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The short answer: centuries of use of Old Church Slavonic instead of Latin or Romanian as a written language.

The short answer: centuries of use of Old Church Slavonic instead of Latin or Romanian as a written language BUT note there is a tendency towards analytic tenses in spoken languages across Europe.

But suddenly prescribing grammar, as opposed to lexicon, is much more difficult, it sort of works if there is continued passive literacy in the standard language, but blatantly introducing structures new top-down sounds hard, and I am not aware of many examples of it. In any case, the nuances of parse trees do not appeal to political and cultural forces the way that lexicon and pronunciation do.

But suddenly prescribing grammar, as opposed to lexicon, is much more difficult, it sort of works if there is continued passive literacy in the standard language, but suddenly introducing new structures top-down sounds hard, and I am not aware of many examples of it. In any case, the nuances of parse trees and morphology do not appeal to political and cultural forces the way that lexicon and pronunciation do.

Another example of continued legacy is the mismatch of orthography and pronunciation in modern French, as extreme as that in English, if more predictable. That only happened because the literary class were continuously writing Latin, then Old French, generally dragging their heels at every step.

Another example of continued legacy is the mismatch of orthography and pronunciation in modern French, as extreme as that in English, if more predictable. That only happened because the literary class were continuously writing Latin, then Old French, generally dragging their heels at every step. It would have never happened had the French woken up one morning and decided to write their language for the first time.