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English ,the less Germanic of the ... ? | ||
Tags: Germanic Languages | English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4463 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes  Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 9 of 52 31 January 2014 at 6:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Nynorsk yes, Bokmaal no. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4502 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 10 of 52 31 January 2014 at 7:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't know enough to judge Faroese. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5023 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 11 of 52 31 January 2014 at 7:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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A number of ways of construing the question. Is least German to be interpreted as farthest from Proto-Germanic? Or is it the language among the Germanic languages most different from the others? Is the set simply modern Germanic languages, or all Germanic languages dating from the break-up of Proto-Germanic, including languages since gone extinct?
Inquiring minds want to know. I imagine the question asked is the second one, in which case, I think, yeah, English or Afrikaans is a good candidate. Edited by ScottScheule on 31 January 2014 at 7:56pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4085 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 12 of 52 31 January 2014 at 8:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I remember an old joke, "English is the only Germanic language with a Romance
vocabulary". But it basically is true. English also has no grammatical gender, the case system deteriorated, and the usage of "thou" and "ye" disappeared in favour of "you", which was supposed to be a polite second-person form, I think both accusative and dative case. It has this silly "do-support" which serves almost no purpose except elongate a sentence. The SOV clause order disappeared for subordinate clauses, which is basically used in Dutch, German, Swedish, Norwegian, etc. The OVS word-order for emphasis has declined in use dramatically. The distinction between the perfect tenses with "be" and "have" as auxiliary verbs has declined, i.e., transitive "I have eaten dinner", but intransitive, "I am travelled to Leiden yesterday". Also used English the Germanic word-order with the past participle and the second, third, etc. verbs at the end of the clause, it would be, "I am yesterday to Leiden travelled." That feature has also deteriorated dramatically in English. English also lost all noun classes. Its declension of nouns has been confined to adding "s" as a prefix for most plurals. The "ge-" prefix for past participles disappeared, which is a Germanic trait. The infinitives of English verbs do not have a uniform ending like in Dutch or German "-en" as a suffix, nor "-a" like in Swedish/Norwegian. The infinitive form in English is "to" followed by the stem of the verb and nothing else. I am not sure if any other Germanic language functions like this. I do not think that any other Germanic language changed so much like English in such little time. "Hwæt heðer þou?" insted of "What do you call yourself?" was used in England at one point, but if one said that now, no one would understand. I remember reading hereover in Wikipaedia one night, and it stated that Old English, which was very close to Proto-Germanic, is actually easier for a Germanic non-Anglophone speaker to understand and read. In other words, it is easier for a Swedish speaker, Dutch speaker, German speaker, Icelandic speaker, etc. to read and speak Old English than a Modern English speaker. I have never heard of such an extreme phenomenon for any other language, that foreign speakers have more chances of understanding its older form than modern speakers of that language. Unless English starts reintroducing cases and grammatical gender, so that as an Anglophone I say, "þeser are miner booker", "I gave þee minen hamen and cheesen sandwichen", it might even start appearing less like either Germanic and Romance languages. Afrikaans had many disappearances like English, but the vocabulary is still comparatively quite Germanic. Someone from the Netherlands could understand an Afrikaans speaker without prior study probably. I highly doubt that any Germanic language speaker can understand almost fully or speak English without prior study. Edited by 1e4e6 on 01 February 2014 at 6:07am 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6660 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 13 of 52 31 January 2014 at 11:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I've often thought this. If you look at Swedish/Norwegian/Danish, they all look very intelligible. Similarly, Dutch/German look very similar. But of you put English alongside them, it looks different. I think it has something to do with the Norman French conquest of England in 1066, which infused massive amounts of French/Latin into English. If you look at English in the time before the conquest, it looked a lot like Danish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4085 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 14 of 52 31 January 2014 at 11:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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English having changed so much is probably about five times as much as how much Norwegian
or Dutch changed in the same period. This is how English sounded when it had all of its Germanic features: http://youtu.be/u1ti7iB9cy4?t=20s 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6498 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 15 of 52 01 February 2014 at 12:48am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Icelandic has roughly the same grammar as in the viking age, and also more or less the same vocabulary. High German has an equally conservative grammar, but its vocabulary has changed more than the Icelandic one. So Icelandic is definitely closer to the roots.
In the other end of the scale we have English with a minimal morphology, extensive loans from non-Germanic languages AND weird things like its double verbal system (a 'simple' one and one based on -ing-forms) and the use of a dummy verb "do". In Dutch and Danish-Norwegian-Swedish the reduction of the morphology has gone almost as far (though these languages have kept two genders etc.), and these languages also have several grammatical quirks - like the postclitic articles of the Nordic languages. Afrikaans has actually reduced its morphology even more than Dutch. But for me the thing that settles the matter is the amount of loanwords from French in English. And one thing more: the Germanic languages are born in Europe, but apart from Afrikaans as a native language and German as an important secondary language in Southern Africa the other Germanic languages have basically remained in Europe. Only English has really left the cradle. Edited by Iversen on 02 February 2014 at 11:38pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Marcos_Eich Diglot Newbie Brazil Joined 4013 days ago 16 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: German | Message 16 of 52 01 February 2014 at 3:10am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Really? I would like to konw more about it. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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