Hi,
Interestting (though OT) thread....
I had always understood it as the following:
The English language is made up of a mixture of European languages:
certainly German but also French, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Latin,
(even some Old English), you name it. It's because we were invaded so
many times and we so admired those who conquered us that we adopted
their spoken tongues! <G>
AFAIK German, English, Danish, Dutch, Flemish and Frisian(?) are all
Germanic languages (just like e.g. French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and
Italian are Romanic languages). The differences between the various
different Romanic languages seem to be a bit less than between the Germanic
languages, granted German, Dutch, and Flemish do actually have a lot of
similarities.
Then, as for English, from what I've understood, indeed it has quite some
influences from Latin and especially French, actually, I once heard that
about 1/3 of English deriviates from French. Dutch too has some very typical
influences from German, French and English.
I was interested to learn that, when the Founding Fathers selected what
should be their national language, English won by *only one* vote. I guess
England was out of favour at the time. Second most popular choice was
German. So (assuming this to be true), if one Founding Father had voted
differently, German would now be the international language.
Regarding this, I have heard the same, but with one difference: I had heard
that the second language was actually Dutch, but I'm not 100 ertain...
Does anyone know this for sure?
Anyway, I might be off too in all of the above statements, this is just what
I had heard from it, and I certainly didn't get all this information from
end-all, be-all sources....
Cheers!
Olafo
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