Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)
grammarphobia.com
grammarphobia.com
The -s endings came after Norsemen conquered England, and the introduction of it was from their language, connected to old French. This also is why in English, you have words like "ox/cows" and "beef": the Norsemen who were nobles essentially influenced the English to use their words for the animals since they were served as food to them (beef), while the English people who slaved in the fields raising the actual animals (cow) continued to use their ancestors' words for the live animals. This is why we have different words for the meat of the animals (beef, poultry, mutton) vs. the actual animals (cows, chicken, sheep).
You might be able to argue the Normans influenced the normalization towards plurals endings in S, but languages are generally pretty resistant to borrowing grammatic features wholesale versus, say, borrowing vocabulary.
Not always check Spanish for example they took a lot from Arabic, like 'EL'.
Latin did not have articles. The use of articles is a grammatical feature that has been borrowed between languages. But yes: that kind of borrowing is a lot less frequent than borrowing of vocabulary.
Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian have kept more of the insanely complex rules for pluralisation actually.
Danish isn't insanely complex to pluralise (native English speaker who recently learned Danish).
The choice is either add -e or -er with some exceptions.
https://www.duolingo.com/comment/6279406/Plural-Endings-in-D...
Swedish is a bit more complex with arbitrary assigned neutral or uterum gender and definite articles.
But you'd probably be understood using -er in spoken Swedish for a large group of words. Written Swedish is more tricky.
https://medium.com/@mailmyswedish/plurals-in-swedish-76f1de9...
Although they kept the cases - that there are only traces of left in Swedish - even Icelandic seems simpler.
* * *
Wamba, up and help me an thou beest a man; take a turn round the back o' the hill to gain the wind on them; and when thous't got the weather-gage, thou mayst drive them before thee as gently as so many innocent lambs."
"Truly," said Wamba, without stirring from the spot, "I have consulted my legs upon this matter, and they are altogether of opinion, that to carry my gay garments through these sloughs, would be an act of unfriendship to my sovereign person and royal wardrobe; wherefore, Gurth, I advise thee to call off Fangs, and leave the herd to their destiny, which, whether they meet with bands of travelling soldiers, or of outlaws, or of wandering pilgrims, can be little else than to be converted into Normans before morning, to thy no small ease and comfort."
"The swine turned Normans to my comfort!" quoth Gurth; "expound that to me, Wamba, for my brain is too dull, and my mind too vexed, to read riddles."
"Why, how call you those grunting brutes running about on their four legs?" demanded Wamba.
"Swine, fool, swine," said the herd, "every fool knows that."
"And swine is good Saxon," said the Jester; "but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels, like a traitor?"
"Pork," answered the swine-herd.
"I am very glad every fool knows that too," said Wamba, "and pork, I think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?"
"It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy fool's pate."
"Nay, I can tell you more," said Wamba, in the same tone; there is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment."
"By St Dunstan," answered Gurth, "thou speakest but sad truths; little is left to us but the air we breathe, and that appears to have been reserved with much hesitation, solely for the purpose of enabling us to endure the tasks they lay upon our shoulders. The finest and the fattest is for their board; the loveliest is for their couch; the best and bravest supply their foreign masters with soldiers, and whiten distant lands with their bones, leaving few here who have either will or the power to protect the unfortunate Saxon. God's blessing on our master Cedric, he hath done the work of a man in standing in the gap; but Reginald Front-de-Boeuf is coming down to this country in person, and we shall soon see how little Cedric's trouble will avail him. ---Here, here," he exclaimed again, raising his voice, "So ho! so ho! well done, Fangs! thou hast them all before thee now, and bring'st them on bravely, lad."
They tried to conquer England for the best part of a millennium, failed, conquered parts of France and Italy instead - by war and diplomacy - and then conquered England.
Side note: if that kind of stuff is interesting to you, I can highly recommend The History of English podcast.
Pretty much same for ox - from the old form of "big" "великий" - big animal.
Cow "корова" most likely comes from protoslavic korva and most likely inherited from ancient-indian "carvati" - "chewing".
EDIT: Another fun fact is that words sometimes begin to mean their _exact opposite_. For example, "wicked" used to mean "evil", but in England (and elsewhere, but especially England) it's started to mean "sweet".
