The German Language

[Regina]

I find it fascinating that although English is in the German language family, it's lexicon seems to share a lot of terms with Spanish, which is in the Latin language family.

important
importante

information
informaccion

etc.
but I see few, if any, similarities between English and German words.

How did that come to be so?

Probably during the Norman period in The Middle Ages. The Normans spoke a form of French, which comes from Latin, and I guess the words came from there. Spanish also comes from Latin, so the similarities.

Also from religion. Traditionally (before Protestantism took hold) The Bible and Masses would only be recited in Latin, so it's probable the Latin words entered everyday English lexicon from there. Latin has a great deal in cultural influence in Europe, it's been seen as a language of high-learning since The Roman times, so you find Latin-based words in many European languages.

I don't think it's necessarily true to say "English comes from German", it's more like English and German share a common ancestral language. The Anglo-Saxons, who arrived in England in the early Middle Ages, would have spoke the same language that the ancestors of modern Germans then spoke, but the languages have both since independently transformed. The same with Dutch, that's in the same language family as well.

ETA - There are some similarities with German, but it's more in sentence structure and the way we'd pronounce certain words. Sometimes "similarity" means it's simply more like German than it is Latin (which you see with numbers)