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English is weird
Case:
Well, if you ignore all the romance-vocabulary, English is still a Germanic language.
Sort of.
Nominally.
Morituri:
We all know the popular line about the way English "borrows" from other languages - sometimes a brazen daylight theft and sometimes by following them down dark alleys, beating them senseless and going through their pockets for loose vocabulary. Let's face it, English is a thug.
English is a bastard child of the Romance and Germanic families that's has fallen into theft and other crimes, and at this point has been cast out by the families of both its parents. Romance and Germanic families both hem and hum and act embarrassed whenever the subject of English is brought up.
But both seem miffed that being disowned by them doesn't really bother English in the least.
Case:
In Europe, it's mostly the romance cultures that are miffed that English has won the European lingua-franca wars. Crossing that line between the language families is quite challenging, and cultures with substantial shares of the populace that are comfortable with languages from both families are rare - IIRC, in the northwest, only Belgium and Luxembourg.
Until the mid 90s, a large share of both French and German students studied the other countries' language, but since then, that share has dropped.
For the north-western countries, English is simply much, much easier to learn, and with the EU accession of the Central-Eastern countries, and their decision for English as second language, the balance shifted decisively.
Cornelius:
--- Quote from: Case on 25 Jan 2019, 03:37 ---Crossing that line between the language families is quite challenging.
--- End quote ---
It gets even more interesting when you go to where there's an overlap between those. The East Cantons for instance; official languages are both German and French, and they do use both of them. Besides, they're friendly people, so if they hear you speak Flemish, they'll happily throw in whatever vocabulary they have. That was an interesting afternoon.
Case:
I think I confused two different languages in our above discussion about Frisian:
There are three different Frisian languages - west-Frisian, spoken by about 430.000 people in the north-east of the Netherlands, as well as east-Frisian and north-Frisian, spoken in a handful of places on the German north sea coast and in Southern Schleswig on the Jutland peninsula.
The latter two are nearly extinct, and have been largely replaced by standard (high) German and local low German dialects.
What I thought of as (east) Frisiam is in fact East Frisian low Saxon, a low-German dialect (According to the respective German wiki, it seems the misnomer is quite widespread amongst non-Frisian Germans).
I knew that the German Frisians regard themselves as an ethnic minority, but our constitutional court rejected their request for official recognition
Low German is indeed ... well German, it can be difficult to understand, but it doesn't feel like a foreign language. Genuine Frisian otoh is definitely a language apart, albeit a related one. Low German dialects - what we call 'platt' or 'plattdütsch' (lit. 'flat German' ) - are spoken in virtually all of northern Germany,, even my own hometown has its own 'platt'. Or rather had :The last people I heard speaking it were my maternal grandparents. So it's no mystery that the Frisian variants of low German would feel familiar to me, since they are related to the low German dialect of my childhood (Sadly, I've lost all but a few words)
North Frisian sounds like this://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDJiHSFvm_oand here's a bit of east-Frisian low Saxon://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwT3NEcOcUM
I'd still say that the German Frisian variants sound more German to me than English - if anything, it feels more like Germandutchsomething - , but that might be due to the speakers shifting back and forth between high German and Frisian pronunciation. And yes, this is definitely a language apart, albeit, sadly, one that appears to be destined to fall victim to the very strong pressures to speak high German. I guess that's probably due to policies pursued during the unification process of the last 150 years (Germany, as a nation, is really quite young, and its constituent parts needed quite a bit of convincing to feel German rather than Bavarian, Rhenish, Prussian etc. - that was the original meaning of the (in)famous 'Deutschland, Deutschland über alles': It wasn't at all unthinkable for 18th Century Germans to side with foreign powers in wars against their own brethren)
Sorry, my bad :oops:
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