It has multiple roots, thanks mainly to the Normans. It also has a habit of plundering vocabulary from other languages, to the point where a single thesaurus e

It has multiple roots, thanks mainly to the Normans. It also has a habit of plundering vocabulary from other languages, to the point where a single thesaurus entry might list synonyms with etymological origins from a dozen different languages. It can also smash affixes from disparate languages together without shame, particularly prevalent as mixes of Greek and Latin. There is a decent chance that an English speaker with a broad vocabulary would be able to recognize individual words in any foreign language that can be expressed with the ASCII character set.