And there's always the great consonant shift: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Unfolding-Language-Evolutionary-Manki...
I read up on this (rebracketing it's called), and now I understand why the snakes called Natter in German are adders in English, and that even made it back to German as ...otter (Kreuzotter for example).
That and the "double u", why not "we"??
Also lot's of languages when borrowing from English do away with the plural if it's obvious. Like in french, a pair of jeans is just un jean, singular.
1 pant
2 pantx
3+ pants
The problem with the words op is describing is that they should, semantically, belong to the category of 1 object, but morphologically (and syntactically) belong to the category of not-1 object. Adding a separate category for 2 objects does not address this.
I do wonder if simpler english will ever catch on
I do wondr if simplr nglsh wil evr cach on.
If you want a history of attempts to fix it, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...
So a hypothetical "nife" would never be mistaken for "neef", as "nif" could be.
(No, I didn't know this word existed before this moment.)
Define "pointless". Each word has its own etymology, and if we're going to be honest here, the different spellings aren't _that_ complicated. Take it up with English's ancestors for borrowing words from many different languages, and then with more recent ancestors for the great vowel shift, among other things leading to change.
Language is never going to make sense. It's not prescriptive- we just make changes, arbitrarily, sometimes due to mistakes, and it either catches on or it doesn't. Trying to "fix" language is an impossible task because no one is making the rules. English in particular doesn't have a language council making decisions, unlike say, Korean. It doesn't matter anyways because "Standard English" is quite different than day to day conversation, and even in formal settings it's based on stylistic guidelines, not hard rules.
Just let it be- devising an _arbitrary_ method of attempting to corral an entire language is an impossible task. And any work would be undone within one generation anyways since languages evolve. Esperanto, a manufactured language, has already seen linguistic changes by its native speakers (kids who were taught it growing up).
Also, I think your "simpler" transcription is actually less phonologically accurate.
For instance, I would transcribe the "er" in "wonder" as [ɝ]. In some dialects, it would actually just be [ɜ] without any pronounced trace of the "r" like sound. In actuallity, I suspect that it is actually [ɜɹ] underlying, and the two sounds just coalesce into [ɝ] when you pronounce them.
That is to say, the "er" sound is viewed a variant of the vowel moreso than it is a variant of "r". I have the same complaint about "simplr" and "evr".
For "nglsh", I just do not see any motivation to remove the vowels. It is true that English allows "n" to act as a vowel, but in "English", there is a pretty clear [I] (as in Igloo) before the [n]. Similarly, [l] could act as a vowel, but there is also a pretty clear [I] following it.
Finally for "cach", I can't really complain about this being worse, as "ch" is our way of writing tsh ( /t͡ʃ/ ), but if we are simplifying English, it would be nice to clean up this too and show the relationship between that sound and the t sound.
That mike car
Him going there
-- my school teacher
EDIT: Now that I think about it there is another one that is hard for me, even it I know it is the correct form in English: visa (singular) and visas (plural). In my mother tongue it follows the same pattern as datum and data, it's Visum (singular) and Visa (plural).
"people" is the plural form of "person", i.e. one person, two people, as a group
"people" (pl. "peoples") is a group of people as a unit, e.g. a tribe or an ethnic group or the citizens of a country
"persons" is ALSO the plural of "person" but only used when you talk about individuals rather than a group (e.g. "person of interest" -> "persons of interest", not "people of interest")
Yes this is a bit awkward and yes sometimes what's grammatically possible still sounds awkward even to native speakers (e.g. I'd argue "the polices" is a legitimate term when discussing multiple police organisations of a country as an abstract group but it sounds extremely wrong to most people apparently).
For example, there is a UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Obviously, native speakers would say "people with disabilities" in almost every situation, but that would be too informal for the title of a treaty.
Likewise, law enforcement use formal speech such as "persons of interest" to bolster their authority, but nobody would ever say "I sat next to two Australian persons on the flight".
Admittedly, it's more likely I'd say "I sat next to two Ozzies on the flight." (No, not Aussies, Ozzies. Like Ozzy Ozbourne. Because that's how it sounds to me when Aussies say 'Aussies.')
Which contexts did you have in mind?
See also: Meccano, Duplo, Brio, Scalextric.
