[jcranmer]

The Great Vowel Shift is why we write words in Modern English as if we were speaking Middle English. But even before then, the shift from Old to Middle English radically simplified the Germanic grammar of English. The other major change is the tendency in English to borrow foreign words rather than the tendency to adapt them to English--for example, we say television, not farseeing.

Since many technical roots derive from Latin, this somewhat artificially inflates the Romance root contribution to English.

[kwoff]

maybe interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English