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From: "John R. Yamamoto-Wilson" <john@rarebooksinjapan.org>
Newsgroups: sci.lang.japan,fj.life.in-japan
Subject: Re: English is the god of all languages
Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2006 17:42:02 +0900
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I wrote:

> > English owes very little indeed to Nordic languages. English is in the
> > Germanic group of languages.

Kevin Wayne Williams replied:

> As are Danish, Faeroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish. These are
> all descendants of "North Germanic", which is in turn a descendant of
> "Old Norse", which is descended from proto-Germanic.

Oops! You're right, of course. But they branch like this:

                          Germanic
                ________|__________
                |                                    |
            West                        North (Norse)
                |                                    |
            Dutch                           Danish
            English                         Icelandic
            Flemish                        Norwegian
            Frisian                          Swedish
            German
            Yiddish

So, while Old Norse and English have a close common root (much closer than
English and Latin), English is not derived from Old Norse, windows and
Wednesdays notwithstanding. (I know you know that; I'm just setting it out
in black and white for the record.)

> One thing I found interesting: the Dutch study Chaucer and Beowulf in
> high school without translation. It takes effort, but there is no need
> to translate it into Dutch, as many find them easier to read than modern
> English.

Interesting. I didn't know that.

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.org