According to a study carried out at the University of New England, Australia in 2006, 56% of English words derive from the Latin language and only 12% comes from German.
So to get back to the answer to the question:
Modern English is a West Germanic language that can be distinguished from the other modern West Germanic languages by a strong superstratum of Norman (Old) French at an early time in the language's development, and by a tendency to both borrow words from other languages (especially Latin, but also vocabulary drawn from the languages of peoples subject to its historical imperialistic colonization of an unmatched amount and diversity of territory) and to be permissive with regard to the creation of new words (via technical jargon, poetic license, and incorporation of minority group terms and slang). These tendencies have resulted in Modern English having the largest vocabulary of any language and an extremely poor phonetic-to-orthographic correspondence. There are multiple dialects spoken on every continent, with Standard American English (probably) the dialect with the most native speakers. However, widespread adoption of Modern English in international business, science, and entertainment has produced a language with a greater number of non-native speakers than native speakers.
Ok. But what about that Italo-Celtic? I mean the following:
Italian is a Romance language derived from Vulgar Latin and forms a subgroup of Italic languages within the Indo-European language family. On the other hand, English is a West Germanic language ( a branch of Indo-European languages) that was first spoken in early medieval England and is now the most widely used language in the world (Mydans,2007). Historically, English originated from the fusion of closely related dialects, now collectively termed Old English, which were brought to the eastern coast of Great Britain by Germanic settlers (Anglo-Saxons) by the 5th century – with the word English being derived from the name of the Angles. A significant number of English words are constructed on the basis of roots from Latin, because Latin in some form was the lingua franca of the Christian Church and of European intellectual life (Weissbort, 2006).
In addition to this: according to earlier studies (Watkins, 1966; Voegelin & Florence, 1977; Kortlandt, 1981 and 2007; Jasanoff, 1997) the Italian and English languages are very related. In fact, in historical linguistics, Italo-Celtic is a grouping of the Italic and Celtic branches of the Indo-European language family on the basis of features shared by these two branches and no others. Also, Italo-Celtic refers to the hypothesis that the Italic languages and the Celtic languages are descended from a common ancestor, Proto-Italo-Celtic, at a stage post-dating Proto-Indo-European, making them genetically related more closely to each other than to any other language outside that group. Although the hypothesis is generally considered obsolete, a research carried out at the University of Armindale, New England, Australia in 2006 (Official web page The University of New England Armidale, New South Wales (http://www.une.edu.au/arts/LCL/disciplines/italian/ think_ ita.htm) showed that the 29% of the English words has German origin, the 15% comes from other sources whereas the 56% of the English words originates from Latin.
Traditionally, say for Old English, it is obviously Germanic, with Germanic and Scandinavian influences on grammar, phonology and lexis. Ironically, it seems that there was grammatical competition with basilectic Celtic languages, resulting in a greater tendency towards regularization of grammar (eg helping to get rid of lots of verb conjugation and noun declension issues) even though there is almost no lexical trace of Celtic tongues left in English. This so-called Celtic hypothesis (which I like though I am waiting for something far more conclusive to support it) has a fair following around Central and Northern European universities but not much following in Britain or the US.
In the Middle English period Latin and French affected lexical repertoire, broadening it - on that basis there maybe arguments that English is a Romance language but I am unconvinced, as the grammar is far more regular and resembles Germanic varieties more.
And then in Modern English texts from here and there, there is ample evidence of the traditional creole character of English, to the extent that for many lingua franca varieties outside of Europe, the idea of English being a Germanic or a Romance language is becoming a moot question - it is not!
Though perhaps it was.
Does it have to be either/or? English is an odd reunion of two divergent branches of Indo-European. Latin-Romance imports have overwhelmed the vocabulary (they've flowed into high German, too), but I think you could make an argument that the bones of English – fundamental verbs, for example – are still very Germanic. The stripped down grammar is characteristic of an amalgam of two different languages; I've heard English described as a Creole. I'm not a specialist, so don't take me too seriously.
It's probably neither Germanic nor Romance. Many features (almost total loss of morphology and a relatively strict word order) as well as its history and lexicon substratrum and superstratum are evidence of its being a creole. See work by Charles-James N. Bailey.
English is a Germanic language, if you're considering genetic affiliation. However, we know that the Norman invasion introduced French words and suffixes, etc. Language contact doesn't change the family tree relationship of a given language, but a language can be significantly restructured as a result of areal contact.
According to Historical Linguistics the Roman Empire affected West Germanic seriously. The following data should be considered:
After the aboriginal contact, the Germanic tribes speaking one language spread out across northern and Central Europe. By 500BC three major dialectal divisions had appeared in Germanic: East (the Goths), North (the Scandinavians), and West (ancestors of the English, Germans and Dutch). The Germanic languages today show many signs of being closely related: English: sing, sang, sung; Dutch: zingen, zong, gezongen; Swedish: sjunga, sjo:ng, sjungit.
Due to the influence of the Roman Empire the Western dialect of Germanic which later gave rise to English, Dutch, and German borrowed a large number of Latin words in the first few centuries AD. This was the first phase of Latin borrowings. These borrowings tended to fall into certain semantic categories.
a) Words for many Mediterranean foodstuffs: oleum, butirum, olive, caseus (cheese/kase-- replacing the Germanic yustas/ost), piper, kitchen from coquina, panna>pan, cuppa>cup, discas>dish, kaula for cabbage (cf. cauliflower, kohlrabi, coleslaw); petrosileum>parsely. The Germanic tribes also coined some new terms at this time: ale, beer--grain allowed to sprout into malt and fermented with ground barely. hence: hallucination. Tacitus reports that the Germans drank it with abandon.
b) Timekeeping words: yarum, mannoth, langtinus (Lent). Originally, the Germanic peoples had no names for the days of week, so Roman names were translated into Germanic to produce the following calques, or loan translations: sun-day, lun/moon-day, mars/tiwaz-day, mercury/Odin, Woden-day, Zeus/Thor-day, Venus/Friga-day, Saturnday (no German equivalent to the God Saturn) Some original Germanic time words were retained: sumaz, wintraz.