Is "gimme the lego over there" strange? I think it is, and if it is, then it's an interesting dater point to support this hypothesis.
I appreciate the apparent strangeness of this, but it's certainly not unique within the language.
That's English! :)
"Forums" (rather than fora) seems a little awkward to me, but "data point" seems more natural than "datum". But then I never learnt Latin at school. At some point we need to stop applying the grammar rules of foreign languages to fully adopted words.
There is also the noun vīsum, -ī, plural visa with the primary meaning the seen [thing], appearance, perception. This is the word that was borrowed into English and other languages.
Wha? Oh, you mean quae navis navigaverunt.
This applies to the singulars that denote single objects too: scissor lift, pant leg; not scissors lift or pants leg.
According to this principle, it should be datum point, where only the head noun point may be pluralized.
"Datum point" exists, but I've never seen or heard it in use; it's just a "confirm by Google".
Were you also commenting on its pronunciation? I'd instead say: "data" is a mass noun like "mahyonnaise" and "tomahto sauce".
And 'in agreeance' instead of 'in agreement.'
Think coffee - you have one coffee (singular), two coffees (plural), and some coffee (an indeterminate amount).
One datum, Two data, Some data.
I don't think there's any case where German has a word of the opposite gender for a person whose gender is known, because it's usually easy to adapt the default (masculine) form by appending "-in".
It stands to reason that the feminin came to be at the boundary between these.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
PS: This is fun ... Der Mensch -> Die Familie -> Das Dorf. Der Krieger, die Krieger, das Kriegen. Der Aktionär -> die Aktie. Die Aktionärinnen ... das Aktienpaket. Der Karren (car), Die Karre (load), das Ankarren, das Herangekarrte, das Karree (See [2] for more on four wheels, strange animism, etc. Ultimately inconclusive).
Note that the pluralizing morpheme -en was written -in in old german. Also note that many case inflections come out as -en, so I suppose that female forms were in the objectified part of speech more often, where the gender is not reflected in the article (den Kindern, Männern, Frauen).
This is similar to why the & character is called "ampersand"--it was originally considered a letter, and instead of the alphabet ending in "x, y, and z", it ended in "x, y, z, and per-se 'and'".
> Our father whiche art in heuen,
> halowed be thy name.
> Let thy kyngdome cum vnto vs.
> Thy wyll be fulfylled as well in erthe,
> as it is in heuen.
In the first line we see how U was used within words for both U and V ('our' and 'heaven'). In the third line we see how V was used for words starting with U (as well as words starting with V).
Of course, this isn't universal, there are counter-examples of U used initially and V used medially!
Another weird gray area between ligature and letter are the "æ" and "œ" characters, which are mainly used as ligatures for the British spellings of "foetus" and "encyclopaedia" but were, at some times, seen as actual letters. American spelling reforms erased this particular weirdness from our dialect.
Ðere was also ðe letter "ðæt" ("that"), a later invention ðat began as a stylistic alternative to þorn in Old English manuscripts, but fell out of favour early in þe Middle English period (during þe 1200s or so).
Þorn continued to be used to a limited extent in early printed works of English. The <th> digraph started to supplant it already in manuscripts during the Middle English period, with <þ> being retained only in limited contexts well before the introduction of the press in Europe (contexts being primarily common sigla (scribal abbreviations) like <þᵉ> for "the" and <þᵗ> for "that", and occasionally when the scribe felt like they might run out of room on the line).
See some previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16059265
I'm having trouble parsing this. What was the meaning of this phrase?
A mondegreen of "and per se and", meaning "and (the character) '&' by itself", which is how the symbol (&) was originally referred to in English. This formulation is due to the fact that in schools, when reciting the alphabet, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A," "I," "O" and, at one point, "&") was preceded by the Latin expression per se (Latin for "by itself"). Also, it was common practice to add at the end of the alphabet the "&" sign, pronounced "and". Thus the end of the recitation would be: "X, Y, Z and per se and." This last phrase was routinely slurred to "ampersand" and the term crept into common English usage by around 1837.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_alphabet#Uncommon_lett...
In Arabic, oo and v are both bilabial sounds (produced using both lips). In Persian, v is pronounced more labio-dentally (bottom lip, top teeth), which is perhaps what causes the confusion.
