This past week I was catching up on my Jeopardy!, and one of the categories happened to be Latin body parts. The questions were all body parts in Latin, and the contestants had to guess the English. Most of them were derivatives, so it was rather easy for the contestants to guess. One of the questions was "pes" and the answer was "foot".
When the Romans expanded to different places in Europe, they took their language with them. The languages that the people already had combines with Latin and created the Romance Languages. English, however, comes from German. When the Normans came to France and England, the French language was already established. French was considered the upper class language, which is why there are latin words in English. This explains how the contestants were able to know the answers (unless they took Latin).
Sophie Pong
http://udel.edu/~dlarsen/ling203/Slides/History%20of%20Romance%20Languages.pdf
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