Comment by vidarh

Trying to put your bizarre ethnonationalism aside, as HN is not the place for that:

Firstly, you're conflating German and Germanic, while ignoring that the common ancestor here dates to before the High German consonant shift between the 3rd and 5th centuries, that further split the German* languages, that had already long since split from the other Germanic languages.

Secondly, my point was merely that there is a closer relationship between the Germanic languages historically spoken around the North Sea, than with modern standard German that has carried with it the consonant shift, and so if you take into account Low German/Plattdeutsch, the similarities are more visible and obvious.

I see no reason to try to mush them together, but it would be interesting to see German take the approach of Norway: Norwegian have had a few fairly successful reforms actually moving it further away from Danish in some respect, but which also in some respects have mean allowing older forms closer to Norse in the majority form of Bokmål, that were retained/included in Nynorsk.

If German did the same thing and started encouraging and allowing those of the forms of minority Low German dialects that are closer to the older Germanic forms (e.g. Dag instead of Tag, for dag/day), it might over time restore some of the continuum.