while 1/2 of french is imported and mangled latin. so where did english borrow from really? given that it’s easier to figure out the latin roots of the anglicized?
The medieval English and the modern English are completely different. Medieval French and modern French, not so much.
There are roughly three named "ages" of English (in England): old, middle and modern. I can just about understand written middle English and have severe problems with old English.
Modern English can be very flexible, which is probably why it has become popular as a lingua franca. There are no real noun genders. Word order can be fiddled with mercilessly too. Officially, English sentences are subject - verb - object (SVO) for example: "I sat on the bed". You can say "I the bed sat on" or "On the bed sat I" or "sat I on the bed" and it still works fine. Most of those variants are regionally correct, somewhere.
English spelling is an absolute nightmare! Linking pronunciation to spelling is absolutely awful. I can completely understand English as a second language speakers throwing their hands up in the air and declaring the whole thing as complete bollocks! However, that means that we are extraordinarily tolerent of speling mistaks. field or feild? sealed or ceiled? Who nose!
You have the causality backwards here.
> Word order can be fiddled with mercilessly too. Officially, English sentences are subject - verb - object (SVO) for example: "I sat on the bed". You can say "I the bed sat on" or "On the bed sat I" or "sat I on the bed" and it still works fine.
This is just incorrect.
There was more than that. For a while, England was a backwater of the Angevin empire and kings of England were native French speakers for quite a long time.
* i say ultra because proper german has more cases than french in fact.
The classification as Romance vs. Germanic is based on two important observations:
I. Even considering the Germanic influence, French and its close relatives are still more similar to each other and to the other Romance languages. If I see a page of French text, my knowledge of German is almost useless, but my Italian gets me very far. This classification can be made objectively by using Swadesh lists[0] or related tools.
II. We can trace its historical development very well and it seems to organically emerge from the vulgar Latin of late antiquity.
Of course the association with Latin was deliberate, but this happened much earlier when the Romans conquered, colonized, and eventually romanized Gaul. Because of this, there was simply never a need for loaning words from Latin on a large scale. Later, the Franks were just a new management that placed itself on top of the existing culture.
on french being vulgar latin, i agree. but bear in mind that the vulgar latin spoken in the provinces are akin to creole (and other patois/pidgin dialects) of modern mainstream languages: they’re amalgamations of many languages, the mainstream languages furnishing words and phrases where necessary. barely do they supply grammar. that said french, unlike other romance languages, demonstrates a strong germanic syntax structure, which has persisted over centuries of iterations of the language. the overwhelming evidence suggests that french is germanic (both in syntax structure and vocabulary). it’s incorrect to assume that spanish and italian, for example, are pro-drop when in latin the so-called pro-drop is the default. intelligisne? is what you ask your interlocutor, not tu intelligsne? in french an explicit subject is required, without which the sentence is nonsensical and grammatically incorrect.
french is arguably romance but it is germanic too, and in no small way.
Nobody is denying that French has Germanic influence. And it probably encouraged its highly divergent evolution from its relatives. The neighboring Picard language is a lot more conservative for example.
Please compare the following paragraph to its translation into German, Norwegian, and Italian. That should really settle the discussion. From the Wikipedia article about Christmas. My estimation is that like 95% of these words are of Romance origin:
> Noël est la fête chrétienne qui célèbre la Nativité, c'est-à-dire la célébration qui rappelle la naissance de Jésus-Christ. La fête de Noël vient peu de temps après le solstice d'hiver boréal auquel elle est associée (voir ci-bas). La déchristianisation faisant, la fête de Noël est aujourd'hui coupée de son fondement religieux dans de nombreux pays occidentaux, mais elle y subsiste comme fête traditionnelle.
Edit: Vocabulary matters though because certain words are more likely to be replaced by loan words than others. More importantly, they allow linking with a language's close relatives (most importantly the other languages d'oïl), which might be more conservative, and with its historical forms across time. Said differently: languages without apparent similarity to other languages, no close existing relatives, and no written records to trace their development are isolates by definition.