Comment by marssaxman
2 days ago
I've often had the same thought coming from the other direction, as an English speaker learning Dutch for the past couple of years: I hear many little echoes in Dutch of archaic or poetic English forms.
2 days ago
I've often had the same thought coming from the other direction, as an English speaker learning Dutch for the past couple of years: I hear many little echoes in Dutch of archaic or poetic English forms.
That’s because English and Dutch are basically German dialects that the ruling aristocrat classes worked hard to differentiate and abstract from their ruling aristocrat class competitors in other places.
You may want lol into that, since you are realizing and noticing things, but you are seemingly still not connecting the dots correctly. Another hint, Dutch comes from Deutsche, how the “Germans” refer to themselves, which is also where the “English” came from, Angles and Saxony, the latter still being a region of “Germany” today.
In other words, you really should be referring to themselves Germans as the Deutsche of you wanted to differentiate them from the Dutch, which are basically the same Deutsche people who just live on the coast, the lowlands, i.e., the Nether-lands.
The continuum of the North Sea languages is much more apparent if you undo the High German consonant shift... (and of course if you minimise the use of the words English have imported from France)
That seems to me like a really worthwhile effort, especially for the continental Europeans if they want to keep the EU alive, even if it needs major, structural reform that I am not confident it can implement without total deconstruction first. If the EU wants to survive it simply cannot allow English to dominate it, nor is even French ideal, making Dutch the official language is of course silly for obvious reasons (regardless of my affinity for it), contemporary German seems to be self-deleting in many different way for many different reasons, and nonsense like Esperanto speaks for itself. But a kind of merging or integration of the German languages of central Europe would be an ideal candidate to bring about European unity in a sustainable and healthy manner... a meeting in the middle, maybe a restoration of old high German even that is the common node.
I am generally even just sad writing this because even my proposal invariably means the total destruction of many languages, traditions, cultures, and true and healthy diversity that has defined Europe over all of recorded history; but at least if this effort of trying to mash Europe into a kind of neo-communist of uniform sludge, at least try to create something new and beautiful out of it, not some disgusting brown mush where the non-english EU speaks English, while by the end of the century the majority of people will not even be indigenous Europeans anymore.
It is sad realizing that what we are all currently witness to is a cataclysmic collapse and destruction of civilization in Europe on an order that humanity has not witness since the civilizational collapse of the Americas or even the Bronze Age collapse and minor cultural collapses and ethnocides that were perpetrated through the French proto-communist Revolution, the Russian communist revolution and the Chinese communist revolutions. It is astonishing knowing that I am living through a historical event that may even never be recorded, let alone well, because the likelihood that it will be recorded at all, let alone accurately is very low.
If a common German language could be created, along with maybe a common Romance language for Hispania and Italy, etc. at least there would be a kind of remaining legacy akin to how the Egyptian icons are enigmatic, even if their culture did not survive.
1 reply →
The Anglo-Saxons were not Germans, and their language was not a "German" language.
It was Germanic, derived from a common ancestor with German but absolutely distinct separate lineage and your weird ethonationalist quasi-fascist soup of of thoughts here and below is both factually incorrect and incoherent.
Actual scholars of Germanic languages don't share your bizarre biases.