How German are the British royals? | Hacker News Reader

How German are the British royals?

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25 pointscarlsborg15 comments

NW Germany should look like English, as that’s where the angles, saxons and jutes came from. Followed by the Danes a few hundred years later. I thought the German from that part was closer to English as well? Hard to differentiate genetics on such short time scales I think.

The face of Britain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLV63ip7pdI

Dutch is a mix between German and English. English is certainly not the hardest language to learn if you already know German or Dutch, although any Romance language helps too. Doesn't really translate to north Germanic languages like Swedish though. I think English, Dutch and German are classified as west Germanic languages while the others are north Germanic languages. On the other hand English did make substantial changes compared to Dutch or German.

Well, they got run over by a whole lot of Vikings who were fond of French food in 1066. Having Norman French as the ruling language for a few hundred years helped muddy English. People have commented that the animal name is often Anglo saxon (cow, pig) while the meal name is French (beef, pork). Don’t know when English started stealing words and the like from all languages but it’s real good at it now. And quite sloppy with rules vs. Related languages.

Vocabulary != grammar. The English dictionary was certainly populated by Old French, but the structure and phonetics of the language remained on their own course.

mixed with old english, which is quite different from modern english

A lot of German, Dutch and Scandanavian words survive in dialects of English.

https://www.quora.com/How-is-it-that-Scottish-words-resemble...

I remember in an episode of Blackadder, in response to "for god's sake we're British aren't we?" from Prince George, he says "You're not you're German". (Obv a TV show isn't the best way to backup facts).

So I have this second generation German friend, she took a 23andme test, her roots are all English.

How is that possible?

Well seems england and Germany have had a looooong affair going on

It's possible thanks to 23andme « results » being worthless. It doesn't show where you're from, it shows with which set of samples you overlap (with a very broad interval of confidence).

The only use for that type of service is extracting your genetic data and exploiting it somewhere else.

Maybe the UK can take this opportunity to Brexit from the German royals?

How to start a war between the UK and Germany.

I cannot get over the stupidity of a system, that would proclaim a complete foreigner as king of the whole goddamn country. And this was only 300 years ago, and this system was presumably supported by highly educated people.

For a long time, nobility was much more important than nationality. It was so important to have a ruler from one of the accepted noble houses that Greece imported a King from Bavaria (Otto of Greece). And they were basically all related. So one sprawling family dominated Europe for centuries. Almost inconceivable from today's viewpoint.

It was neccesary because the complete foreigner was the most proximate heir that was Protestant.

> However, the British soon realized that George I did a great deal for the kingdom — he put down two Scottish uprisings, established the two-party system that is still in place today, created a well-functioning navy and expanded the British Empire.

It wasn’t stupid if it worked.

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