On 17 Apr 2015, at 23:17, Daniel J. Matyola <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 5:38 PM, Bob W-PDML <[email protected]> wrote: >> according to the French English is just French, badly pronounced. > > Quite untrue.
It's what passes for humour over there, but it's not entirely inaccurate. > Danish is the closest language to English, and for good reason. That's not entirely accurate. English is West Germanic, which includes Frisian, Dutch and German ; Danish is a North Germanic language, which includes the other Scandinavian languages. As for the French connection, something like 30% of our vocabulary comes from French, and even more of it comes from Latin, far outweighing our Germanic vocabulary. You could indeed say we have a Romance vocabulary grafted onto a sorta Germanic grammar (which is now quite different from modern German grammar). I've never studied Dutch or Friesian, so I can't say how much our grammar differs from their's. B > > Remember, the first great work of English literature (Beowulf) is a > story about the Danes, for those in England who remembered their > Danish roots, as is arguably the greatest work of English literature, > Hamlet. <G> > > Dan Matyola > http://www.pentaxphotogallery.com/danieljmatyola > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
