spanish/english there about 70% the same?

Question

except for 3 or 5 extra letters at the end of a Spanish word or a {a} or a {o} at the end of a word the two langue’s are nearly I identical I spoke English and learned Spanish the symmetries of the two cause me to wonder often which came first and at what point what day what minute in history did one man stand before a crowd and said today exactly is exactamente or vise versa and so on

Answer 1

The similarities you are talking about are in words of Latin origine. Of course those words resemble!
But they are from diferent branches of Indoeuropean familie of languages.

I have no idea how you got that 70 %. Did you use the Swadesh list? Or is it only YOUR appreciation of the situation?

Answer 2

English and Spanish have several different connections, two important, one minor, some in between. The minor one involves recent (last few centuries) borrowings of words from one to the other (e.g., football on the one hand and salsa on the other). The important ones are (1) words borrowed into both from Latin (mostly after Latin itself was no longer spoken), e.g., nation and nacio'n, and many many others, and (2) the much older layers of words that derive from the fact that basic Spanish words DERIVE from Latin (this different than borrowing!!) and that the core of English derives from Proto-Germanic, and that Latin (via Proto-Italic) and Proto-Germanic were themselves related and derive from Proto-Indo-European. The connections of type (2) are usually easy to see, and are what you probably mostly see. The differences here are due to the different ways Latin came to be pronounced in different European countries roughly within the last 1000 years or so. Type (1) connections date to several thousand years ago, and involve gradual changes between Germanic and Italic languages and then the gradual changes from Germanic via Old English to English on the one and from Proto-Italic via Latin to Spanish on the other. These connections typically the most common and basic words, e.g., the Spanish pronoun tu' is the word as the obsolescent English pronoun thou. Likewise, yo and I are actually the same word, and so are the numerals, e.g., dos and two, tres and three, and so on. Notice that there systematic patterns in all these cases, called correspondences, so f.ex., English will normally have th at the beginning of a word where Spanish has t- in this oldest layer (as in thou and three), but not in other layers. Some of the other connections between English and Spanish that are not as obscure as (1) but more so than (2) involve (3) connections between English words of French origin and Spanish words (since French like Spanish is of Latin derivation), so f.ex., English chief is related this way to Spanish cabo, and (4) connections between words borrowed from Latin, like English feminine (and indeed Spanish feminino) and Spanish hembra 'mare'. The second is derived from Latin femina via several gradual processes that among other things changed Latin f- to h-, and all the other changes we observe in this word.