There were many other borrowings from Latin at this time, especially of words denoting more abstract concepts: paternal, from Latin pater father. Latin cognates borrowed into Germanic during the 1st-5th centuries AD led to the creation of many lexical doublets that attest to the divergence of Latin and Germanic from a common ancestor--Indo-European. A lexical doublet can be defined as two words from a common source which reach a language at different times or through different intermediate languages (a cognate that is actually borrowed into a language). A good example is the Germanic three and the Latin prefix tri-, which both originate from the ancient IE word for three, thought to have sounded something like tree. Three is native Germanic; tri- is a later borrowing from Latin.
The reason for the phonetic differences in such lexical doublets is this: In the history of the development of IE into several daughter languages, several major phonetic changes occurring in Germanic which did not occur in Latin (these are called Grimm's Law). The effects of these changes can clearly be seen when examining lexical doublets involving Latin borrowings, which do not show the changes, and original Germanic versions of the same historic root, which do show the changes.
a) Indo-European contained the voiceless unaspirated stops [t], [p], [k]. These became fricatives in Germanic but not Latin, thus: p--f father/paternal, t--th three/triple, k--h horn/cornucopia, the original non-aspirated [p, t, k] in Germanic remained only after [s], so both Germanic and Latin words in English contain the consonant clusters [sp, sk, st]: spill/ spoil, star/stellar, asteroid, scab/scabies. All of these pairs are examples of lexical doublets in modern English.
b) Voiced stops became voiceless aspirated stops in Germanic but not in Latin: b--p peg/bacillus d--t ten/decimal, rat/rodent, tooth/dentist, g--k corn/grain. This change once again added [p, t, k] to Germanic, but this time the sounds were aspirated. This change occured later than the loss of original, unaspirated [p,t,k].
And so, by way of summary of the pre-English period, we can note the following events:
a.) Movement of the Proto-Germans north out of eastern central Europe after 4000BC, leading to mixing with aborigines of the Baltic and North Sea coast. A great deal of aboriginal influence affected Germanic at this time.
b.) The Germanic tribes spread out all through northwestern Europe. by 500BC common Germanic breaks up into three main dialects; English later derived from the West Germanic dialect.
c.) A great deal of contact between West Germanic tribes and the Roman Empire led to many borrowings from Latin. Since Latin belongs to another branch of IE, these borrowings often formed lexical doublets alongside native Germanic versions of the same IE words.
Those are all interesting (and relevant) points, Paschalis. The question remains, however...Do borrowings change the genetic structure of the language? We know, for instance, that modern Spanish has (not a few) Arabic, Celtic, Visigoth, Greek, Phonoecian, Aztec, Inca and other-origin words. No one would argue, though, that Spanish is a Celtic language. The regular phonetic changes and the processes associated with grammaticalization (i.e., demonstratives becoming definite articles, locatives becoming progressives) have taken place from Latin to Spanish. Does areal contact and lexical borrowing change genetic relatedness?
Modern English did not organically evolve form Anglo-Saxon, the language that is being described above. On the contrary, following the so-called Norman Conquest Anglo-Saxon was replace with the varieties of French that the new rulers spoke; the old rulers were replaced and/or displaced -- together with their language. Interestingly, Anglo-Saxon was not replaced with some variety of French, but from the co-existence of upper-class, government and administrative French discourse (and Latin to some extent) on the one hand and lower-class and native Anglo-Saxon on the other, there developed a creole. It's not completely clear how precisely this happened, but -- as mentioned earlier -- the (lack of) morphology and (rigid) syntax of modern English implies a process of creolization, with French/Latin as the superstratum and older forms of English as the substratum (high-frequency words, for instance, and thus remnants of ablaut conjugation). And this is backed up by the historical events.
The doubling of some units in the the lexicon/vocabulary is witness to the political and social upheaval:
A "stool" (compare German Stuhl for chair) is good enough for the English natives, whereas the "chair" is what one sits on (from French);
a "villain" is not only an uneducated person from the conquered people but actually a morally bad person;
what the native peasants and shepherds raise are cows, calves, sheep, etc. What the rich conquerors eat is beef, veal, mutton, etc. , all from French.
As far as I see English language is a West Germanic language with lots of verbal influences from Latin. Although verbal loans from many languages have been adopted in English, Latin is the only language which has affected English verbally.
I believe a good answer to the question is provide by Thomason & Kaufman 1992 and Schreier & Hundt forthcoming, who claim English is not a creole but a language with substantial lexical and grammatical contact, a contact language. Also, for another interesting voice, cf. Origins of the British by Stephen Oppenheimer 2007, who argues that the British isles were largely populated by pre-IE people, according to the genetic spectrum of contemporary British people.
I couldn't agree more. Although English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects and brought to Britain by Germanic invaders or settlers from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the Netherlands, it developed into very much a "borrowing" language with an enormously disparate vocabulary. Actually, the term "contact language" is the best one that should be used in this case.
