At 12:16 PM +0000 3/30/01, Olaf Greve wrote:
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
You are probably right about the Dutch part since most of New York
was settled by Dutch speaking people. Many Americans continue to
confuse deutsch and dutch, calling the people in Pennsylvania of
German heritage, "Pennsylvania Dutch."
Winsor
--
Winsor Crosby
Long Beach, California, USA
mailto:wincros@xxxxxxxxxxx
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