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In many ways, English is a pidgin of Danish, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman French with vocabulary borrowed from a lot of other sources. That's why it's fairly easy to speak it well enough to be understood.

By the way, if it weren't for Latin-educated academics who couldn't bear to use anglicized Latin words rather than properly declined Latin words and couldn't write an English grammer without claiming that you shouldn't split your infinitives, well, because you just can't do that in Latin, we wouldn't have mugged Latin for it's grammar. Instead, we'd be happily talking about indexes, datums, genuses, and so on without Latin grammar pedants telling us it's improper.

One of the most fun classes I took in college was in my first quarter. I had graduated high school in May and didn't have any particular plans for the summer, so I started college. I was attending the one in my hometown, anyway, so it wasn't like I had to travel or anything. Anyway, I took the requisite English Composition, but we had a visiting professor that summer. Instead of the same old, same old, we did a course in "The History of the English Language" which was just fascinating!! It was amazing to learn what an amalgam our language is!

We only ended up having to write three compositions that summer, and he made sure we didn't fill it up with what he called "Easter Vocabulary"; words we never used, but put in papers to make it sound fancy.

In many ways, English is a pidgin of Danish, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman French...

Actually, more of a "creole." Pidgen is a first-generation compromise trade/slave language. The children of pidgen speakers sythesize the grammar and speak a creole. The word "pidgen" comes from the English word "business" as modified for/by Chinese speakers doing business in the 19th century capitulations. The same time and place gave us the word "mandarin," derived from the Portugeuse verb mandero -- I command.

According to an old English professor, about 20% of our current vocabulary traces back to Anglo Saxon -- but those are the structural/skeletal words we use 80% of the time. English poetry is the most beautiful in the world, Dr. Stanley Ward explained, since our language is a shotgun wedding of conflicting traditions. Poets can draw from several different containers to find the most apt word. In common parlance, the only time a French equivalent is more common than the Anglo Saxon word is enemy/foe.

Kemal Atatürk, father of modern Turkish, ruthlessly purged his language of non-native words. The "Osmanli" he spoke got about 80% of its vocabulary from Arabic, Persian, and French. Today, that number is around 20% -- so Turkish kids can no longer read the "Nutuk," Atatürk's six day speech, in the language he used.

It can be argued that "language reform" is a revolutionary activity, designed to cut a people off from their roots, their traditions. Other examples of this process include "simplified Mao script," and the displacing of the King James Bible as the core of literate English.