I think that there are arguments in favor of considering English a French-lexicalized creole language (about 60% of its vocabulary comes from Romance languages, mainly French), but that position would probably be quite polemic.
To the last respondent: I don't know where you were educated, but you clearly do not display the correct attitude to be in research. A few hundred years ago nobody doubted that Jerusalem was literally the center point of a flat earth and everybody was sure of that. We are researchers, we doubt the obvious, the dogmas and that's how any science progresses. This is a serious, polite discussion and you start degrading the person who asked the question. The germanic/romance split is only there if you take a look at syntax and morphology, if you only consider lexical features then English is very much a Romance language.
Thus, the question proposed requires clarification of it's standpoint: what is taken as such - origin, dynamics, present state or maybe its sociolinguistic behavior throughout the history?
When relying on the work of others (study carried out at the University of Armindale, Thomason & Kaufman 1992, Schreier & Hundt forthcoming, Oppenheimer 2007), it would be nice to give full references...
There is no such university - it would be the University of New England (NEU) which is in a city called Armidale (without an 'n').
Anyway, Early English is clearly a Germanic language, though syntax shows signs of Celtic influence (the so-called Celtic Hypothesis). Mixing with French and Latin occurred with Middle English, especially regarding lexis until greater stabilization occurred with more currently recognizable Early Modern English, and also an increasing consciousness of a kind of standard variety centered around London (nominally labelled 'Received Pronunciation', RP, though this expression does not occur until the very late 19th Century or so it seems). This perspective is discussed by McWhorter, J. (2008), Our Magnificent bastard Tongue. New York: Gotham, a fairly easy read. He is best on the Celtic Hypothesis.
My view is that older standard varieties of English (British, American, Australasian) are one great big complex post-creole language with renewed creolization processes occurring withing the domain of World English - English in some ways becomes its own family of languages - how is that for a long-range projection?
So, except from philological or genealogical perspectives, in some senses, whether English is a Romance or Germanic language becomes a moot question.
Not having fully read the other answers, but skimming them, one thing that is very important is that your question is not in a great format.
There is a huge difference between "Germanic Language" and "German" (or between Low German and High German).
As others have noted, Old English was a mix of the dialects spoken by the Germanic invaders of the 5th-7th centuries. These people came from pretty much everywhere on the North Sea coast between the narrow point between England and France where the Chunnel is now, and where the Jutland Peninsula expands into the larger mass of Denmark. They migrated primarily due to massive flooding of the coast of the North Sea that occurred during the Medieval Warm Period.
They were generally Frisians, Saxons, Angles, and Jutes.
During the North Germanic (aka Viking) Expansion period, northeastern England was invaded by Danes, who brought their language, and made significant changes in vocabulary. This included changes to the closed class words, such as changing the 3rd person plural pronoun to they/their.
So at the time of the Norman Invasion, we have a mix of dialects derived from the regions between the Strait of Dover and the Skaggerat.
The 11th Century Norman Invasion is where most of the Romance language influence comes from. But as others have noted, this is not Latin. This is a dialect of Old/Middle French depending on where you want to put that line.
Some French influence continued for the next 4 or so centuries. The fact that the English ruling class came from France led to several hundred years of war between the English (and the parts of France they controlled, Normandy and Aquitaine mostly) and the French monarchy. The English lost.
Skip ahead to the 17th century and we start developing modern scholarship, and getting very excited by Rome and Greece, and the learned class imports words directly from classic Latin, coins new words according to classic Latin word structure, and decides to add some Latin syntactical rules (such as not splitting the infinitive).
As time goes on, people stop caring so much about Latin, words are imported from everywhere British and American soldiers, sailors, and merchants went (which is everywhere).
So English is a West Germanic Language that can be considered a creole of the dialects of the North Sea Coast invaders, with an old superstratum of Danish, a less old superstratum of French, followed by technical importation of Latin that expanded with the expansion of formal education.
What also needs to be kept in mind is that English, especially from the period between the loss of the French territories and the Latin scholarship craze, was internally very inventive, with authors creating new words that passed into the general vocabulary by the hundreds. This did not happen in other Germanic or Romance languages.
If you want to be short about it, English is a West Germanic language with a West Romance superstratum.
I support James Polichak's reply due to the fact that the history of English language is more or less the same as described. The origin and evolution of English language dates back to the Germanic invaders with an amalgum of celtic and anglo-saxon.
Is it a pun? You ought to respect the research nitch as well as the views of researchers. And if you are talking about the English language, still its unfair to comment like that. No language is pure in its own right.
See:
My Excellent Etymological Adventure
Rory Van Tuyl
Stanford Continuing Studies Lin06, Fall 2010
Conclusion
Despite dictionary word counts that place English words derived from Germanic languages (including Old English) in the minority, and the claim that Old English is the ancestor tongue to only 2.8% of modern English, a survey of literary prose and poetry from 1380 to 1998 shows that Germanic-derived words comprised about 75% of the vocabulary used by actual writers, and nearly all of these words come from Old English. But American newspapers and magazines have shown an increase in the use of English words derived from Romance languages over the period 1705 to the present, to the point where 20th and 21st century news writing uses roughly half-Germanic, half-Romantic vocabularies.
So it seems that modern English has been much civilized by Latin and French and has become, after all, a substantial Anglo-Saxon repast turned spicy gourmet feast thanks to its one-quarter Romance vocabulary.
With modern technology, it is now possible to produce a weighted statistic, based on the frequency of the word being used in a corpus, rather than just counting dictionary words. I suspect that such usage may be getting more 'Roman-tic'?
