Yea, no.
There’s not a single valid linguist that would agree. It’s very clearly a Germanic language, with French being the single largest influence courtesy of the Norman Conquests.
“Four score and twenty years ago” - nowhere else in English do you find this number construction, only by someone who speaks French (such as Lincoln, Jefferson, Franklin, etc).
I took french for 6 years and never put that last bit together. Thank you.
Kinda bizarre take given that English is not a romance language and instead Germanic. Lots of words and phrases then came in from French due to the Norman conquest, and lots of words have been borrowed from other languages due to long European ties, the British Empire and the American globalisation.
English is the ultimate mash up language, and its flexibility makes it very versatile. It can feel hard to learn due to the ideosyncracies but even spoken badly meaning is often retained.
No noun genders is also a huge plus. They exist but they dont have function - unlike in French or German where you need to know the gender of an object to work out how to form a sentence correctly.
So yeah “French pronounced badly”? Yeah, its really not.
TIL French is German as fuck, apparently.
Seriously, English doesn’t even have that many more words with non-Germanic roots than German itself.
English does have more loanwords than most languages have words.
But it’s still a Germanic language with a similar origin as modern German. If I remember correctly, they both stem from some proto-Germanic language and they continued development independently of each other.
English does have more loanwords than most languages have words.
Small languages that are dying out, maybe. Contemporary standard German is filled to the brim with loanwords from French, Latin, English and even Hebrew.
If I remember correctly, they both stem from some proto-Germanic language and they continued development independently of each other.
Old saxon, specifically. I don’t think there’s anything proto about it, it was just an old form of a dialect that was common in Germany until about 200 years ago.