And so my quest to learn a dead language begins! COME AT ME LATIN!
I don't think calling Latin a dead language is exactly fair. No one speaks it anymore, sure, but just about all of the English language is based on it, and nearly everything in science has some fancier Latin terminology.
english is more based on french, with some germanic leftovers, then based directly on latin, though we do have some latinic words, ie audio, spectate, Colosseum, via, sponsor, census, and a few others
the reason behind the big gap between old english and middle english is due to the norman invasion and rule of england back in forever ago, bringing copious amounts of old french words into the english vocabulary. old english is very similar to german though
"waet sindon ye donde?* - what are you doing?"
"was machts du?** - que faites-vous?"
(* as there arent that many references to how old english grammar was contructed, i'm assuming that this is the sentence i constructed using wiktionary.
** i couldnt find any references to old german, so i used modern german.)
/linguaphile off