UTC Actually most of the romance words in English come from Norman French abit removed from French especially modern French Then there is another grouping of Latinate words which came in via the Grammar school boys Grammar schools of the late medieval being schools which taught latin grammar and which required students to speak grammar at all times and the ecclesiastical coinages from around the same period late Tudor England onwards The first lot the Norman French had a rather different historical journey from the second lot the second lot being rather closer to Classical Latin actually most are Church or Medieval latin but the difference here is not so great The Norman French borrowings have a little more fanciness than regular Germanic English because Norman French was the language of the English ruling class and law etc for about 300 years Most the food words come through this path The second group borrowed in from about 1400 to 1700 are fancy not so much because they represent the ruling classes but because they represent learning Then there s a few other words which come in from other places like Piano from Italtian and others which are similar because they actually come from a common germanic italic root even a proto Indo European root I think that it would be worth noting the path of derivation NF vs Lating vs other On a second related point the Germanic in English comes from several dialects from both the North Germanic group Norse and the West Germanic Old English had a few differing dialects Northern English dialects tend to have a little more Norse and a little less Anglo saxon than the south east There are Norse and Saxon cognates which both made it into English skirt and shirt being the famous examples So again some more information regarding the exact derivation of the Germanic unless someone wants to go the whole hog and put in the proto Germanic reconstructions But that probably can not be done 14 17 15 July 2007