> That's why the author of the article says he's joking when he calls Albanian and Welsh "almost Romance" - loan words, even a lot of them, may make a language

> That's why the author of the article says he's joking when he calls Albanian and Welsh "almost Romance" - loan words, even a lot of them, may make a language easier to learn, but don't move it to another family. That's one of my problems with this article. Even if the author does briefly admit its facetiousness, a lot of readers will come away thinking that language families are about family resemblances, when they're really a matter of genealogy, pure and simple. That, and it comes across sort of like a Latinist's attempt to prove all roads lead to Rome, giving short shrift to Albanian (which occupies its own branch of the Indo-European family, with its own characteristics) and to English, which among other things is drastically analytic in comparison with the rest of the I-E languages. (I can't comment on the case of Welsh.)