explain why english is considered a layer cake language

Question

anonymous · Answer

English uses (or shall I say steals) a large amount of words from other languages because it does not have any existing words to explain the term. 

Hence, to understand English, you will need a large knowledge of the languages which makes it up. (The bottom layer of a cake!) So many of our words utilises Latin and Greek roots. (Think of  -phobia, astro- (astonomy, astrix).

By understanding these roots, you can build the other layers of the cake on top. Words, sentences, paragraphs, ideas, context, techniques etc. - you will need to grasp all of these in ur studies of English. 

You have to understand the layer under it before you can fully understand the current layer. 

This is my interpretation of the cake metaphor. Hope it gave you some ideas. =D