Quote:
Originally Posted by DMB
I think it's more complicated than just gaining French vocabulary. Middle English is very different grammatically from Old English and is really a sort of creole.
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I would disagree with the "creole" designation; it really is mostly a matter of French vocabulary. Middle High German is also quite different from Old High German in roughly the same way that OE differs from ME. I.e., OHG is almost completely incomprehensible to a modern German speaker in the same way that OE is incomprehensible to a modern English speaker. MHG, by contrast, can be sort of halfway read by a modern German speaker in the exact same way that ME can sort of be halfway read by a modern English speaker.
(Norse also had a significant effect on English as well, since there was about 200 years of the Danelaw. )