Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

"English started out as German."

Can we not do better than this? This is factually incorrect. I'm sure the author knows better, and just thought readers weren't "smart" enough to be able to understand "English is part of the Germanic language family" or "German and English are related", but instead this is just ... no... I don't think I'm being pedantic by complaining about this... But this is like saying that "Spanish started out as French" or "Romanian started out as Italian"

German refers to the language descended from Old High Franconian. English is descendended from the Anglo-Saxon dialects, the languages of peoples who invaded Britain from the western coast of what is now Denmark and the northeast coast of what is now the Netherlands. And then modified with a whole bunch of old Norse influence from Danish and Norwegian invaders. And then with a whole bunch of Old Norman French influence... etc.

If you look for a _modern_ Germanic language that English is most closely related to it would be the low Germanic languages, low Saxon, Frisian, even Dutch more so than German proper. Low and high refers to altitude -- not class or prestige or anything -- the "high" German languages are those that underwent a softening/changing sound shift which came out of the highlands in southern Germany. English, like Dutch, never underwent that sound shift. Hence we say "School" with a "k" for the sch instead of a soft "sch" like in German.

What’s the misunderstanding you’re trying to avoid with this distinction?

Do you descend from your cousin? No. You're related, and thus share a common ancestor.

Sure, but who believes english comes from modern german? The OP is laying out a strawman of confusion. The article certainly does not make this claim. It’s being pulled from the OP’s ass with no context for a dopamine hit.

Edit: removed accidental condemnation of sodomy.

I regularly teach a historical linguistics course. Despite my repeatedly telling my students that Germanic is not the same as German (it's easier in German, where the distinction is clearer: Germanisch vs Deutsch), and that English doesn't come from German, a surprisingly high percentage still end up thinking that English comes from German.

So, the Strawman is realer than one would like, albeit still lacking a brain.

You are probably right, but the original article is more of a "freestyle". It is entertaining and engaging. Conflating (deliberate or not) of cousins and ancestors is a small price to pay to keep the reader on the subject. [pardon my English, I am sure you will find enough to critisize]

It was pretty entertaining, sure. English in all its phases is a fascinating language. Hence why I hate to see it reduced to some kind of debased German :-) I like German, too. I wish I spoke more of it.

What's interesting is the gap of time between our last written Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and the time that Middle English was written down. In-between is a couple hundred years of time where the aristocracy spoke and wrote in Old Norman French. Interesting things happened phonetically in that time but we know little of it.

It would be pretty easy to say something like "Go far enough back, and English and German (and Dutch &c.) were the same language...."

Is that not true? Certainly you can find a period of time when populations in both England and Saxony spoke mutually intelligible tongues. This confusion seems to arise out of a deliberate misinterpretation of your quote out of bad faith, not any semantic misunderstanding of the past.

If you believe this isn’t true you’re wandering into a territory of objectively demarcated language and dialect classification to little benefit. Pedagogically useful I’m sure, but to what semantic end? Hell I thought this was the type of problem linguistics intended to solve.

No, it is true: that was exactly why I suggested it. My point was that rather than saying something along the lines of "English used to be German" (which makes as much sense and is just as true [false] as saying "German used to be English"), it would have been easy enough to quickly say that they used to be the same language.

(Though, as to your point about England and Saxony: (1) mutual intelligibility is not the same as being the same language (2) Old Saxon isn't the same as Old High German.)

[But, you're right about demarcating language: it gets tricky pretty quickly. E.g., from a certain perspective, English (and German, and French, and Hindi) don't exist in the first place. A bunch of people have some sort of instantiations of formal grammars + lexicons in their brains and the output of these is such that some sort of more or less effective communication takes place and so we say these people 'speak the same language'.]

It's also not even clear that Saxon is actually the origin for English; yes the Anglo-Saxons often called themselves Saxons, but it is likely the ethno-linguistic pool they came from was something closer to Frisian than Saxon. Or some sort of Common West Germanic, from what is now Schleswig-Holstein and Frisia, not Saxony proper.

