It's weird that English was was most influenced by war and then conquest of the Norman, but then comes French which didn't conquest nor wage war against English-people. Is French unique enough to attract a whole language to it?
Oh, the French were as war-like as any other country, and England and France fought many wars, some of them very long! As Sluggo said, the Normans came from Normandy, on the French coast, along the English Channel. Normandy is where the Allies invaded Europe during World War II.
Wikipedia has an article on the
Norman Conquest of England that explains how the Normans were descended from Vikings who settled in northern Franch, and how the Norman influence actually goes back 75 years before the invasion by William, Duke of Normandy.
As for what you mentioned Stargzer, the artic "Unclefitch Beholding" seemed more weird to me than what is possibly had if English kept it's Germanic root. For if it did it would mostly start growing in a different scientist and linguistics will start making to fit what is new, the people themselves will make new words and later will be adjusted to grammer, though still I know nothing about Germanic thus you can consider me talking nonesense.
I don't know any German except for how to say "A beer, please!" and "Thank you!"
Anderson was attempting to show how a scientist who had no access to Greek, Latin, or French words could create new words to describe new things by combining existing English words, words that came from Old English, Middle English, Anglo-Saxon, or Scandinavian (from the Vikings), much as someone who had never seen a gun before might call it a "thunder stick." When automobiles first appeared they were called "horseless carriages" because they were carriages that didn't need horses to pull them.
I haven't read all of Anderson's essay, but I've read enough to see how he takes non-Romance-language words and creates new words, such as "worldken" for "physics," from "world" and "
ken," which is an old word meaning "perception" or knowledge" as a noun and "to know," "to perceive," or "to understand" as a verb. It's now mostly a Northern English or Scottish Dialect word, but you can see how he uses "to understand the world" in place of "physics," which comes from Latin and Greek (see
physics and
physic at the
Online Etymology Dictionary).