English is essentially bad Dutch with outrageously pronounced French and Latin vocabulary.
--Eugene Holman

English is essentially Norse as spoken by a gang of French thugs.
--Benct Philip Jonsson

English is essentially a bizarre dialect of Chinese, pronounced entirely in the first tone.
--John Cowan

English is essentially any other language spoken with a very hot potato in one's mouth.
--Ivan Derzhanski (based on Alain LaBonté on Swiss French)

English is essentially the language you speak without moving your mouth.
--Marianne Cowan

English is essentially a language that uses vowels no other language would accept.
--Luís Henrique

English is essentially degenerate Welsh steeped in Latin, Dutch and Franco-Scandinavian Norman.
--Mike Taylor

English is essentially German spoken in the mouth rather than the throat.
--jmallett

English is essentially Low German plus even lower French minus any sense of culture.
--Danny Weir

English is essentially Anglo-Saxon with all the cool bits taken out.
--Thomas Leigh

English is essentially a dialect of French.
--Alain LaBonté

English is what you get from Normans trying to pick up Saxon girls.
--Bryan Maloney

Written English is essentially a variety of Old French invented by somebody who spoke only Saxon and read only Latin.
--Basilius

English is essentially an imprecise dialect of Java, without the object orientation.
--Julian Morrison

English is essentially a language that no one speaks in France.
--Dan Seriff

English is essentially French converted to 7-bit ASCII.
--Christophe Pierret [for Alain LaBonté]

English is essentially a *****.
--Lars Hendrik Mathiesen

English is essentially a French menu stuttered by a fish-and-chips dealer.
--Kala Tunu

English is essentially the Borg.
--Muke Tever

Men efter all Englisk äre basiklig Svensk förpoisonat of Frensk (ellor skould dat be Danisk?).
--Jonathan Knibb

English is essentially Dutch but it doesn't want to admit it.
--Danny Wier

English is essentially a West Germanic language that's trying very hard to look like a Romance one.
--Andreas Johansson

English is essentially language's equivalent to a transvestite.
--Andreas Johansson

Modern English read phonetically is essentially Middle English as no Middle Englishman would have spoken it.
--Jake X

According to generative linguists, all languages are essentially English.
--Arnt Richard Johansen

English is essentially the devil's attempt to reverse the curse of Babel by making a world language from the most difficult language in the world.
--qaya

English is essentially Pictish that was attacked out of nowhere by Angles cohabiting with Teutons who were done in by a drunk bunch of Vikings masquerading as Frenchmen who insisted they spoke Latin and Greek but lacked the Arabic in which to convey that.
--Bill Hammel

English is essentially Plattdeutsch as spoken by a Frisian pretending to be French.
--Andreas Johansson

English is essentially a stripped-down Germanic lang with Baroque-style Norman French ornamentation glued on at odd angles.
--Adam Walker

English is essentially a language that doesn't care where syllable boundaries are.
--Peter Bleackley

Inglish iz issenshali a langwidje dhat, wen rittun fonetkli, iz ilejibul tu netiv spikerz.
--Peter Bleackley

English is essentially the language of people who think that everybody else speaks their language. French is essentially the language of people who think that everybody else should speak theirs.
--Peter Bleackley

English is essentially bad Frisian, old French, Latin, and Greek, with a grammar that pretends to be like Latin but is really like Chinese or very dumbed-down Germanic (depending on how you look at it).
--Trebor Jung

English is essentially all exceptions and no rules.
--Jonathan Bettencourt

English is essentially the works of Joyce with the hard bits taken out.
--Jon Hanna

In English, all foreign languages are essentially French.
--Tristan Mc Leay

English is essentially Hindi (cot, jungle, shampoo), with a heck of a lot of loanwords from Anglo-Saxon, French, and Latin.
--Sean B. Palmer

English is essentially a Germanic language that has eaten far too many French dishes for its own good.
--John Cowan

English is what you get from Normans trying to pick up Saxon girls.
--Bryan Maloney

yessir

English is essentially French converted to 7-bit ASCII.
--Christophe Pierret [for Alain LaBonté]

a 7-bit ASCII. wow i love that. an incomplete byte of binary. how awesome is that?

fantastic

thnx for sharing!

good post!

not bad

My mother the English teacher would probably have liked this one best:

English is essentially the works of Joyce with the hard bits taken out.
--Jon Hanna

That's a good one.

LOL That's great.