it's very difficult to find an "origin language" because after a number of years (say a couple hundred) the language has mutated so much it becomes unrecognizeable. From what I understand from the film "The Story of English" that i saw in class, these Normans (or Angliii) spoke forms of Dutch and Frisian. These languages spread with the invasion of Great Britian, pushing Celtic, Welsh, Gailic, etc. to the fringes of the isles where some traditions still survive. You're right when you said that these Normans borrowed words from Latin, Romance languages and so on, but 90% of the common words found in Great Britian come from Anglo-Saxton language.
When you start to discuss the origins of modern English, that's when I side with Rosie. There is just so much evidence from Shakesphere to the King James Bible that the development of modern words and phrases originated in this area.
If you're really interested in this type of study a really good book to pick up is The Power of Babel by John McWhorter.
According to Dr. Harold Whitehall from Indiana University, only 15% of the English language comes from Saxon, as far as vocabulary is concerned. However, this 15% covers the most common words in the language such as prepositions, pronouns, common verbs, and conjunctions. Most of the stuff I have read tends to agree with Dr. Whitehall.
Sorry, I misread that. You said
common words. We aren't talking words as a whole. So, I shall note that those 90% of common words come from 15% of the language vocabulary as a whole.
And I have read
The Power of Babel. It's a decent explanation of the modern approach to the study of linguistics.
Oh yes, when I refer to a source language, I'm speaking mainly of structure in regards to case forms, sentence structure, conjugations, and the like. Not vocabulary.
Edit: A final note: Everything I have ever read on the subject of the derivation of English disagrees with the video you watched in regards to the language of the Normans. It is French.
Linkage. And there are plenty more sources that say the same thing. I hesitate to say that the video is flat out wrong, but it may be.
If you wish to get a very good view of the evolution of the English language, an excellent book for the lay person is "The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way" by Bill Bryson. It seems like the person who wrote the article I linked to liked it too. :-D
One more edit: Here is some old English dated sometime around the 10th century.
Ic eom munuc, and ic singe ælce dæg sonfon tida mid gebroþrum; and ic eom gebysgod on rædinga and on sange; ac ic woulde betweonum leornian sprecan on Englisc ongemong minum oþrum manigfaldum bysgum.
If you read that carefully, you can probably understand it. Most of what is difficult there is where Saxon vocabulary has been superceded by Romance vocabulary and the older words are unfamiliar. English hasn't changed much since the Norman conquest. Read Chaucer's Cantabury Tales and you can probably understand the orignal manuscripts with a little work. Hmm.. that would have been a better example than the old English above... gotta find a copy....
Yet another edit:
A passage from the Cantabury Tales....