Sources of the most frequent 10,000 words of English
Decile English French Latin Norse Other
1 83 % 11 % 2 % 2 % 2 %
2 34 % 46 % 11 % 2 % 7 %
3 29 % 46 % 14 % 1 % 10 %
4 27 % 45 % 17 % 1 % 10 %
5 27 % 47 % 17 % 1 % 8 %
6 27 % 42 % 19 % 2 % 10 %
7 23 % 45 % 17 % 2 % 13 %
8 26 % 41 % 18 % 2 % 13 %
9 25 % 41 % 17 % 2 % 15 %
10 25 % 42 % 18 % 1 % 14 %
(Robert Stockwell and Donka Minkova, English Words: History and Structure, Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Yes, this has been done for quite some time now, for various types of language use. One recent application of this process has people outside of the academic community exciting has been developing models of the word usage of particular authors to estimate the likelihood that another text was written by them (e.g., is that really a newly discovered Walt Whitman poem?).
There are plenty of variations on using statistical analyses beyond addition and subtraction to examine the relationship with socioeconomic and geographic variables. Here is a recent complex example of what can be done with a good corpus of linguistic data (spoken here, language is Dutch, article in English):
Quantitative Social Dialectology: Explaining Linguistic Variation Geographically and Socially. Martijn Wieling, John Nerbonne, R. Harald Baayen
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0023613
But I'm not sure how you make meaningful comparisons between 1380 and 1998 when you know you have an unknown amount of missing information and do not know how the information that survived did so, in contrast to the missing information.
And by 1998, there is clearly too much data to use, and a subset needs to be taken. Which will be done in a different manner than the attrition of earlier centuries.
Thanks, Nebi. That table is very illuminating (and indeed surprising!). It means that of the first 1000 most frequent-usage words, more that 57% is Germanic in origin. On this evidence from Bird, I would classify the English language as being more Germanic than Latin in its (everyday usage) origin. Paschalis should be happy!
The grammar and the core vocabulary of English are inherited from Proto-Germanic, so English is a Germanic language, despite of great number of loanwords. 100 most frequently used words are almost all Anglo-Saxon (Crystal 1995). The 135 most frequently used words occupy the half of total number of word tokens (individual words, word forms) in one-million words (exactly 1,014,312 wordform tokens; 61,805 wordform types; 37,851 lemmas) Brown Corpus of American English (W. N. Francis, H. Kucera, Brown University 1964). In Brown Corpus about 40% of tokens, or 52% of all lemmas, are ‘hapax legomena’ (words that occur only once within a given text or corpus). This is in accordance with Zipf's law (named after the American linguist George Kingsley Zipf, 1902–1950) which states that the frequency of any word in a given corpus of natural language utterances is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency list. In Brown Corpus, the most frequently used word “the” composes 7% of the total word occurrences with 69,971 times per one million word tokens; the second highest word “of” occurs 36,411 times which is nearly the half of the frequency of “the”.
Nebi, you are generally right about these things, but there are a couple of things that should be kept in mind.
"Anglo-Saxon" is not an accurate term. Ethnicity was not particularly well documented at the time, but the Germanic groups that were involved in the colonization of southeastern Great Britain included the groups living to the north of the Angles - the Jutes (as in the Jutland Peninsula) - and to the west of the Saxons - the Frisians, who still live in the coastal region from the north of North Holland (the Netherlands province) through Niedersachsen to Schleswig-Holstein (the German Bundesstaats), in the area formerly occupied by the Angles.
There are also some very common Germanic words that are from Scandinavia (Old Norse), rather than West Germanic languages. Birth, die; they both are Norse gifts. (as well as the other words in that sentence)
The Brown Corpus, as the date may suggest, is incredibly out of date. And, as noted, refers only to American English. So it is unaware of things like the internet and anything else that was not commonly mentioned in American English in the early 1960s. And there has also been some massive shifts in the frequency of use of many words in the corpus based on changes in culture and technology.
Also sources - Adventure & Western fiction (source of 29 texts or 58,000 words) was at about its peak in popularity then (in the US (and only the US)), but is not nearly so popular currently. Science fiction, on the other hand, is much more popular (6 texts, 12,000 words).
Since the Brown Corpus is based on written material, it is biased in several ways.
First, we're dealing with academics in the early 1960s. So there was not much effort to include texts that were written by or for Americans who were out of their comfort zone, in particular women and African Americans.
The second is related to the first. Published material in the United States in general was dominated by white men, with much less access by women and African Americans to establishment journalism and publishing houses. So the language used by women and African Americans was skewed toward spoken language.
Which has a different composition than written language. One major difference is that the most common words in spoken language tend to be deictic (pronouns, physical or temporal adverbs) than in written language. There is also a more limited range of words used, which cuts down the number of single-appearance words in a corpus greatly. .
Spoken language also tends toward economy and informality. This results in an increased use of Germanic words, as they are shorter in general. They also tend to be the lowest ranking in the English double or triple terms varying in prestige, which generally goes Germanic-French(-Latin, if there is a third). So pretty/beautiful, lawyer/attorney, doctor/physician, talk/converse, common/frequent, etc.
I won't look it up for you, but think you know this sentence has many words that are more often spoken than written.
Third, we are dealing with texts from a time before most people had televisions, and the programming by television broadcasters was much more restricted in scope. This caused a huge shift in exposure to spoken language vs text, and did so in a way that linked speech to visual elements, allowing a much more natural spoken content than radio. It also, slowly but greatly, changed gender and race relationships in American society. In many important cases, this was an explicit goal.
