What’s the misunderstanding you’re trying to avoid with this distinction?
Edit: removed accidental condemnation of sodomy.
So, the Strawman is realer than one would like, albeit still lacking a brain.
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.
[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.
Is there a continental European Germanic language that was closer to English at that time? An ancestor of modern Frisian or something?
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.]
Thanks for the Old Saxon example. Very interesting!
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.
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.
(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'.]
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.
So again, why does this apparent misunderstanding matter? It certainly doesn’t detract from the article that a less precise colloquialism was used.
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