Interesting post Theo.
Well I began my post teaching English in France about a month ago, and like many of yous I had never really considered the ridiculousness of my native language. But, like someone else said, all languages when logically examined have their own quirks.
As for the French/Romance/English language thing, English and French are actually quite related, I'd say at least 40-50% of common nouns and a fair amount of verbs have a similar root or a related, often outdated but recognizable origin. And the two languages borrow a lot of words from one another. That being said, of course no one is going to take a word like clique and pronounce it with a French accent. It sounds fucking stupid. Just like when talking about the weekend, in French, it's le week-end and is pronounced with a French accent, dropping the d at the end. Not pronounced with a English accent.
Nothing makes a Brit cream gravy in his pants (that's British English for boxers, or underwear for us unsophisticated Americans) than the superiority they feel from hating on US EN.