English

English is what you got when Anglo-Saxon peasants were forced to serve French speaking nobles. Which is why basic grammar and simple words are Germanic in origin, while words for food, laws, and various complex things have Romance origins. And then went on to become traders who borrow words from everywhere.

Add to that constantly shifting pronunciation rules. To pick an example that is only mostly complete, “wear” and “where” are now homonyms for most people. But a century ago they mostly were not. The spelling captures the historical pronunciation, not the current one.

But it could be worse. At least we’ve dropped the insanity of gender from the language. Old English had 5 genders, that generally didn’t match what French had.

But still if you want a flavor of what English might have sounded like without being mangled by French, read Uncleftish Beholding: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish_beh…. It explains basic atomic theory using only Germanic based words (eg Beholding) and made up words with Germanic roots. So, for example, atoms can’t be split or cleft, and so are uncleft is an atom. And Ymir has a mythological role parallel to Uranus, so uranium became ymirstuff.

It is surprisingly readable, but sounds quite different than English usually does.