[The Normans] gave English its double vision, which is the source of both the beauty and the mess. After 1066 you’ve got the Saxon peasantry keeping the Germanic words for the muddy daily grind and the Norman lords laying French over the top for everything refined, so English ends up with two words for everything and a built-in class system in the vocabulary. The peasant tends the cow, pig, and sheep (Old English); the lord eats beef, pork, and mutton (boeuf, porc, mouton). The animal is Saxon while it’s alive and shitting in the field, French once it’s plated.
That’s where the prettiness comes from - the absurd synonym wealth. You can ask (Saxon), question (French), or interrogate (Latin), and each one carries a different temperature and register. Most languages would kill for that kind of tonal palette; it’s why English is so good for poetry and bullshit alike. You can slide up and down the formality ladder rung by rung, which is half of what rhetoric even is.
Claude on the two levels of English.