English is actually Scandinavian (northern Germanic)

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

According to this link provided in a comment by a poster today which has made it very easy to write today's post. It reminds me a bit of a book I mentioned three years ago called Le français ne vient pas du latin which also makes a somewhat unorthodox yet interesting claim.

Back to the link: the claim is that Old English did exist as we know it, but then later died out and the language that took its place was Northern Germanic, naturally with a very heavy Old English influence. There was a lot of bitter confrontation for a while and by the time the Normans invaded England the two had more or less merged. One more reason: many of the words said to be adopted from Norse were very basic words like big and egg and skin, and to have adopted so many basic words when Old English already had its own words for them is difficult to believe. The final claim is word order, with some examples in the article as well as an article I wrote a few years back on why Norwegian is the easiest language for English speakers to learn.

I think I'll submit that link to /r/linguistics as well...wait, somebody already did today.

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