To come back to Paschalis' question, which appeared to be deceptively simple. Should we characterise the roots of a language according to its frequency of words or its inherited syntax? If both, how much weight should we give to syntax? What about other dimensions such as sayings, pronunciation (the only gutteral g is in 'loch'?), and spelling 'rules'?
Historically, the way that languages get categorized is historically.
In other words, there is nothing you can do to turn English into a Romance language because we know that it came from a separate branch of the language tree which was distinct from Latin (Old Germanic or proto-Germanic, or whatever).
If, at some point, the population of an area start speaking in words and syntax that are almost entirely from a different language than what they had been speaking, you have language replacement.
This is common. This is how the Romance languages came into existence. Latin didn't start out being spoken from Lusitania to Palestinia. There used to be hundreds of languages spoken in North America that were replaced by English, same with Australia. Arabic displaced many languages in its expansion, as did Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Spanish, Bantu, etc.
In your basic human community of hunter gatherers or agriculturalists, a language is limited to the small area that those people utilize. Sometimes, there will be some sort of a trade language over a larger area, but something we would still consider small today.
Any language that is spoken in a large area got that way by displacing the languages that used to be there, generally by the people who speak that language conquering, displacing, or exterminating the previous inhabitants.
We can use Germanic as our example: angry horsemen from the Asian steppes started pillaging the territory of Germanic tribes that were east of the Elbe river. Those tribes that could, moved. In the north, they replaced the Celts who used to be there (we don't know how much absorption vs extermination went on). In the south, they bounced into the Romans who had replaced the Celts who used to be there. Some we absorbed into the Roman genetic mix, some were exterminated, some took over bits of the Roman Empire. Then the Slavs moved in to the areas that the Germanic folks had moved out of after that round of horsemen disappeared. When the Germanic peoples decided that they wanted those areas back, things were messy. Here, we know that extermination was a method used.
Sometimes it can be environmental. Germanics again: the reason why those Angles and Saxons invaded Britain is because their continental territories were being swallowed by the ocean and subject to regular destructive flooding (this was the start of the Medieval Warm Period, which no one really knows why it happened, but also due to glacial rebound of Scandinavia).
They replaced, displaced, or absorbed the local Celts (the displaced went into Cornwall, Wales, Brittany, Ireland, which were already inhabited but you can't live in the ocean).
How much of a language has to be replaced? This is a difficult question. The answer is likely similar to the question of what distinguishes a dialect from a language - a language has an army.
So to get back to the answer to the question:
Modern English is a West Germanic language that can be distinguished from the other modern West Germanic languages by a strong superstratum of Norman (Old) French at an early time in the language's development, and by a tendency to both borrow words from other languages (especially Latin, but also vocabulary drawn from the languages of peoples subject to its historical imperialistic colonization of an unmatched amount and diversity of territory) and to be permissive with regard to the creation of new words (via technical jargon, poetic license, and incorporation of minority group terms and slang). These tendencies have resulted in Modern English having the largest vocabulary of any language and an extremely poor phonetic-to-orthographic correspondence. There are multiple dialects spoken on every continent, with Standard American English (probably) the dialect with the most native speakers. However, widespread adoption of Modern English in international business, science, and entertainment has produced a language with a greater number of non-native speakers than native speakers.
English is unequivocally a West Germanic language (with West Germanic grammar, syntax, and core vocabulary), and based on any standard linguistic treatment; it cannot be considered part-Romance or even a hybrid or creole. Professional linguists are constantly emphasizing this point when they design the classifications for the Germanic and Romance language groups. That being said, this is a very complex and often contradictory-seeming topic, and I can understand the reasons for confusion based on both the language itself and the related history, since there are so many entangled influences to consider.
I actually had to give a talk on this very issue at an educational forum years ago (based on a project I'd already tackled earlier in college), and so I’ve given a very detailed answer here to provide something definitive on this fascinating but often confusing topic. I’ll break my answer to this question down into sections to make the explanation a bit easier to digest, with the two key takeaways that 1. German (along with Dutch and most other Germanic tongues) is, like English, profoundly shaped in its vocabulary by Latin and the Romance languages, a fact that often goes unappreciated, and 2. conversely the core vocabulary and structure of German and English are both unquestionably (and equally) Germanic, and they are thus accurately classified exclusively as Germanic languages. My answer is too long to fit into a comment box here -- several sections over multiple pages -- but I've written it to be both clear-cut and definitive, to address all possible angles and major questions surrounding this topic. My detailed answer on the Germanic nature of English (and the reason that it must be exclusively classified as such) is provided here: http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/english_why_germanic.htm
Hope this helps!
I voted up Professorn Ulm's comments because he considers English as a system including syntax, not just lexis, which too many other commentators do.
To add though, modern English in most of its varieties is stable, and so any gauging of the roots of English result in fairly tangible evidence, especially regarding lexis, the easiest to grasp. Imam not convinced that the same can be said about phonology however.
This leads to another point, in that traditional and more theoretical grammar systems (eg. Transformative grammar, and even a conservative view of systemic functional grammar) are based on written language form, rather than spoken. This is an overlooked point by many theorists and researchers. Michael Halliday, the main figure in the systemic functional grammar movement which transverses more than just English in fact emphasises this point.
A further point relating to the origins of English, when indeed there was creolisation going on, for centuries, there is a strong school of thought often sourcednto researchers in central and Eastern Europe (and Finland of all places!!) As to the impact of Celtic languages, particularly through basilextization ( basically syntax comes from lower strata - apparently a more numerous Celtic underclass - and lexismfrom higher social orders (eg. Saxons, Vikings, Norman's). Textual comparisons are frequently made with Welsh and Breton from those eras. However there simply is not enough written test from which to obtain firm conclusions, so the so-called Celtic hypothesis remains an uncertain if interesting view.
