How far back in time could you read English?

[John_Mace]

@robert_columbia

Right. So it’s more correct to say that English and German both derive from a common source, which was spoken at the same time as Latin but wasn’t Latin. Most of the languages of Europe have been influenced by each other, many of them heavily.

Yep, I think you only have to go back about 2,500 years to when German and English were the same language.

Interestingly enough, even though English is considered to be closely related to German in terms of descent, the word order of English is pretty nearly identical to that of Swedish and rather different than modern German. The standard hypothesis is that English originally used a German-like word order that was changed when the Vikings entered England, conquered it, learned English imperfectly, and taught their subjects to speak the new broken Viking-English.

I believe that is one hypothesis, but I don’t think it’s the consensus. I would defer to one of our resident linguists on that.

I’ve not studied either German or a Scandinavia language formally, but I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Germany and in Norway, and I have to say that I found Norwegian easier to learn than German.