There were a lot of cognate words and similar grammar, but genders and inflectional endings didn't match well at all. That drove the dramatic simplification of English grammar, for the most part. As for the Norman influence, it was mostly vocabulary... but changing the languages of documentation to Latin (mostly) and French (in law, for the most part) left English a lot of room to progress away from the Old English that was, by that time, already playing the same sort of role that Latin did in the Early Romance period - it no longer reflected the language that people lived in.

> There were a lot of cognate words and similar grammar, but genders and inflectional endings didn't match well at all. That drove the dramatic simplification of English grammar, for the most part.

It's why English nouns lost their masculine and feminine grammatical gender. The people who used both languages had more important things to worry about.

Haha, so Saxon and Norse cancelled each others' grammar out? :)

Creole languages have a very simplified grammar compared to their parent languages.

It all points to the case that English is actually a creole language.

English doesn't quite meet the criteria of being a creole, though.

Superstratum/substratum theory applies here. English has an Ingvaeonic superstratum and multiple substrata, from Old Norse and Norman French at least, if not more.

But from pretty closely related languages.

I didn't think French arrived as a language name until well after the Norman conquest?

Something romance then. Whatever derivative of Latin they used.