Good comments, Nerd--sounds like you took Gillian Sankoff's class on creole and pidgins at Penn--

Another arguement against Steve's assertion is the fact that pidgins are a common ground created for the purpose trade, and the language used in commerce for three hundred years after the Norman conquest was French, not Norman French, but Parisian French, which was widely taught --in fact, there are surviving grammars that indicating that even before the conquest,French was widely used in commerce--

Also, even though Modern English is rife with latinate words, there are relatively few of them in Middle English, which seems much closer to a Germanic language, such as, say, Old Frisian, which is regarded by some as the nearest related language--