7 ms·
What’s the misunderstanding you’re trying to avoid with this distinction?
by monadic2 6y ago
What’s the misunderstanding you’re trying to avoid with this distinction?
- _emacsomancer_ 6y agoDo you descend from your cousin? No. You're related, and thus share a common ancestor.
- monadic2 6y agoSure, but who believes english comes from modern german? The OP is laying out a strawman of confusion. The article certainly does not make this claim. It’s being pulled from the OP’s ass with no context for a dopamine hit. Edit: removed accidental condemnation of sodomy.
- _emacsomancer_ 6y agoI regularly teach a historical linguistics course. Despite my repeatedly telling my students that Germanic is not the same as German (it's easier in German, where the distinction is clearer: Germanisch vs Deutsch), and that English doesn't come from German, a surprisingly high percentage still end up thinking that English comes from German. So, the Strawman is realer than one would like, albeit still lacking a brain.
- shitgoose 6y agoYou are probably right, but the original article is more of a "freestyle". It is entertaining and engaging. Conflating (deliberate or not) of cousins and ancestors is a small price to pay to keep the reader on the subject. [pardon my English, I am sure you will find enough to critisize]
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoIt was pretty entertaining, sure. English in all its phases is a fascinating language. Hence why I hate to see it reduced to some kind of debased German :-) I like German, too. I wish I spoke more of it. What's interesting is the gap of time between our last written Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and the time that Middle English was written down. In-between is a couple hundred years of time where the aristocracy spoke and wrote in Old Norman French. Interesting things happened phonetically in that time but we know little of it.
- _emacsomancer_ 6y agoIt would be pretty easy to say something like "Go far enough back, and English and German (and Dutch &c.) were the same language...."
- monadic2 6y agoIs that not true? Certainly you can find a period of time when populations in both England and Saxony spoke mutually intelligible tongues. This confusion seems to arise out of a deliberate misinterpretation of your quote out of bad faith, not any semantic misunderstanding of the past. If you believe this isn’t true you’re wandering into a territory of objectively demarcated language and dialect classification to little benefit. Pedagogically useful I’m sure, but to what semantic end? Hell I thought this was the type of problem linguistics intended to solve.
- _emacsomancer_ 6y agoNo, it is true: that was exactly why I suggested it. My point was that rather than saying something along the lines of "English used to be German" (which makes as much sense and is just as true [false] as saying "German used to be English"), it would have been easy enough to quickly say that they used to be the same language. (Though, as to your point about England and Saxony: (1) mutual intelligibility is not the same as being the same language (2) Old Saxon isn't the same as Old High German.) [But, you're right about demarcating language: it gets tricky pretty quickly. E.g., from a certain perspective, English (and German, and French, and Hindi) don't exist in the first place. A bunch of people have some sort of instantiations of formal grammars + lexicons in their brains and the output of these is such that some sort of more or less effective communication takes place and so we say these people 'speak the same language'.]
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoIt's also not even clear that Saxon is actually the origin for English; yes the Anglo-Saxons often called themselves Saxons, but it is likely the ethno-linguistic pool they came from was something closer to Frisian than Saxon. Or some sort of Common West Germanic, from what is now Schleswig-Holstein and Frisia, not Saxony proper. So yeah there would have been mutual intellegibility, because at that point there was likely high mutual intelligibility between all Western Germanic languages. But like you said that doesn't make them the same language. And like you aluded to, it's kind of a lumpers vs splitters thing.
- schoen 6y agoWhen I first learned about the history of English as an adolescent, I used to say that English was "a mixture of French and German". I think I was thinking that Germanic languages had not diverged significantly from each other at the time of the Norman Conquest and that French and German were also conservative enough that the modern languages were recognizably similar to or even mutually intelligible with their ancestors from a thousand years ago. These intuitions that I held about language change are not right, and they did allow me to confusedly use "Germanic" and "German" pretty much interchangeably. (After learning more linguistics and modern Germanic and Romance languages, I can now return to my old intuition and see it as a useful metaphor.) I think you and other people in this thread are right to actively try to correct this misconception, because it's a real misconception that people, including me, have held literally instead of metaphorically.
- _emacsomancer_ 6y agoIt's an unfortunate accident that English uses 'German' for the language and 'Germanic' for the language family which easily leads to this sort of confusion. [Even ca. 700-1000 A.D., Old English and the ancestors of modern German (modern 'Hoch Deutsch') were pretty different, if obviously related, e.g.: Old English: ============ Fæder ūre, ðū ðē eart on heofonum, Sī ðīn nama gehālgod. Tō becume ðīn rice. Gewurde ðīn willa On eorþan swā swā on heofonum. Urne gedæghwamlīcan hlāf syle ūs tōdæg. And forgyf ūs ūre gyltas, Swā swā wē forgyfaþ ūrum gyltendum. And ne gelæd ðū ūs on costnunge, ac alȳs ūs of yfele. * * * * Old High German (Bavarian): =========================== Fater unser, du pist in himilum. Kauuihit si namo din. Piqhueme rihhi din, Uuesa din uuillo, sama so in himile est, sama in erdu. Pilipi unsraz emizzigaz kip uns eogauuanna. Enti flaz uns unsro sculdi, sama so uuir flazzames unsrem scolom. Enti ni princ unsih in chorunka. Uzzan kaneri unsih fona allem sunton.
- schoen 6y agoThat is also useful because that is further apart than I would have expected. :-) Is there a continental European Germanic language that was closer to English at that time? An ancestor of modern Frisian or something?
- diffrinse 6y agoBesides presenting the wrong graph of relations in the language remarked upon already, the statement gives the sense to someone uninformed that modern German is a pretty old language.
- monadic2 6y agoGerman is a pretty old language, just like most languages. English didn’t just pop into being in the sixteenth century either. This is just semantic handwringing that doesn’t add any understanding to the idea that english is a germanic language, which again does not imply that modern english comes from modern german. So again, why does this apparent misunderstanding matter? It certainly doesn’t detract from the article that a less precise colloquialism was used.
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoNo, it's literally as incorrect as saying Italian came from French. When in fact both just came from Vulgur Latin. Both share a common ancestor. A lot further back than the 16th century. At the time that the branch that became English came into existence, German didn't exist either. It was just Frankish, or Alemannic. At the time the Angles Saxons and Jutes left the continent, what eventually became German looked like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergakker_inscription https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergakker_inscription And it was already a separate language from the Angles' language