English is the result of Norman men-at-arms attempting to pick up Saxon barmaids and is no more legitimate than any of the other results.
H. Beam Piper (Little Fuzzy or Fuzzy Sapiens)
For "Norman" read "French-speaking" and for "Saxon" read "Germanic-language-speaking." I'm told that English is now a Germanic language with a more-than-half Latinate (mostly French) vocabulary. Here's a quote which evokes a time in which the two languages had not fully mixed, at least not in every context -- it is a record from a court of criminal law:
[A judge] fuit assault per Prisoner la condemne pur Felony; que puis son condemnation ject un Brickbat a le dit Justice que narrowly mist, & pur ceo immediately fuit Indictment drawn per Noy envers le prisoner, & son dexter manus ampute et fix al Gibbet, sur que luy mesme immédiatement hangé in presence de Court.
P.S. Originally copied and pasted this quote from the web. Later, looked it up in a dead trees copy of "The Language of the Law" by Mellinkoff. The book cited a passage with spelling that was further from standard French...updated to reflect.
Costanza:
I'm told that English is now a Germanic language with a more-than-half Latinate (mostly French) vocabulary.
That's true only for highbrow written English (and even then, I'm not sure if French words would outnumber those coming directly from Latin). Everyday spoken English still overwhelmingly consists of Germanic words.
Also, that sample you cite is Law French, a very peculiar historical sort of formal legal language. Nobody ever used anything like that as everyday spoken language.
In Russian we have the word 'Mirozdanie', which means all that exists, no matter do we know anything about it or not. The sense of this word includes you and me and every man, and every star, and every planet and all universes and all space (super) civilizations, if exist, and this world and any other worlds, if exist, and so on. Is any English word with the same sense? Or in other words, how correctly and adequately translate the Russian word 'Mirozdanie' in English? I have my web project (in Russian) “Dossier on Mirozdanie” ( http://www.mirozdanie.narod.ru ) To tell about it in English sometimes I use the word, that Google and other dictionaries recomend - 'Creation' (Creation Dossier), sometimes, when I am afraid of being accused of creationism, I use the word «Multiverse» (Multiverse Dossier), but I think, every of this words has a great shortage in the context - both of them are based on hypothetical conceptions.