From history.perl.org here is an excerpt from the Perl 1.000 release notes of '87:

It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with those languages should have little difficulty with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC|PLUS.) Expression syntax corresponds quite closely to C expression syntax. If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little faster, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then perl may be for you. There are also translators to turn your sed and awk scripts into perl scripts. OK, enough hype.

Another piece of trivia: the initial release was delayed until the awk to perl (a2p) translator was finished because Larry felt Perl would not be well received without this vital piece.

Of course, since that time, Perl has borrowed heavily from other languages as well. And the tradition continues today in the design of Perl 6 with a fancy name: The Principle of Borrowing. :-)