English as Fusion of French and Anglic

[Rhetorica]

Well, the phylogeny still holds true for a few very well-conserved genes—well enough at least to build the taxonomic tree—but not all of the core genes agree with each other on some details. Most of the diversity doesn't result in appreciable structural similarities, though—many bacteria are just roughly circular blobs with a more-or-less-the-same glycocalyx. Actually describing what makes Escherichia coli K-12 MG1655 different from Escherichia coli O111:H- str. 11128 would require listing out the names of hundreds of genes, and even that wouldn't be very descriptive—and yet we must distinguish them, because some will kill you, and different strategies are necessary to deal with them. A lot of medically and biologically relevant bacterial genomes are actively in flux at a rather fast rate.

...but anyway, this really isn't the place.

[Drydic]

Yeah with unicellular organisms body structure isn't terribly useful, I'll grant that wholly. I was mostly meaning that for Animalia (I don't know the kingdom well enough to be sure if it works for Plantae).

Please, do go on about this tho, here or another thread. It would be very interesting.

[sirdanilot]

There are various theories on how to classify contact languages (creoles, pidgins, languages with extensive lexical borrowing...). One is that the lexifier source language determines the classification, another is that substrate languages determine classification, and a third one postulated by Thomason and Kafuman 1988 is that these languages are 'agenetic' because they are derived from a limited grammatical knowledge of the lexifier language and are constructed rapidly in an 'a priori' way; they are not genetically linked to any language, but are 'creole' or 'agenetic'.

English can be confidently classified Germanic according through the first theory; though it has extensive Romance borrowing, most of its base lexicon and closed class words are Germanic.
English is probably stil Germanic according to the second theory, as it's not the case that a non-English speaking population started speaking English. At most, there would be a shift towards a more romance-inspired language, but then it would still be Germanic according to this theory.
The third theory is not applicable to English. It is not a creole language that was generated in a very short time span, it does not have 'typical creole features' such as unmarked phonology, isolating grammar etc. (though honestly many real creoles do not have these features either...). English is clearly not 'agenetic'.

Conclusion: English is a Germanic language, with heavy Romance borrowing and borrowed Romance derivational morphology, but syntactically very Germanic (and also morphologically mostly Germanic).

[Hallow XIII]

as it's not the case that a non-English speaking population started speaking English

what

[Rhetorica]

The argument's more or less moved on to here.