> English at the core is based on German (an old German not spoken anymore - and one we probably can't reconstruct) This is just plain wrong, or at the very le

> English at the core is based on German (an old German not spoken anymore - and one we probably can't reconstruct) This is just plain wrong, or at the very least very misleading. It's true that English is at its core a Germanic language. As is German, but it's fairer to say that both languages share a common ancestor. And in fact, we can and have reconstructed these older ancestor languages. In fact, most European languages descend from Proto-Indo-European, which has also been reconstructed to quite some detail. I can heartily recommend this podcast[1] by the way, which goes into a lot more detail about this as well as the history of how these things got discovered. [1] - https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/ https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/