How is it that English descended from Germanic language but its alphabet and vocabulary resembles Latin?

Question

How is it that Latin and Germanic language have similar alphabets?

What is the relation between Germanic language and Latin???

Answer 1

First, Latin and German are distant cousins in the Indo-European language family. Both are rather highly inflected, with similar uses of the various cases. As a result, knowing one helps with the other even though the actual vocabularies are largely different.



The reason for the similar alphabets is that German had NO true alphabet (well, runes) before it came into contact with Latin. Most non-Romance European languages were first put into writing by Christian missionaries in the Dark Ages (In fact, as a general rule, if a language is written in the Latin alphabet, the country is or used to be Catholic, and if the language is written in the Cyrillic [Russian] alphabet, the country is predominantly Orthodox.)



Now, the reason English derives so much of its vocabulary from Latin is due primarily to the Norman Conquest, in 1066, which made French (a Romance language) the official language of England for about 150 years. When English re-emerged as a written language, it had absorbed a great deal of French. If you'll look at a piece of writing in Old English (the period before about 1100), you'll probably find that it looks more like German than like English we speak. Then if you look at a selection in Middle English, from about 1100 to 1500, you'll probably recognize it as English and be able to puzzle out what it's saying--especially if it's in the London dialect, which Chaucer used and helped make the standard. And you'll probably see far more words of Latin origin in the Middle English piece!



Even before the Norman Conquest, however, Britain had been occupied by Rome for nearly 400 years, so that many of the place names in the country were of Latin origin even before the first Germanic people arrived there. Then the Anglo-Saxons in what was becoming England accepted Christianity, and the Latin that went with it, a century or two before most Germans on the continent did. So even before the Norman Conquet, English contained a stronger Latin element than did its mainland cousins.



From the emergence of Middle English on, English literature was far more influenced by French and Italian literature than by German. Then at the Renaissance, as Greek and Roman culture was rediscovered on a large scale, more terms from Latin (and Greek) entered the language to express new concepts. And of course, well into the Renaissance, Latin was the intrational language of scholarhip in Europe.

Answer 2

Most languages in the world use Latin alphabet, even if they do not have any relationship with Latin. Known exceptions are: Arabic alphabet, Cyrilic one (for Russian, Bulgarian, etc), Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, etc, etc.



That means that all Germanic languages nowadays use Latin alphabet: German, Dutch, English, Frisian, Swedish, Danish, etc.



English is a Germanic language, as its origin is the emigration of German tribes (Angles, Jutes and Saxons) into what is now Great Britain. If you see texts in Anglo-Saxon, the primitive language, it looks much more modern German than modern English.



What happened later is that the Normands, who spoke a dialect of French, conquered the island and French was the official language of the country for centuries but only the upper classes used French, wheras the folk never abandoned English.



When English was made official again the language had been borrowed thousands of French words. As French comes from Latin, these are all in all Latin words.



Subsequently English took more words directly from Latin, usually words related to science, medicine, technology, philosophy, etc.



For more accurate information you can see this link, on the section "History"



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language



That's why modern English is a Germanic language, with a grammar which is clearly Germanic but with more than 60% of its vocabulary which comes from Latin / French.



Regarding your last question: all Latin, Germanic, Slavic, Celtic, Iranian, Greek (among others) languages have a common ancestor, called Indo-European. This language is extinct and the most similar one is Sanskrit.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages

Answer 3

Descent Of English Language

Answer 4

Because of the Norman Conquest of England. A couple of extracts from the Wikipedia entry:



The Norman conquest of England began in 1066 with the invasion of the Kingdom of England by the troops of William, Duke of Normandy, and his victory at the Battle of Hastings. This resulted in Norman control of England, which was firmly established during the next few years.



The Norman Conquest was a pivotal event in English history for several reasons. It largely removed the native ruling class, replacing it with a foreign, French-speaking monarchy, aristocracy, and clerical hierarchy. This, in turn, brought about a transformation of the English language and the culture of England.

.......

Language



One of the most obvious changes was the introduction of Anglo-Norman, a northern dialect of Old French, as the language of the ruling classes in England, displacing Old English. This predominance was further reinforced and complicated in the mid-twelfth century by an influx of followers of the Angevin dynasty, speaking a more mainstream dialect of French. Not until the fourteenth century would English regain its former primacy, while the use of French at court continued into the fifteenth century.



By this time English had itself been profoundly transformed, developing into the starkly different Middle English which formed the basis for the modern language. During the centuries of French linguistic dominance a large proportion of the words in the English language had disappeared and been replaced by French words, leading to the present hybrid tongue in which an English core vocabulary is combined with a largely French abstract vocabulary. The grammatical structures of the language had also changed dramatically, although the relationship, if any, between this transformation and the marginalisation of English resulting from the conquest is uncertain.

Answer 5

there is an somewhat user-friendly respond. The latin alphabet unfold with the latin Christian texts and this alphabet became the alphabet of the scholared persons. nevertheless it quite is significant to show out that the runes persevered for use for an exceedingly long term in Scandinavia. specially Sweden.