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Comment by triyambakam | Hacker News Reader

Not related to Antartic English but I am a proponent of the theory introduced by Professor Faarlund [1] that English should be categorized as a North Germanic language like Swedish and not West Germanic like Dutch and German.

[1] "Language of the Vikings" by Faarlund

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I doubt that a serious linguist would really classify languages in a hierachical categorization system, and would not argue for a joined language continuum. I interact on a daily basis in english, german and swedish and it is totally obvious to me that there is a long list of things were two more or less randomly share one characteristic (or words) compared to the other, e.g declination in english and swedish, or compound words in german and swedish. Similarly, dialects (and other types of variations) are clearly intermediates based on geography. And time obviously also plays a role in divergence, hence would old norse be closer to todays english than swedish or norwegian (minus the modern words). But if I had to make a decision, english would be the outgroup.

I don’t think this works well. English is absolutely “Germanic” but it doesn’t neatly fit into any grouping grammatically, lexically, or audibly. The influence of French, and milder influences of Gaelic languages have transformed the language considerably. Those two have as much influence as does Norse. The Angles and Saxons were West Germanic, and they started the language. Reclassification of English as North Germanic would be about as accurate as reclassifying it as Romance.

But it would be more romantic. I was struck by how much a lot of English people really want to feel like Vikings. French people tent to be looked down upon, or considered as weird eccentrics. Some people really don’t want to realise how close the English and French cultures are in actual truth.

> milder influences of Gaelic languages

Gaelic is the surviving Celtic language of Scotland, and not the dominant Celtic language of Scotland when the Angles and Saxons arrived, which was more like Welsh. I don't think Gaelic has had a sizable influence on English. One would expect this to have come more from Welsh, Cornish, and Cumbric, the displaced languages, but I'm not aware of a huge influence here either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Scott...

I would not have picked Strontium.

Do-support is thought to have come into English from a local Celtic language.

The usage of “do” and some of the uses of would/could/should come from “Celtic” languages if I understand correctly.

Dutch sure sounds a lot more like English than Swedish does. The famous "Geef me een klap papa" comes to mind. Quite a bit of Dutch sounds nearly as close to English as, say, Scots does. "Zet de televisie aan." "Waar ben je?" "Ik heb honger, wanneer gaan we eten?"

I grew up hearing German, Schwaebisch, English, Latin, and French regularly. Dutch is readable for me, but hearing it is sometimes completely foreign.

In case anyone doesn't recognize the cognates, I think they'd be

"Set the television on."

"Where been ye?"

"I have hunger, when ere going we eating?"

(It would be easier for English speakers to understand "wanneer" by the similarity to "whenever" but it turns out that "wanneer" is actually cognate with when+ere (as in 'before') and not with when+ever.)

Those aren't too out of place in Scottish English.

There was a commotion on Twitter recently when a Dutch politician posted a tweet (in Dutch) that started with the words, “we hebben een serieus probleem”.

https://brill.com/view/journals/ldc/6/1/article-p1_1.xml?lan...

One problem with discussing language relationships is that there are (at least) two conflicting viewpoints on grouping languages. Historical linguists like to classify languages according to the genetic heritage of the people speaking them. They like to think of English and its heritage as West Germanic.

The other method of grouping is by degree of mutual intelligibility. It appears that Anglo-Saxon evolved to become mutually intelligible with Old Norse, so on pragmatic terms, they could be considered dialects of a common language.

Edit: I'll add that from my experience in the domains of applied linguistics and public policy, the practical distinction most commonly made is that if two speech forms are mutually intelligible, we call them dialects, and if not we call them separate languages. For some reason, that seems to really upset some people.

> if two speech forms are mutually intelligible, we call them dialects, and if not we call them separate languages

You simultaneously made a lot of Portugese people unhappy and Swissgerman/Alemannic people happy

Interesting, what is the difference?

One is closely related to the German that you hear in Germany today. The other is more closely related to the Amish Mennonite German, which is very different. There are similarities, but they are different enough that some people feel they are as similar to each other as English is to German.

Are you talking about Pennsylvania Dutch? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Dutch_language

Judging by https://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haaptblatt the Amish/Mennonite German is no more different than any of the many dialects (Hochdeutsch being a koiné language "Dachsprache") one hears in Germany today. Compare https://pfl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Haubdsaid

> „Wir können alles. Außer Hochdeutsch.“ == [People from Baden-Württemberg] can do anything. Except speak German.

Faarlund's argument for classifying English as a North Germanic language is based on syntactic evidence and historical contact between Old Norse and Old English. He suggests that the extensive Viking presence in the British Isles during the Viking Age led to significant linguistic influence that shaped the development of English. This influence, according to Faarlund, is profound enough to warrant reclassifying English away from its traditional West Germanic grouping into the North Germanic category. He points to structural similarities between English and the Scandinavian languages that are not found in other West Germanic languages, arguing these are the result of Old Norse influence rather than shared Germanic heritage.

What does Faarlund say about Frisian then? Frisian is also a West Germanic language, and to my understanding is very closely related to English to the point that it is possible to speak a grammatically correct sentence in English and IIRC West Frisian simultaneously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisian_languages

When you say grammatically correct sentence, are you meaning a sentence where at least the grammar is identical in both English and West Frisian? Because that alone doesn't seem surprising; the grammatical similarity across all Germanic languages is indeed illustrated by the 'Comparative Germanic sentences' section of the very Wikipedia article you linked to.

So the example I’m familiar with and I’m going off memory is “Green eggs and cheese is good English and good Fries.” when spoken. I suspect it’s not exactly the same, but to this day I’ve never met someone from old Frisia (which runs between the Netherlands and Denmark along the coast) to fact check this for me properly. Also IIRC Western Frisian is the most popularly spoken one, and when standardized spelling came for it during the language reforms that hit pretty much all extant Western European languages, the standardization came under Dutch governance, which is why I emphasized spoken rather than written Frisian.

That’s all background though, not really relevant. In fact it might even be a distraction, but it’s what I lead with. What I’m really getting at though is that the parent said he was a proponent of Professor Faarlund’s theory that English should be categorized as North Germanic rather than West Germanic. If true, it would seem to me given that given that one of the closest cousins to the English language is the Anglo-Frisian language family, why would you stop at reclassifying just English? Why not Frisian and Low German languages? I’m not sure you can address reclassifying English without also addressing these language groups, either to sever English from them or else to propose reclassifying some or all of them as well.

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