So yeah there would have been mutual intellegibility, because at that point there was likely high mutual intelligibility between all Western Germanic languages. But like you said that doesn't make them the same language. And like you aluded to, it's kind of a lumpers vs splitters thing.

When I first learned about the history of English as an adolescent, I used to say that English was "a mixture of French and German". I think I was thinking that Germanic languages had not diverged significantly from each other at the time of the Norman Conquest and that French and German were also conservative enough that the modern languages were recognizably similar to or even mutually intelligible with their ancestors from a thousand years ago.

These intuitions that I held about language change are not right, and they did allow me to confusedly use "Germanic" and "German" pretty much interchangeably. (After learning more linguistics and modern Germanic and Romance languages, I can now return to my old intuition and see it as a useful metaphor.)

I think you and other people in this thread are right to actively try to correct this misconception, because it's a real misconception that people, including me, have held literally instead of metaphorically.

It's an unfortunate accident that English uses 'German' for the language and 'Germanic' for the language family which easily leads to this sort of confusion.

[Even ca. 700-1000 A.D., Old English and the ancestors of modern German (modern 'Hoch Deutsch') were pretty different, if obviously related, e.g.:

Old English:

============

Fæder ūre, ðū ðē eart on heofonum,

Sī ðīn nama gehālgod.

Tō becume ðīn rice.

Gewurde ðīn willa

On eorþan swā swā on heofonum.

Urne gedæghwamlīcan hlāf syle ūs tōdæg.

And forgyf ūs ūre gyltas,

Swā swā wē forgyfaþ ūrum gyltendum.

And ne gelæd ðū ūs on costnunge,

ac alȳs ūs of yfele.

* * * *

Old High German (Bavarian):

===========================

Fater unser, du pist in himilum.

Kauuihit si namo din.

Piqhueme rihhi din,

Uuesa din uuillo,

sama so in himile est, sama in erdu.

Pilipi unsraz emizzigaz kip uns eogauuanna.

Enti flaz uns unsro sculdi,

sama so uuir flazzames unsrem scolom.

Enti ni princ unsih in chorunka.

Uzzan kaneri unsih fona allem sunton.

That is also useful because that is further apart than I would have expected. :-)

Is there a continental European Germanic language that was closer to English at that time? An ancestor of modern Frisian or something?

Old Saxon will be the closest thing to Frisian for the same time period, and it does look closer to the Old English:

Fadar usa firiho barno,

thu bist an them hohon himila rikea,

geuuihid si thin namo uuordo gehuuilico,

Cuma thin craftag riki.

UUerða thin uuilleo oƀar thesa werold alla,

so sama an erðo, so thar uppa ist

an them hohon himilo rikea.

Gef us dag gehuuilikes rad, drohtin the godo,

thina helaga helpa, endi alat us, heƀenes uuard,

managoro mensculdio,

al so uue oðrum mannum doan.

Ne lat us farledean leða uuihti

so forð an iro uuileon, so uui uuirðige sind,

ac help us uuiðar allun uƀilon dadiun.

[these are all of course translations from Latin, so there are also differences in translator choices as well.]

Yeah, also the problem of the translation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiousios (or the vernacular translation of Latin translations of that word)...

Thanks for the Old Saxon example. Very interesting!

Besides presenting the wrong graph of relations in the language remarked upon already, the statement gives the sense to someone uninformed that modern German is a pretty old language.

German is a pretty old language, just like most languages. English didn’t just pop into being in the sixteenth century either. This is just semantic handwringing that doesn’t add any understanding to the idea that english is a germanic language, which again does not imply that modern english comes from modern german.

So again, why does this apparent misunderstanding matter? It certainly doesn’t detract from the article that a less precise colloquialism was used.

No, it's literally as incorrect as saying Italian came from French. When in fact both just came from Vulgur Latin.

Both share a common ancestor. A lot further back than the 16th century. At the time that the branch that became English came into existence, German didn't exist either. It was just Frankish, or Alemannic.

