[ClearCase_guy]

they say that soon after the ancestral Indo-European language arrived in Europe it split into different branches leading to Celtic, Latin, Greek and English.

Someone is a moron. Probably the journalist. English is a Germanic language, with heavy influence from French (a Romance language, based on Latin). It is a staggering mistake to say that English is one of 4 early offshoots from the ancestral Indo-European language.

[Pharmboy]

Good pick-up. I missed that completely; and, of course you are CORRECTAMUNDO!

[irish_links]

"...It is a staggering mistake to say that English is one of 4 early offshoots from the ancestral Indo-European language...."

It is a staggering mistake to say that the author suggested that. Rather, he states that the early Indo-European language split eventually LED to English, not that English developed at the time of the split.

[Redbob]

I'm not sure the journalist said "English is one of four early offshoots"; what he said was that "the ancestral Indo-European language... split into different branches leading to Celtic, Latin, Greek, and English," and presumably to German, Flemish, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, etc. etc.

There is a difference.

[Doctor Stochastic]

It is a staggering mistake to say that English is one of 4 early offshoots from the ancestral Indo-European language.

Neither the article nor your quoted phrase say this, either.

[ZULU]

Good catch. "English" should read "Germanic", also they left out the Balto-Slavic Lingustic subfamily, ,more distantly related to the other four, but still an Indo-European language, like the Iranian languages, Sanskrit and it modern descedants Hindi, etc, ancient Hittite and the Anatolic Language related to it, Armenian, and Tocharian, an extinct language spoken in Central Asia by a long dead people who looked European.

[VadeRetro]

English is a Germanic language, with heavy influence from French (a Romance language, based on Latin).

It's very Latinate, not just from the French influence but from legal, medical, and scientific terms which since the Renaissance and the abandonment of the direct use of the Latin language have been creeping into common use. What happened in English which didn't happen to the same degree elsewhere in the Germanic community is that commonly-used Latin words were slightly anglicized but otherwise incorporated untranslated. ("Paternitas" became "paternity," etc.)

Pick up a dictionary and sample the derivations. Latin is very heavily represented now. It's probably the single most common source of word roots although the core vocabulary of the language is Germanic.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

It is a staggering mistake to say that English is one of 4 early offshoots from the ancestral Indo-European language.

Damn right! He meant to say 'Merican.