The example you gave is based on vocabulary shared between English and French due to historical reasons. The bones of English, the grammar and structure of the language, is without a doubt Germanic.
– Like all Germanic languages, English has two more or less parallel series of voiced and unvoiced obstruents (fricatives, stops, affricates) – Ekkehard König, The Germanic Languages, 1994.
– “Strong” and “weak” verbs
– Lack of Latin grammatical features such as the ablative absolute
Morever, we can trace the genealogy of English back in time from Modern to Middle to Old, all the way back to Proto-Germanic. Try reconstructing an opposing, Romance, genealogy for English.
The reason that English “doesn’t look” like a stereotypical Germanic language is that the grammar has been highly simplified, the language absorbed a lot of Romance vocabulary which it then proceeded to pronounce in a manner to suit itself, and the Germanic languages underwent vowel and consonant shifts which obscured how closely related some words were that just a few hundred years ago sounded alike.
Despite this, English has even preserved a few archaic features from Proto-Germanic that some “typical” Germanic languages have lost (and which Romance languages never had to begin with) – a good example is “Th” (actually two sounds, /ð/ and /θ/ ). The only other Germanic language to have retained both is Icelandic, the most conservative Germanic tongue, while Danish has /ð/ but not /θ/
The Norwegian newspaper reports on this state that one argument for this proposition is the word order, but it only compares Old English to modern languages, the Scandinavian languages, German and English, and points out that Old English and German have one word order, and English and the Scandinavian have a different. As has already been pointed out, the Scandinavian languages today have different rules for word order in many cases, but more importantly, shouldn’t the comparison be made to Old Norse?
I’m not a linguist, but didn’t modern Scandinavian rise from Old Norse a few centuries after the Viking presence in the British Isles? And what was the word order in Old Norse?
I agree with everything you say, but I guess I am going on the idea that when you quack like a duck, look like a duck, etc. your DNA may say that you are a goose, but people have at least some basis to think of you as a semi-duck.
German has three genders. Romance languages two. English none.
German always, always puts the verb at the end of a subordinate clause. “Die Frau die ich schon gesehen hatte war in der Stadt.” Literally, “The woman, whom I already seen had, was in the city.”
But both English and French would structure the sentence: "La femme, que j’avais déjà vue, était dans la ville. The woman, whom I had already seen, was in the city.
I am not disputing the Germanic origins of English. I am just saying it deserves to be regarded more as a hybrid of Germanic and Romance in its modern form.
After reading this thread, I have to ask - shouldn’t English basically be described as something quite different now? We have people arguing - passionately, that it belongs in this or that category. In fact, English is so messed up, that they can reasonably argue it very different ways. Does that fact alone not mean it’s basically become a language family unto itself? Sure, it has historical influences, and was originally Old Germanic. But by now, well, I honestly don’t see it fitting in with any major European language family today.
We’ve just grown apart. it’s not you, it’s us - we all just need some time to ourselves.
No. A “Language Family” is generally something like Indo-European, of which English is with a doubt a member. You are talking about sub-sub categories within a language family. And then it becomes a matter if you’re a lumper or a splitter. Still, the vast majority of linguists will agree that English is a Germanic language with heavy borrowings from many languages, mostly Romance languages, but also Norse and Greek. At it’s core, though, it’s Germanic.
The problem is that linguistic “hybrids”, such as pidgins, creoles, and true mixed languages, are specific things with certain development stages, and English does not fit the criteria to be any of them. English is exactly what it looks and sounds like: a Germanic language that has simplified grammar and has absorbed a lot of Romance vocabulary.
Imagine that someone came to you and said, “Your dog has the same color coat as my dog. Clearly they are the same breed”, to which you replied: “That can’t be. My dog is a Rottweiler and yours is an Australian labradoodle. Their coat pattern looks similar, and although all dog breeds are distantly related, our dogs are not the same breed.”
Even if this person rounded up 100 other people to insist that your dogs were clearly the same breed because of their coat color, that opinion will not magically make a Rottweiler and an Australian labradoodle the same thing. Their coat colors look the same, yes, and to a person who’s never seen a dog before, they may appear to be the same breed. But when you know, even a bit, about dogs, you learn that that’s not true at all.
And in your sample sentence, the English version is the more formal and literary, and not something you’re likely to say or hear in real life. If I were going to say something to that effect, I’d say, “I saw that woman before, and I saw her in the city today.” (okay, okay, in my true dialect I’d say “I done seen that woman before, and I seened her today in the city!”)
That isn’t what matters for language taxonomy, though. Because Old English is a well-documented stage of the language, its roots in West Germanic are well known and studied. However many admixtures have gotten added on top, none of that changes the roots, which still hold.
If the only documentation we had on unfamiliar language XYZ was collected as of yesterday, and if it had no known relatives (which would be the other clue to go on), yes, like you said, it would be probably be filed as unclassified at first for insufficient data, because of the lack of time depth.
We can’t just unlearn Old English and how it compares with the other known ancient Germanic languages like Old Norse, Old German, and Gothic. I could get plastic surgery and wear disguises until I no longer resembled the rest of my family, but it couldn’t change the fact that I’m my family’s daughter. However far the branches spread apart, they all grew from the same roots.
As Tolkien would say, the kin of eld have been sundered by the sundering Sea.
Plus, Modern English’s Germanic roots are still clearly evident. It’s not an accident that most of the basic words are still Germanic, not Romance in origin.
