> English is one good candidate for this elite club. Thanks primarily to the Normans, English has been inundated with words of a Latinate origin. That being said, 1066 was some time after the disintegration of the Roman Empire in the west, and it wasn’t Latin that the invaders were speaking. Also, frankly, I’ve written enough about English.
While the bulk go back to the Normans, there were also subsequent significant waves of French and Latin influence on the English lexicon, so many of the most obvious similarities are much newer.
E.g. English imported another ~10k or more Latin words during the English Renaissance. Including the word "lexicon".
Then another wave of Latin influence via scientific discovery in the 17th and 18th centuries creating a need for new terms while Latin and Greek conferred greater cachet (from French to Scottish English around 1630) / prestige (French, from Latin) / status (Latin) over creating new "native" words. Of course helped by them being common languages for scientists to have a certain familiarity with, and sometimes fluency in.
It's particularly fascinating when you find relatively closely related words imported in different waves or from different sources (like cachet, prestige, status), whether because of nuances or perhaps differences in perceived status, or sometimes because the meaning has diverged from the original borrowing.
[Not a linguist by any means, but speak multiple Germanic and Romance languages so the differences and similarities always fascinate me and English still seems like a horrific mishmash, so I spend a disproportionate amount of time learning enough about etymology to make stupid mistakes]
Besides being (mostly) from the same Indo-European family, all European languages have influenced each other over the centuries. I don't know enough about Albanian and Welsh, so I'll take Romanian - which is a Romance language, but also has plenty of Slavic, Greek, Hungarian etc. etc. loan words. 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 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.)
People who speak very unrelated languages find much easier to learn Italian, Spanish or French after they learn English. Not so with e.g. Arabic