English more closely resembles French than any other language I can think of. There’s a lot of overlap in the roots.
Edit: I mean, French resembles English more than other languages.
Edit: I mean, French resembles English more than other languages.
It's true that the 100 or so most important words in English are still Germanic, and also that all European languages imported tens of thousands of rare, fancy, words from Greek, Latin and French. But I am talking about the middle-space, those few thousands of common-but-not-ubiquitous words that fill a student's vocab list.
In most Germanic languages that stuff is still largely Germanic, but in English it is much more mixed.
Seems to be vaguely upheld by Wiki although I can't find my original source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in...
So while articles don't change much under declension, words like "a" and "the" are familiar to Germans but not to ancient Romans (I don't know about the French). Also the relative order of adjectives and nouns is Germanic. Conjugations, while simplified, still retain much of the old structure, and the set of tenses understood in English is quite Germanic.