Ha, good one. In fact I had mentioned in a thread about Berlin startups on HN a while ago, that knowing English helped me a bit with guessing the meaning of some German words, since the two cultures have some common historical and cultural background.

English has been widely influenced by French after William the Conquerer and the Normands rule over England for almost 4 centuries.

Take a look at Beowulf and good luck trying to understand the original germanic version of English. You won't.

There is a whole branch of the conlang (constructed language) community that is interested in what English would be like if it hadn't been manhandled by Norman French. Science Fiction writer Poul Anderson wrote an essay in which he tried to use as few non-Anglo-Saxon words as possible, using calques from German where necessary. The result is sometimes said to be in "Anders-Saxon". The essay[1] is fun to read and has a Wikipedia page [2]. A friend said it was like reading one of the Norse sagas.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding

Sorry if this is way too much topic drift from Supercomputers!