But the lack of written distinction for these sounds is common in many scripts including Indian, Greek, and older Latin.
(Finland is bilingual, and the characters sets, keyboards and sorting rules are same both for Finnish and Swedish.)
English French Slovak
pliers pinces kliešte
pants pantalons nohavice
scissors ciseaux nožnice
In Slovak, there is "kombinačky", which is shortening from "kombinované kliešte". Basically more or less the same item as as "combination pliers".
And weirdly the Czech for "pliers" isn't the same as "ticks":
Slovak Czech
kliešte kleště
kliešť klíště
kliešte klíšťata
A pair of pants is un pantalon, and a pair of pliers is also just une pince.
"Lunettes" (glasses) would be another word that is usually plural. Juste one lunette is a scope for just one eye (or some circular object with a hole in the middle).
pants -> Finnish "housut", scissors -> "sakset"; there is no singular "housu" or "saksi" in that meaning. As above, there is the singular "saksi" but it means a Saxon.
None of those examples in English unambiguously denote single objects, they all denote indefinite numbered collections. The explicit singular object in each case is "a pair of X", where "X" is the term you have listed, and that is a grammatically singular noun phrase denoting a singular object.
As a countable noun, aside from also being a drinking vessel, "a glass" is a lens or monocle. A pair of glasses is exactly a pair of those. These definitions are still in current use.
Its true that the singular terms for the others are no longer in common current use, so the plural seems odd, but glasses is a particularly bad example.
+ The world would be better off with an easy-to-use, global lingua franca.
+ For historical reasons, both good and bad, at the moment English is the logical candidate. (The use of an alphabet also supports English as a global lingua franca, but "misspellings" should be tolerated as well as discussed at length in the comments here.)
+ We should accept usages such as "childs," vice children, and "it's" as a possessive, as being proper English and not mistakes. (English as a Second Language teachers could doubtless come up with a long list of such "mistakes.")
Such an approach to achieving a common global tongue would be more likely to succeed than was seen with Esperanto.
This is how languages evolve already. Mistakes become accepted over time.
The problem with "turning it up to 11" (or not offering mistakes any resistance before giving in to them; being conservative about it helps to single out the most persistent ones, working as natural selection of sorts)... is that not all the learners will make the same mistakes.
> English as a Second Language teachers could doubtless come up with a long list of such "mistakes."
Exactly, it would be a very long list. And much dependent on the background of the learner (aka their first language). What'd be obvious and easy for me as a Pole is not necessarily the same for a Spaniard.
Meaning this approach would lead to further diversification, rather than unification of the language.
> "misspellings" should be tolerated as well
As a non-native speaker, I'm pretty sure that widespread acceptance for spelling mistakes would pose more difficulty for me in the long run.
It is way easier for a native speaker to see past them.
So, while your mileage may vary, I, for one, vote thanks but no thanks :)
GP here. You and @maginary make an interesting point, namely that standardized spelling helps non-native speakers. The problem with English is that much of our existing standardized spelling is quite non-intuitive to pronounce, e.g., rough, through, thorough. Perhaps some kind of spelling reform as discussed by @philipps and @jherdman below would help, although other comments here also discuss the problems that have arisen with such efforts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of...
> "it's" as a possessive
are mostly native-speaker exclusive. Your/you're, there/their, etc. spelling mistakes you just don't see non native speakers make. This is because they're just that, spelling mistakes.
So while native speakers know what they mean but it's just associated with a sound in their head, they just write out that sound. Non natives on the other hand usually think about the grammar, the right word, etc. I don't think I've ever met a non-native speaker that makes the there/their mistake e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...
If you had a conservative spelling system, where each diaphoneme was mapped to a single letter, speakers of dialects with many merges (e.g. American English) would struggle to spell correctly, since they would be unable to distinguish several letters apart. If you had a simplified system, then most speakers would get confused by merges that existed in the spelling system but not in their own dialects; and speakers of more conservative dialects wouldn't be able to write sounds that are to them different.
* American English could be considered one such refactoring. Some common changes include: removing vowels without sound (e.g. "labour" => "labor", "colour" => "color"), removing duplicate letters ("programme" => "program"), and reversing some "re" words (e.g. "theatre" => "theater"). More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo... * The printing press introduced some too. The best example I can think of is the general removal of diaereses (e.g. "microörganism" => "microorganism"). Though I'm less certain of this one.
