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Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

Maltese isn’t an Arabic dialect. Yes, the grammar and phonology and core function words derive from Arabic, but more than half of the vocabulary comes from Italian/Sicilian-North African Arabic may borrow a few words from Italian here and there (just like English does), but not >50% of their vocabulary.

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By your reasoning, English isn't a Germanic language since over half of its vocabulary comes from Latin or French.

You certainly wouldn’t call English a “dialect”

"A language is a dialect with an army and navy" -- Max Weinrich

In the Yiddish original: "אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט", see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...

Best not to needle the Maltese about their army and navy. They are tiny but tough (and still significant).

So tough that "siege of Malta" needs a disambiguation page on Wikipedia.

Can’t read the Hebrew alphabet, but transliterated to Latin: “a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot” - I find it fascinating that despite knowing close to zero Yiddish, it makes complete sense.. well, I know a handful of German words (which covers “mit”)… and “flot” contextually makes sense as “navy”, especially if one knows English “flotsam and jetsam” (not navy but at least nautical)

I would certainly call it a Germanic dialect.

I think the family tree model of linguistic history is not very useful for English. Saying English is Germanic to the exclusion of everything else is not very useful.

The family tree model seems to assume that every language has only 1 direct ancestor. It seems to have been inspired by phylogenetic trees in biology. In phylogenetics, single-parent trees work fine because distantly related species can't breed with one other. By contrast, different languages borrow features from one another all the time. It could perhaps be useful for some languages, but not for English. I reckon.

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