Apologies if this is too basic, but I know very little about linguistics and figured this would be a good place to ask.
English seems like it draws from several other langiuages, notably the romance languages like French, where there is not really a perfect tense. That is, there is no tense for "I have been living here for...". Instead one would use prepositions
J'habite ici depuis...
where this would translate literally (whatever that actually means) to
I live here since...
but actually means
I've been living here since..
So I'm wondering how, why, and from where English acquired this particular feature. I looked over the Wikipeda page on this but it's more about usage than history.