I'm a little surprised none of the gamer speak refactorings haven't made their way into the written word in a serious way, especially given their prevalence in such a large portion of the population.
The funny thing here is that "ребёнок" while not being archic comes from an anchient-russian "робя", which has plural form "робята", which is actually used in modern language too, but meaning can be anything from "boys" to "guys" or any other generalisation of a group of young people (both boys and girls).
PS: at the same time you can actually invent a plural for "ребенок" if you want to, but it may be considered as something similar to cockney, but used on purpose in otherwise normal speech.
"Ребята" is the plural form for singular "ребёнок". However the meaning of "ребята" is migrating from "children" to "young guys".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1XQx9pGGd0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG7REAOG1kc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cZR1EXGapc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Kg63k5JDH8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBqlVl0K9tw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVH6LdoEDNs
So, Ochsen -> Oxen, Maenner -> Men
(Slightly unrelated) So if you look at Scotland and Ireland, they've get some really interesting things in their dialects. die "Kirche" in German is a "church", in some dialects in scotland, it's a "kirker". Or in old dialects in Ireland, "children" is sometimes spoken as "childer".
EDIT: I retract my theory on the relationship between children and kindern :)
It's not like German were "at fault". English grew out of a common ancestor with nowadays German.
German definitely did not cause those curious plurals. We know for sure Old English had them itself from Proto-Germanic, and it makes a lot more sense for a language to retain irregular forms for words that are used very often, than to loan grammar, which is a relatively rare occurrence.
EDIT: How do you type asterisks here? Escaping with a backslash doesn't work, nor does using three in a row
for reference
cold https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
call, cry, (yell?) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/child from PIE g(')elt- (“womb”)
from Proto-Indo-European gel- (“to ball up, amass”). according to the PGmc page https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic...
but
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dolphin
says from δελφύς (delphús, “womb”), which says from
From Proto-Indo-European gʷelbʰ- (“womb”)
I'd offer German "Quälgeister" as modified reflex of the latter. Also "Quell" is synonym for off-spring. Well, spring is a direct translation of "Quelle", i.e. source. Coincidence? Cry fits in, too.
I do not believe the dolphin theory, though. I guess tail-fish is more likely. they have a penis after all, which is way funnier in general, perhaps to funny for low brow scribe type doctors. Ancient Greek δελφίς (delphís) lends itself for φίς (phís) > fish. cf. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fin IMHO
any questions?
You can't, if you want to use more than one in the same comment. A workaround is to use a similar glyph such as UNICODE SMALL ASTERISK ﹡.
(Regular plural suffixes are -en and -s.)
"The OED notes versions in such Germanic languages as Dutch (kieken, kuiken)..."
But chicken is kip in Dutch. Maybe they're talking about older versions of the word.
Also interesting, perhaps, is the other '-en' that comes to mind: boy/boys, which is jongen/jongens
"jongen" is another story. It used to be "jonge", which is the substantivized version of the adjective "jong" (young). The -n was later added by analogy from the other cases. This is why the plural is pronounced "jonges" (written "jongens"), and the diminutive is "jongetje" even in the standard language.
Edit: Ah, no. It's from the Angles: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Gregory_I#Famous_quotes_a...
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Children%2C+Ch...
The answer is that the -s plural is from the Vikings/Norse, and the -en plural is from the more complex system inherited from Anglo Saxon languages.
English is like a creole or a pidgin language in a lot of ways and a lot of its features are due to various foreign invaders imposing their grammatical rules on the local vocabulary.
Which is interesting, because modern Swedish has an -n plural (among other plurals) and no -s plural. Compare ögon (eyes) and öron (ears) with their old english eyen and earen. I guess it would follow that Swedish had a lot of Angle Saxon influence in its evolution.
The simplified version eventually spread because England was a mixture of various ethnicities for centuries and you’d have different variants of English from one town to the next— and after the Vikings you had the normans.
I think it’s the equivalent of the guy I was eating with at a restaurant in Nicaragua who yelled to the waitress ‘honey, el forko por favor?’ Like, there was an attempt at Spanish.
I think you misunderstood... Modern Swedish doesn't have the -s ending at all for plurals. My point is that somehow that got lost.
