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So what did Old English and "Old High Franconian" (Old High German?) start off in common as, if not "Old German"? Linguists would call it Proto-Germanic though.

So what did Old English and "Old High Franconian" (Old High German?) start off in common as, if not "Old German"? Linguists would call it Proto-Germanic though. The parent poster isn't factually incorrect though. And interestingly, there's a significant body of research showing mutual intelligibility between Old English and Old Norse, which are less similar than than Old English and Old High German. Old English texts have been found in (modern day) central and southern Germany (e.g.: Fulda), which implies that they were reading them there. This would be from the 7th to 10th century timeframe, IIRC.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Sure, but the common ancestor was never called "Old German" or "German"; and not only linguists, but the speakers themselves would never have called themselves Germans. They had various ethnonyms, but not that one. "Saxon" is probably the word that the could have settled on. But that's not really an ancestor of modern high German, more the low German speaking dialects in the north west (Niedersächsisch). I don't think this is being pedantic, frankly. And it's horrible to say English "doesn't really exist"; English is a beautiful language with a long history as old as (in fact in some ways older than) German. (FWIW I'm a native English speaker but my father's family is German, so while I'm not fluent in German I do have education and personal exposure to both languages. I've also studied a bit of Anglo-Saxon. Enough to see just how different it was from old Frankish spoken by the early "Germans" in the same time period)
- herewulf 5y ago
  I had to go back to the original parent's post to make sense of your reply. I found the parent's post to be an accurate, tongue-in-cheek description of the evolution of the English language. It clearly wasn't written by a native speaker and makes more sense if you substitute "German"[1] with "Germanic". I can see why an English native speaker might take offense. I am a native speaker also but I don't take offense. English serves as a pretty awful lingua franca which has cursed most of the world with struggling to make sense of its inconsistencies, but there's nothing to be done about that now. Also keep in mind the topic of this discussion, which is a humorous diatribe against the modern German language (written in beautiful, flowing English by one of its best writers to have ever lived). A native German speaker could quite easily take offense at it. I happen to have struggled through obtaining German fluency in my college years and while I wouldn't agree with everything that Twain wrote, I find his piece hilarious. [1]: "German" being an originally Roman Latin term for a group of related peoples speaking, what amounts to closely related dialects rather than separate languages. The definition of "language" is also really indistinct. It really comes down to mutual intelligibility than anything else, see Norwegian, Danish, Swedish (separate "languages" but mutually intelligible). You're certainly aware that the modern Germans call themselves and their language "Deutsch" -- an old word for "people" and that was the case in English in the past, see the "Pennsylvania Dutch" who most certainly don't come from the Netherlands or speak modern Dutch. Old English had liberal use of the term "þéod" (people) which is cognate to "Deutsch"/"Dutch". The country of "Germany" has only really existed since 1871.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

Sure, but the common ancestor was never called "Old German" or "German"; and not only linguists, but the speakers themselves would never have called themselves Germans. They had various ethnonyms, but not that one. "Saxon" is probably the word that the could have settled on. But that's not really an ancestor of modern high German, more the low German speaking dialects in the north west (Niedersächsisch). I don't think this is being pedantic, frankly. And it's horrible to say English "doesn't really exist"; English is a beautiful language with a long history as old as (in fact in some ways older than) German. (FWIW I'm a native English speaker but my father's family is German, so while I'm not fluent in German I do have education and personal exposure to both languages. I've also studied a bit of Anglo-Saxon. Enough to see just how different it was from old Frankish spoken by the early "Germans" in the same time period)

herewulf 5y ago
I had to go back to the original parent's post to make sense of your reply. I found the parent's post to be an accurate, tongue-in-cheek description of the evolution of the English language. It clearly wasn't written by a native speaker and makes more sense if you substitute "German"[1] with "Germanic". I can see why an English native speaker might take offense. I am a native speaker also but I don't take offense. English serves as a pretty awful lingua franca which has cursed most of the world with struggling to make sense of its inconsistencies, but there's nothing to be done about that now. Also keep in mind the topic of this discussion, which is a humorous diatribe against the modern German language (written in beautiful, flowing English by one of its best writers to have ever lived). A native German speaker could quite easily take offense at it. I happen to have struggled through obtaining German fluency in my college years and while I wouldn't agree with everything that Twain wrote, I find his piece hilarious. [1]: "German" being an originally Roman Latin term for a group of related peoples speaking, what amounts to closely related dialects rather than separate languages. The definition of "language" is also really indistinct. It really comes down to mutual intelligibility than anything else, see Norwegian, Danish, Swedish (separate "languages" but mutually intelligible). You're certainly aware that the modern Germans call themselves and their language "Deutsch" -- an old word for "people" and that was the case in English in the past, see the "Pennsylvania Dutch" who most certainly don't come from the Netherlands or speak modern Dutch. Old English had liberal use of the term "þéod" (people) which is cognate to "Deutsch"/"Dutch". The country of "Germany" has only really existed since 1871.