> Latin substrate in the territory of modern France was so strong that it gradually took over the Germanic ruling class over centuries Good place to point out

> Latin substrate in the territory of modern France was so strong that it gradually took over the Germanic ruling class over centuries Good place to point out that those Germanic speakers had a major impact on French, and to this day it is by far the most heavily influenced by Germanic, of all the languages descended from Latin. For example: attaquer (attack). craquer (crack), affreux (fright), hautesse (height), saisir (seize), taper (tap), trier (tear). (I've given English cognates in parentheses, not translations -- "taper" means more like "to slap".) In fact, Germanic borrowings are around 10 - 20% of French vocabulary. Some words in English have actually cycled between the Germanic and Romance branches multiple times because of this. For example, Old French had a verb, something like "warder". Probably borrowed from Frankish. English borrowed "warden" from Norman French. Later, sound change in French shifted /w/ to a /gw/ sound, so warder -> guarder. English borrowed the word again, giving us "guardian". In this particular case, English also kept the original fully Germanic form - "warder" (noun).