Fun Stuff > CHATTER
English is weird
Case:
--- Quote from: Cornelius on 24 Jan 2019, 03:37 ---I wonder if going a bit further, it might not come back to the same thing after all. Proto Indo-European is reconstructed as *ensla, wich might easily be construed as the same construction your proto-Germanic has, of combining water and land roots. That's just conjecture, though.
--- End quote ---
Do both Latin and the Germanic languages derive from proto-indo European?
Cornelius:
They do: Indo-European Languages
Or, to put it more visually:
(click to show/hide)
From Stand still, stay silent. Not entirely complete, perhaps, as it focuses only on the Indo-European and Uralic families, but a very good, and engaging visual, nonetheless.
Case:
Oh, purrrty!
And what is that branch with Dutch, Flemish & Afrikaans called? "Low Franconian"? And why isn't it closer to the High German branch? Dutch is closer to German than English, methinks? And Frisian is definitely closer to German than either English or Dutch?
And what does 'year 0' mean?
pwhodges:
--- Quote from: Case on 24 Jan 2019, 10:39 ---And Frisian is definitely closer to German than either English or Dutch?
--- End quote ---
I thought it was closer to English, as the old rhyme I know (and so does Wikipedia) suggests:
--- Quote from: Wikipedia ---One rhyme that is sometimes used to demonstrate the palpable similarity between Frisian and English is "Bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Fries", which sounds not very different from "Brea, bûter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk".
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Case:
Brot, Butter und grüner Käse sind gutes English und gutes Friesisch.
Hmmmh, Ok, I see what you mean. IDK - for starters, Frisians are Germans, though a lot of them would probably say they are Frisians who happen to also speak German. English really clicked for me, in a way that French never did, and with a good foundation in German & English, Dutch isn't really that hard to learn (though I've heard it's harder the other way round), so for me, Frisian feels more like another color on the spectrum.
Doesn't mean that I could immediately follow a Frisian conversation in a loud bar, but I'm pretty confident I could handle myself given half a year or so of Immersion.
Also: Standard high German is itself as much a specification as a language - it was very deliberately used to strengthen social cohesion during the 150 years of unification. The old dialects are still there. In my native Rhineland, we sometimes use a grammatical construction that exists in standard Dutch, but not in standard German.
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