Finally, English orthography-based evidence of course supports Professor Ulm's opinion, and Info not disagree. The problem however is the issue of just what English is. These days, it certainly is not what it was: any excursion into even conservative English has a Lingua Franca research (eg. Jenifer Jenkins's earlier work, Widdowson too) shows this. Also, as English evolves in differentncontexts, and not just geographically defined varietal contexts, there is ongoing neologism, mixing and other hybridity always going on, which out of the control of any government or linguistic institution.
This dynamic aspect of language, especially English, needs to stand behind any discussion of whether English is West Germanic, Romance, Celtic, or what.
Wes, I think that the myth of section 2(a) (and perhaps other)s is strongly influenced by terms used in the English language to refer to the individual Germanic languages and the Germanic language family.
The English term "German" seems to turn that language into the exemplar, the "most German" of the Germanic languages. The Germans have no confusion about this, since they speak "Deutsch", which is one of the "germanische Sprachen".
Same for the Dutch, who sorta* got that English name from confusion with the Germans. If you consider your neighbors to be speaking "Duits", one of many "Germaanse talen" there is little confusion. If you speak Swedish "tyska" is a "germanska språken"
It's the English language German/Germanic similarity that leads to much inaccurate thought regarding the Germanic languages and the role German plays in the grouping.
* "sorta" means that there were much different political boundaries among the regions that would become modern Germany and the Netherlands, and what political entities would be considered part of the Holy Roman Empire of the Germanic People and which would not be, which would ultimately be part of neither (Belgium, Luxembourg). The existence of a dialect continuum didn't help. This was, perhaps, especially confusion for the British, who had an imported royal family from Holland followed by an imported royal family from Hanover (starting with George I in 1714, and continuing now. "Windsor" was a name made up by the UK royal family during WW1 because it sounded less German than "Saxe-Coburg-Gotha").
Hello Howard and James,
Thank you for your thoughtful replies. I wholeheartedly agree with the imperative to take grammar, syntax, and phonetics more centrally into account in linguistic categorizations, esp. given the way that the lexical data alone can monopolize such discussions. And thanks also for the clarification on the historical background of "Deutsch," "Dutch," and the royal family designations -- I was aware of the broad outlines but fuzzy on the details. I've been queried a good deal about this topic since my prior post and wanted to fill in some blanks, so I'm basically responding broadly to everyone who's contacted me in the interim. (Apologies for my own late follow-up and non- or semi-responses to most of your messages -- hectically busy with projects at work and programmer training. I’d actually assembled most of these tables and etymological lists years ago for a linguistics talk, but wanted to do a bit of touch-up before answering at length.)
To clarify and expand on my initial post, the problem with many treatments of English linguistics isn’t with statements remarking on the language’s extraordinary vocabulary or the etymological diversity in its lexicon. Clearly there’s no question that Greek, Latin and the Romance languages (especially French) have heavily imprinted themselves on the English stock of words, and there’s also no question that the Norman Conquest and the medieval Old French-speaking nobility after 1066 had a lot to do with that. The unsustainable argument, however, is that this phenomenon has affected only English and not the other Germanic languages, which is not only flawed but patently false based on any standard lexical analysis and historical understanding. The root of the problem, as I’ve seen in many articles that make such a claim, is that it’s generally made without deep knowledge (let alone fluency) of German, Dutch, or the Scandinavian languages. When we actually do examine the lexicons in other West Germanic and North Germanic languages (except for Icelandic), we can clearly detect the same historical development in action, with the same outcome: mixed wordstocks with a massive proportion of Romance vocabulary, especially at higher registers. Thus any claim that the lexical transformation of English makes it only “part-Germanic” would also have to be applied, for the exact same reasons, to German, Dutch, and most of the other Germanic languages too.
To state this another way: If we focus only on vocabulary and basically ignore the grammatical, phonetic, and syntactical structures of English (which, as Howard correctly observed, are unambiguously Germanic and stem from Old English), the etymological evidence would justify one of two possible arguments regarding the classification of English vis-à-vis German and other Germanic languages. Either (1) English, German, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish are all equal members of the Germanic language family or (2) all of these languages are in effect Germanic-Romance hybrids or “creoles” based on the heavy lexical infiltration of Latin-based vocabulary, with only Icelandic holding out as a “purely” Germanic language. I doubt experts in the field would find the second argument acceptable (for reasons I’ll get into), but at the very least, both of these alternate propositions are consistent based on a comparative linguistic examination of the respective languages.
The argument that simply isn’t tenable under any circumstances, though, is that English is a “special case” vis-à-vis the other Germanic languages, and that English alone should be classified as a Germanic-Romance hybrid (based largely on its mixed lexicon) whereas German, Dutch, etc. should be classified as exclusively Germanic (despite their own mixed lexicons). As I detailed in my article, this assertion doesn’t hold up to scrutiny: http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/english_why_germanic.htm
When we peruse the etymological evidence of e.g. German vs. English, we inevitably find that German, very much like English, has been inundated with thousands of words in common usage with a Latin (or Greek) derivation, either directly imported from Latin or indirectly via the Romance languages. This is a key reason that German has so many basic terms spelled exactly the same as in English (the vast majority being fellow Latin-based loanwords: http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/kissing_cognates.htm ) or so similar that their meaning is obvious even to an Anglophone who has never studied German: http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/common_grecolatin.htm . Both English and German had a pronounced penchant over centuries to import vocabulary from Latin Europe which, after all, was the cultural, economic, political, and administrative center of Western civilization for nearly two millennia.
