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Careful: English is just as Germanic as German is. It's easy to conflate "German" with Proto-Germanic and create the incorrect assumption that English evolved f
by tadfisher 1y ago
Careful: English is just as Germanic as German is. It's easy to conflate "German" with Proto-Germanic and create the incorrect assumption that English evolved from German, when both languages share a common ancestor as part of the West Germanic family of languages.
- adamzwasserman 1y agotrue
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pqtyw 1y ago> English is just as Germanic as German is. Well yes and no. English generally diverged much more from the common ancestor than pretty much every other Germanic language. Yeah other examples like Maltese which is technically an Arabic dialect but with half the vocabularies coming from Romance/Italian languages.
- nicole_express 1y agoEnglish has certainly diverged quite a lot, but there are other ways it stayed the same and German diverged; for example, the infamous "th" sounds were at one time common to all Germanic speakers, but was lost among mainland Germanic speakers while English (as well as Icelandic) kept it.
- insane_dreamer 1y agoNo, because unlike Germany, England was for hundreds of years ruled by a nobility that was French speaking (until English emerged from a blend of French and Old English (which was Germanic).
- tadfisher 1y agoYou could certainly make the case that English is not a Germanic language. You would be in contradiction with the linguistic mainstream, who recognize a direct lineage between Old English, Middle English and Modern English. You would also be placing much import on the influence of loanwords on a language, enough so that the presence of such would divorce the victim language from its linguistic family entirely!