On 4/17/2015 6:51 PM, Bob W-PDML wrote:
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
Plus, weren't the Normans originally Viking raiders who had conquered &
settled in that part of France?
Nit: It flows off the tongue more easily if you put the comma after the
first "French".
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