English is also highly derived from Latin, though it completely abandons the simple, logical grammar rules associated with that dead language. Any geeky Latin student can tell you that a large part of learning the language is finding out the derivative words associated with all of the new vocabulary. IIRC, the completely baseless statistic I heard from my teacher was that somewhere around 60% of English words were Latin derivatives, which makes quite a bit of sense considering that almost every Latin word one learns has an English derivative. It certainly makes the Vocab section in the SATs easier, from what I've heard.