GT, as you said, English is a Germanic language, influenced by some of the Scandinavian, especially Norse and Danish. But we do not speak a Latinate language and are very different from it. When the French ruled England they did not insist on making the population speak French, so we borrowed what we felt like and kept our Germanic character. (English is an unbelievable lazy language in that we use words from other languages all the time.) Unfortunately, much of Latin grammar was imposed on English by the upper classes who valued the Classics. For instance, the rule to never put prepositions at the ends of sentences. In Latin, prepositions are very weak parts of speech and go pretty much where you put them. In German, you have separable prefixes, like with "auffahren" where the preposition (auf) is separated from the main part of the verb (fahren) when it is conjugated. In English we have similar words where the preposition gets separated, such as "to put up." So we should (and do) say, "Put it up," not "Put up it." Churchiil was criticized for putting prepositions at the ends of sentences and responded, "That, sir, is the kind of pedantry up with which I will not put." If one wants to get a good sense of English culture not in a history book, read the Heaney translation of Beowulf. It's filled with cultural material, though not in the depth of a history.