If anything, an even more “smoking gun” refutation of the claim that English is uniquely Germanic-Romance hybridized is the existence of so many realms of discourse where the supposedly “more Germanic” German uses a Latin-based term while the “more Romance” English relies on a Germanic equivalent: German Fenster (window), schreiben (to write), kurz (short), rasieren (to shave), Körper (body), Kopf (head), Scharnier (hinge), Schüssel (bowl), spazieren (to take a walk), kaufen (to buy), verkaufen (to sell), einkaufen (to shop), kämpfen (to fight), sauber (clean), Dusche (shower), Aktien (stocks), both Eimer and Kübel (bucket), fehlen (to be missing), Fehler (mistake), Pleitenserie (losing streak), dauern (to last), Drache (kite), Kummer (sorrow), Panne (mishap), Partie (sports match), Tastatur (keyboard), Taille (waist), Rolle (pulley), Frikadelle (meatball), passieren (happen), Zettel (a sheet, as of paper), Pferd (horse) and many others. (Expanded list here: http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/unconventional_wisdom.htm ) Not to mention examples in other Germanic languages like the Latin-derived “bra” in Swedish and Norwegian, which translates English “good.” We’re talking here about indispensable vocabulary items in daily use – alongside the thousands of compounds and idioms built from them – for which an Anglophone will be “speaking Germanic” while a Germanophone will be “speaking Latin.”
Of course there are many instances in the opposite direction too, but the bottom line is that both English and German have independently absorbed thousands of loanwords from the (until at least the late 1700s) more culturally prestigious Romance language family as well as Latin (and Greek) itself. This makes them, as well as Dutch and the Scandinavian languages (aside from Icelandic), lexically quite similar to each other. This holds true even if the details of the borrowings vary and the different West and North Germanic languages—for structural reasons—often make very different use of this Greco-Latin lexical superstratum in relation to their native Germanic core wordstocks. IOW there’s really nothing exceptional or unusual about English’s penchant for importing non-Germanic loanwords (or even loanwords from other Germanic sources, for that matter)—it’s a standard feature of nearly all Germanic languages, and especially German, Dutch, and the West Germanic family as a whole.
Therefore to summarize, when it comes to the Latinate superstratum in German alone, we have thousands of loanwords for which the German term shares the exact same spelling as its English equivalent – http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/kissing_cognates.htm -- along with countless others for which the orthography is very nearly the same (so much so that an English-speaker can generally make out the meanings sans dictionary consultation) – http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/common_grecolatin.htm -- on top of myriad other cases for which standard German speech uses a Latin-based loanword while English prefers a Germanic equivalent – http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/unconventional_wisdom.htm . And this still doesn’t fully account for the ocean of Romance vocabulary that’s flooded into German over the centuries. For instance, there are many terms for which both English and German have absorbed a different Latinate term to express the same concept, e.g. German “Fabrik” for English “factory” or “Büro” for English “office.” (Expanded list here: http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/different_latin_loanwords.htm )
Even the thousands of words in the linked lists above represent only a sampling of the common Greco-Latin superstratum that’s poured into German, Dutch, and most of the Scandinavian languages in parallel. (Also just to be clear, none of these Latin-based words was imported into German from English; all were absorbed from Latin itself or the Romance languages, the same way they entered English.) Conversely, the core Germanic wordstock of English – what we actually say on a daily basis – is very much intact, and lines up astonishingly well with its lexical equivalents in German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages, as shown in this table: http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/common_germanic_vocabtable.htm (Broader list here: http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/common_germanic.htm )
So in conclusion, the etymological evidence is pretty firm that English has had a similar lexical evolution as German and Dutch, at least in the broad sense of its importation of non-Germanic (primarily Greek and Latin-based) vocabulary. If the mass importation of Latinate vocabulary is enough to make English a “Germanic-Romance hybrid,” then the same must be said for German and Dutch given that they, too, have a very heavily Latin-based lexicon especially for their higher registers. There’s no “in-between” or “special case” for English vis-à-vis the other Germanic tongues (except, of course, for the much more purist Icelandic). And I doubt professional linguists would accept the “hybrid” or “creolization” argument here since the grammar, syntax, and phonetics of English, German, and Dutch – not to mention their core quotidian vocabulary and even much of their sophisticated registers ( http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/germanic_gets_sophisticated.htm ) – are unquestionably Germanic.
By way of comparison, Tagalog and other Filipino languages have been comprehensively transformed by Spanish vocabulary, to a much greater extent and on a far more fundamental level than English (as well as German and Dutch) have been shaped by Latin/French. Even such basic terms as the days of the week, the principal numbering system (for purposes like telling time), cooking utensils, hundreds of other basic everyday items, and even the most elementary expressions (like the use of “pwede” to indicate ability or “pero” to signify the conjunction “but”) and suffixations in Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilocano, etc. are Spanish-derived. Yet linguists unequivocally classify the Filipino languages as members of the Austronesian language family, not as “Austronesian-Romance hybrids.” Given the far-reaching but still more limited impact of French on the Germanic languages, even when restricting ourselves to lexical analysis (e.g. the top few hundred utilized words in English/German/Dutch, which are almost invariably Germanic), it’s therefore all but impossible to classify any of the Germanic tongues as “Romance creoles” by comparison.