Ma cowkin made ma een waater
https://blog.assarbad.net/20090810/das-madchen-why-is-it-gra...
people think Chinese it's complicated language, but the opposite it's truth, the characters and tones are making it scary, but once you get rid off characters and tones it's one of the simplest languages, much more logical than English
English itself it's extremely illogical languag with way too many exceptions not following general rule, heck even Slavic languages (again more difficult at first sight) are more logical than English
Now this period and lack of centralization is probably responsible for the many dialects (which now are mostly just different accents for other reasons). But the language changed so much over this period. Middle English is largely readable (but weird) to the modern reader. Old English is basically a different language.
In this period English lost of what I like to call the bullshit like gender of (non-person) nouns. Case of nouns (other than pronouns) also basically disappeared. It still had the formal/informal distinction of the second person that so many other European languages had (but we lost that later). Verbs and nouns became way more regular.
None of this happened with German (although Germany as a country didn't really exist until the 19th century and was at best a collection of city-states prior to that) but German in its various forms was still the ruling language (although Latin always had a certain preeminence what with the Holy Roman Empire and the Electors and all).
Compare modern German grammar (where nouns and adjectives have to agree with case, number, gender and article). It strongly suggests that the ruling class seems to embody conservatism and traditions, which is unsurprising given that the status quo is pretty good if you're the ruling class.
You see this in England where the precursor to modern French was the court language of England for hundreds of years. This has the effect of keeping commoners out (even more than they already are by virtue of hereditary title).
It's almost like without central control English became more democratized.
Obviously the printing press had a massive effect in standardizing spelling (other posters have mentioned that u and v were largely interchangeable).
Radio (and later TV) had a massive effect on standardizing pronunciation.
But still English has rapidly changed. One example I remember is if you go back and listen to early speeches by Churchill you'll here him say "nazi" not as "natsi" but as "nazzi" (much like the non-American ss in "aussie"). But by later in the war (IIRC) the "ts" phenom had pretty much been imported into English.
Another thing I read was the mathematical model for how verbs become regular [1]. Basically, the less a verb is used, the sooner it becomes regular but how long it takes is quite predictable. Apparently "to wed" is the next verb to become regular. "To be" should take about 44,000 years.
It makes you realize just how rapidly language changes and how grammar really is descriptive not prescriptive and why it's completely pointless to get your pedantic about "literally", less vs fewer, "very unique" and so on.
[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2009/09/2...
English derives from a more coastal dialect of Germany, and is closest to Frisian and Dutch (the latter more by convergent evolution). Modern German comes from a High German dialect, which is much more different (although still West Germanic). In 1000, English and Frisian would likely have been mutually intelligible--particularly since they would have been visiting the same markets as traders--but the same would not be true for English and Dutch or English and Germanic.
Old English lost its inflection and became highly synthetic. This is primarily due to the influence of Old Norse, a North Germanic language, and the process would have begun some time before the Norman invasion in 1066. Note that a large Danish population settled in England in the 800s (the Great Dane Army invaded, and Alfred the Great ultimately let the settlers they brought with them stay), and they eventually brought Swein Forkbeard into England in response to Æthelred the Unready, which eventually leads to William's conquest in 1066 after several successive kings find themselves dead with no sons. The loss of inflection made it easier for North Germanic and West Germanic speakers to understand each other, since the roots were largely the same but the inflectional bits were different.
Your characterization of the Holy Roman Empire is wildly inaccurate. While there were several independent cities of the Holy Roman Empire, there were several large duchies and kingdoms--most notably Brandenburg, Bohemia, Saxony, the Palatinate (the four secular electors), as well as Bavaria and Austria. It was by no means "at best a collection of city-states."
Regularization is not an inherent process of language evolution. Actually, English isn't really systematically regularizing: American English has transformed the past participle of "dive" from "dived" to "dove", and there is effectively a movement to make the plural of "octopus" into "octopi" as opposed to the correct, regular "octopuses" (or the actual Greek plural "octopodes").
You know nothing, Jonh Snow (seriously though, from a russian point of view English has very few of them)
P.S. Russian is much easier to spell than English, but its verbs of motion are a real clusterfuck.
P.P.S. I have met more than one Russian who said, "Only foreigners decline numbers correctly."