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Comment by wrp | Hacker News Reader

This is fun and all, but Poul Anderson should have talked to a linguist first. His idea was to show what modern English might be if it hadn't been so influenced by French, Greek, and Latin. The problem is that Anglo-Saxon was a dialect of Old Norse, not Old High German. He should have looked to the Scandinavian languages for inspiration. I think he was misled by the idea that English is a "Germanic" language.

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No, Anglo-Saxon (or more correct Old English) is not a north-germanic language. Germanic languages per se are traditionally split into three branches: west- east- and north-germanic. English, as do German, belongs to the west-germanic branch. Though it is true that English for a time was heavily influenced by Old Norse (which as a precursor to the modern scandinavian languages sits on the north-germanic branch).

A couple of linguists (one Norwegian) do argue that Old English/Anglo-Saxon died out in the wake of the Danish invasions, and that Middle English (and hence modern English) descends directly from Old Norse (with a large amount of vocabulary borrowed from Old English): https://www.apollon.uio.no/english/articles/2012/4-english-s...

This theory is far from uncontroversial, however.

I think you are misunderstanding what Poul Anderson was doing there. He was proposing that without the Normans, English would have drawn on the German lexicon. As the link in the sister comment argues, Old Norse had replaced German as an influence well before the 11th century. So Anderson's construction of hypothetical English vocabulary should have been based on Norse, not German.

>He was proposing that without the Normans, English would have drawn on the German lexicon.

That's not what's going on here, he's limiting the vocabulary to existing English words which derive from Old English and inventing some new words using existing morphemes of Old English origin.

(if you're going to look outside English btw the nearest neighbor languages are Frisian and more distantly Dutch)

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