My sense is that the presumed “diluted Germanicness” of English (based on presumptions largely rooted in its mixed lexicon) is an understandable yet erroneous conclusion based on the seeming historical uniqueness of the Norman Conquest, rather than the lexical evidence per se which, as shown, thoroughly contradicts such a claim. No doubt the Normans left a lasting imprint on the development of England, if anything more in architecture and administration than linguistic domains, but not in a way that necessarily differentiated English from its Continental Germanic cousins. Even without a Norman Conquest, German and Dutch were also “getting Latinized” for their own reasons – and speakers of German, for what it’s worth, did have something of a kindred experience in the form of the French occupations amid the Thirty Years’ War.
If anything, therefore, the Norman Conquest brought English closer to German and Dutch since it helped to ensure that English, like its Continental cousins, would inherit the same basic superstratum of Latin-based loanwords for high-level concepts, streaming in from the cultural prestige centers of Latin Europe. It sounds almost heretical to say this, given the almost reflexive conclusion that the Norman Conquest pivoted English away from its Continental Germanic cousins, but the etymological evidence bears it out. Notice how, in the domains where English didn’t adhere to a Latin loanword for a high-register concept (i.e. when it forged compounds out of Germanic roots for abstract/sophisticated terminology), in most cases the results diverged considerably from their German/Dutch equivalents: http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/germanic_gets_sophisticated.htm Thus ironically, the Normans helped to guarantee that we’d have the same “common Greco-Latin” base to fall back upon and learn each other’s languages a bit more easily.
Another reason for the confusion, I suspect, is that there are a number of parallel imports of Greco-Latin vocabulary into German and English which, nonetheless, have arisen from quite different roots (though this class is much smaller than the cornucopia of Latinate terms that are fully or nearly identical). I first noticed this in college, when many books and articles claiming to compare English and German (to demonstrate how much “more Germanic” German was) would cite cases where German opts for a “Germanic” root that, in reality, was simply a different Latin borrowing from the English one. For example one article noted how German lets the ostensibly Germanic “Opfer” do double duty for English “victim” and “sacrifice,” which are both from French (of Latin derivation). But “Opfer” itself also has a Latin origin. The same goes for English “certain,” “safe,” “secure,” and “sure,” all of which are indeed of French and thence Latin extraction. But many sources then erroneously claimed that the German equivalent is Germanic, when the primary translation – some version of “sicher” – is also Latin-derived.
Likewise with “immunize” which is translated by German “impfen” – also Latin-derived (and German also uses “immunizieren” in some cases), or “champion” (German “Meister” is a different Latin borrowing), or ”coin” (German “Münze” is from the same Latin root as French “monnaie” and Spanish “moneda,”and English “money” for that matter), and so on. (Here again is the relevant list: http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/different_latin_loanwords.htm ) In still other cases, German may often call on a Germanic root to translate a Latin-based English term, yet also have the option of a common Latin-based term itself – for instance with English “example,” which can be translated with German “Beispiel” (Germanic) or equally with “Exempel” (French and Latin derivation). A fuller list of such Germanic-Latinate doublets in German here: http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/dueling_doublets.htm
Whatever the reasons for the confusion, the bottom line is that there’s nothing unusual or remarkable about the Latin infusion into English vis-à-vis the other Germanic languages, which have borne witness to essentially the same historical development. Likewise, the profound lexical changes engendered by the Normans if anything brought English closer to its Germanic cousins rather than pushing it away, by chaining English to the same font of Latin-centric cultural prestige as was shaping German, Dutch, and even the Scandinavian languages. In short, there just isn’t really a sound argument to make for English being a “Germanic-Romance hybrid” unless we make the same case for German and Dutch, and it’s unlikely this would ever pass muster with professional linguists.
http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/kissing_cognates.htm
http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/english_why_germanic.htm
http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/common_grecolatin.htm
http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/different_latin_loanwords.htm
http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/common_germanic_vocabtable.htm
http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/common_germanic.htm
http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/germanic_gets_sophisticated.htm
http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/dueling_doublets.htm
http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/long_lost_relatives.htm
http://wesulm.angelfire.com/languages/unconventional_wisdom.htm
Wes, all agreed, except the French played a relatively trivial role in the 30 Years War. This is true in comparison to the influence of the Normans on England - they conquered it and ruled it for centuries - France's record with regard to wars with Germany is a bit lopsided toward the Germans to the extent that the word "France" comes from the name of a Germanic tribe and the Normans were Scandinavian invaders who adopted a version of French before they moved to England. The Norman-French relationship had the result of much of what is now France being ruled directly by the English and several centuries of warfare between the English and French over the right to rule France, culminating in English defeat in the 100 Years' War.
Essentially, the Norman conquest of England resulted in English conquest of much of modern France for hundreds of years.
France's role in the 30 Years' War was also trivial compared to that of other non-German (i.e., not part of the Holy Roman Empire and not ethnic German nations outside of the HRE, mainly meaning Prussia) nations. Sweden, for example, played a much more important role in the war, one that resulted in Swedish presence in what is now Germany and Poland that lasted until the Napoleonic Wars. The Ottoman Empire did as well, controlling most of the Balkans at the time, and would be firing the world's largest cannons at the walls of Vienna itself a few decades after the war. But Russia and non-German Austria (Hungary and various Slavic groups), also played much more important roles in that war compared to France.
Then there is what is either a sideshow or part of the main war, the Dutch war of independence from Habsburg Spain. This began about 50 years before the 30 Years' War, but had been in a lull for many years before that war started. The French role in that theater of war was mainly material support for the Dutch against the Habsburgs - but the French conflict with the Habsburgs would only be settled by WW1.
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