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UiO linguist makes sensational claim - English is a Scandinavian language

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Arizona Hot:
What are the opinions of the linguists here?

UiO linguist makes sensational claim - English is a Scandinavian language

tomos:
I'm no linguist, but I do manage conversational German. As they say, English and German sentence structure are very different.
i.e. it makes sense to me. German and English have a *lot* of words in common - but maybe these are also common words between 'West-Germanic' and Scandinavian languages (which are Germanic as well AFAIK).

German grammer is great fun for a native English speaker (probably for Scandinavians too).
Mark Twain wrote an entertaining text about the German language (I've only read excerpts from it).
Here's a quote:
The Germans  have  another  kind  of parenthesis,  which  they make  by
splitting  a  verb in two  and putting  half of it at the  beginning  of  an
exciting chapter and the OTHER HALF at  the end  of it. Can any one conceive
of  anything more confusing than that? These  things  are  called "separable
verbs." The German grammar is blistered all over with  separable verbs;  and
the  wider the  two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the
author  of the crime  is pleased  with his  performance.  A favorite  one is
REISTE AB -- which means departed. Here is an example which  I culled from a
novel and reduced to English:
     "The trunks  being  now  ready,  he DE-  after kissing  his mother  and
sisters,  and once  more  pressing to his  bosom his  adored Gretchen,  who,
dressed in simple white muslin, with a single tuberose in the ample folds of
her rich brown hair, had tottered feebly  down  the stairs, still  pale from
the terror and excitement  of the past evening,  but longing to lay her poor
aching head yet once again upon the breast of him whom she loved more dearly
than life itself, PARTED."
--- End quote ---

http://lib.ru/INPROZ/MARKTWAIN/german.txt
or, probably easier to read here:
http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html

Dormouse:
The whole concept seems pretty daft to me.

"...Modern English is a direct descendant of the language of Scandinavians who settled in the British Isles in the course of many centuries, before the French-speaking Normans conquered the country in 1066," says Faarlund.  "...The Danelaw was under the control of Scandinavian chiefs for half a century."
--- End quote ---

The Normans were Scandinavians who conquered Normandy and then spoke French. They ruled England for centuries, always speaking French (and brought a lot of French speaking settlers with them).

English was formed out of many languages including the North German (Scandinavian), West German (Anglo-Saxon) and French. There are many ways of constructing sentences in English, and this is one of the main differences with other languages such as German where the rules tend to be more rigid. All the quoted examples could be phrased differently, and the typical German word order would be understood, even if might not be the most common construction in English. Even now, dialects in different parts of England will use different ways of saying the same thing.

tomos:
^ I get what you're saying, but I suspect that's simply a lack of depth/detail in the article -
I cant comment about the Skandinavian sentence structure as I'm not familiar with it - but as a native English speaker, I can say that the German sentence structure is fundamentally different.

TaoPhoenix:
Roughly what I am getting from all this is that the profs are valuing structure over words. What if it was Scandinavian structure with Germanic & French words?

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