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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

This often gets trotted out, but it's not really true. English is a solidly Germanic language, which merely happened to lose the core attribute of Indo-European languages (extensive verb inflection), and in more recent centuries, there's been a tendency to adopt Latin and Greek words for new word formation rather than (as German did) using native words. So 'technology' instead of 'craftlearn' or 'television' instead of 'farsight'.

Even among major languages, English isn't anywhere near the worst offender of copulating with other languages for features--it never really adopted foreign grammar, the way you see with, e.g., Turkic languages.

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Solidly Germanic with an absurd amount of French, down to nearly identical spelling for many common words. I’m not talking about cognates but actually 100% the same spelling and meaning and they’re often not from some recent century but from old French.

I’m sure you have a solid basis for saying this but it’s basically impossible to write many sentences without by accident using French down to the original spelling.

I was going to highlight all the examples I used by accident myself in this post but I gave up because the links were making it too long.

This is why something like Anglish even exists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_English

I believe this is because England was conquered by the Normans (french speakers). I think it was within the last 100 years or so that the English aristocracy finally stopped speaking French among themselves.

> in more recent centuries, there's been a tendency to adopt Latin and Greek words for new word formation rather than (as German did) using native words

Note that the prevalence of native words in German is the result of a modern reform movement, not something that happened naturally within the language.

> [English] never really adopted foreign grammar

There's the argument that do-support is borrowed from Celtic.

As I understand it, English at it's core is a Germanic language that underwent significant creolization with scandinavian sources. That core then acquired a significant amount of Old French and latin vocabulary, particularly in upper class terminology.

The creolization is why English has a relatively simple grammar, and all the word sources is why we have like 16-20 vowel sounds trying to cram into latin characters.

> English has a relatively simple grammar

You mean "relatively simple morphology". English phonology and syntax are not simple at all (e.g. lots of information carried by word order).

Let's not downplay the influence that the French language had on English.

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