At the time the Angles Saxons and Jutes left the continent, what eventually became German looked like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergakker_inscription

And it was already a separate language from the Angles' language

> "English started out as German."

Full context: "English started out as German. Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon, really is a foreign language, and requires serious study. I don't think an anglophone can learn to read it with mere tricks."

> Can we not do better than this?

Can you just stop copying and pasting things out of context?

> But this is like saying that "Spanish started out as French" or "Romanian started out as Italian"

It's more like saying spanish started as latin given the context.

> English is descendended from the Anglo-Saxon dialects

So english started out as german?

Um, no, English did not start out as German.

Did you even read what I wrote?

German and English started from a common ancestor yes. About at least 2500 years ago, probably. But English did not start out as German any more than German started out as English. They are cousins. The ancestor they share in common is/was not called German. By anybody.

Um, yes.

"Full context: "English started out as German. Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon, really is a foreign language, and requires serious study. I don't think an anglophone can learn to read it with mere tricks."

> Did you even read what I wrote?

Yes, I even responded on a point by point basis. Did you read what I wrote?

> German and English started from a common ancestor yes

It is clear the author was talking about german as in germanic. Hence why he referred to old english and anglo-saxon. Nobody is saying that english came from the modern german language.

You sneakily copied one sentence out of context to argue nonsense - that the author claimed english came from modern german. You built up a silly straw man and you got called out.

Once again. The author wasn't claiming the modern english language came from modern german. But the language that english descended from was german. Just like the anglo-saxon people were german. As in germanic. Okay?

It's not my fault you have a "sneaky" reading where somehow "German" = "Germanic". Don't accuse me of being the sneaky one. You're distorting what I wrote _and_ what the original article author wrote. That's not in the article at all. And yes, I read the full context.

So you either misunderstand what Germanic is, or you're choosing to read the author's sentence substituting "Germanic" for German, or you're being deliberately hostile.

... Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, socrates is mortal... but not all men are socrates.

> That's not in the article at all.

"English started out as German. Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon, really is a foreign language, and requires serious study. I don't think an anglophone can learn to read it with mere tricks."

I can only copy and paste the full context so many times...

> So you either misunderstand what Germanic is, or you're choosing to read the author's sentence substituting "Germanic" for German, or you're being deliberately hostile.

No you are being intentionally obtuse. You knew fully what the author meant but you intentionally cherrypicked one sentence and misrepresented his entire point.

The author CLEARLY stated : "English started out as German. Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon, really is a foreign language, and requires serious study. I don't think an anglophone can learn to read it with mere tricks."

> ... Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, socrates is mortal... but not all men are socrates.

You might want to look up what a syllogism is.

The easiest way to end your nonsense. Lets end it once and for all. So you are claiming that the author is saying that english came from the modern german language right?

"English started out as German. Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon, really is a foreign language, and requires serious study. I don't think an anglophone can learn to read it with mere tricks."

To you, the author is saying english came from the modern german language with the statements above? Of course not. You are so full of shit, I don't know why you keep pushing your nonsense. Of course you won't answer but go off on a tangent. People can see through your nonsense. Have a nice day.

I'll just say it one more time: the common ancestor of English and modern German was never and is still not called German. By anybody. And I did not claim that the author claimed that English came from modern German. I took issue with his statement that "English started out as German". Because it didn't. It started out as _a_ Germanic (or Teutonic, or whatever) language. Not a thing called German.

The word German means something else. Something different than the author implies, and what you imply as well.

Why does this matter? Because this history is actually fascinating and beautiful for both German and English. And the common ancestry is a lovely story in and of itself. And in many ways a reader could be led astray by thinking of English as a form of German when it is in fact its own lineage... many words have entirely different forms and meanings, and in fact English preserves things that were changed entirely in continental Germanic and vice versa.

Not to mention the influence of Old Norse, Norman French, and Brittonic languages on English as well. It's a lovely and poetic mix.

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