I was amazed when I listened to the Lord’s Prayer in Old English, which is available on Youtube and other sites around the Internet. Except for a word here and there, I found it to be totally unintelligible. It’s hard to believe that Old English is an earlier version of my native language.
Modern English owes quite a lot to the influence of Norman French, both in vocabulary and in syntax.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhgXnEGSn4A
https://search.brave.com/search?q=lord%27s+prayer+in+old+english
Old English is basically Germanic, retaining the Anglo Saxon core with some Nordic words. Both of those were Germanic.
But Middle English, ie Chaucer’s language is a bastard of this Germanic old English and Norman frewh8ch was itself a bastard mix of Frankish Germanic (closer yo dutch) and Gaullic Latin mixed with some Norse.
French itself differs heavily from other Romance languages.