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My naive, first-order understanding is that English = German + French. But since the Renaissance, French became the dominate influence due to its use by elites/
by dls2016 8y ago
My naive, first-order understanding is that English = German + French. But since the Renaissance, French became the dominate influence due to its use by elites/scientific community.
So it's not Spanish influence, per se, but its similarity to French as a Romance language.
- jajag 8y agoThat's part of it certainly, but I wonder whether a lot of technical terms and words were taken directly from Latin - which up until a few hundred years ago was the dominant language for education, law, diplomacy etc.