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By your reasoning, English isn't a Germanic language since over half of its vocabulary comes from Latin or French.
by englishrookie 11mo ago
By your reasoning, English isn't a Germanic language since over half of its vocabulary comes from Latin or French.
- argsnd 11mo agoYou certainly wouldn’t call English a “dialect”
- Archelaos 11mo ago"A language is a dialect with an army and navy" -- Max Weinrich In the Yiddish original: "אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט", see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
- exasperaited 11mo agoBest not to needle the Maltese about their army and navy. They are tiny but tough (and still significant). So tough that "siege of Malta" needs a disambiguation page on Wikipedia.
- skissane 11mo agoCan’t read the Hebrew alphabet, but transliterated to Latin: “a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot” - I find it fascinating that despite knowing close to zero Yiddish, it makes complete sense.. well, I know a handful of German words (which covers “mit”)… and “flot” contextually makes sense as “navy”, especially if one knows English “flotsam and jetsam” (not navy but at least nautical)
- englishrookie 11mo agoI would certainly call it a Germanic dialect.
- ogogmad 11mo agoI think the family tree model of linguistic history is not very useful for English. Saying English is Germanic to the exclusion of everything else is not very useful. The family tree model seems to assume that every language has only 1 direct ancestor. It seems to have been inspired by phylogenetic trees in biology. In phylogenetics, single-parent trees work fine because distantly related species can't breed with one other. By contrast, different languages borrow features from one another all the time. It could perhaps be useful for some languages, but not for English. I reckon.