Is Dutch really the closest language (if at all) to ours??
Thomas007
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I was just listening to the numbers 1-20 in Dutch in this 50 second video (no cheesy music or song accompanying it thank god):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGSVGiiBfuk
And I couldn't believe how frightenly similar their numbers are to ours! Some of it sounds like a weird accent trying to pronounce English.
I found some of those numbers as close as anything I've heard to anything to English in any language! By the time I got 17 I was beginning to giggle (because its literally the same). Even numbers like 30 and 70 are pronounced similar to how they are in English!
It fascinates me cause in English we don't have any other language that's so similar we can understand roughly the topic of conversation like some of our European friends can (Scandinavian languages, Spanish/Portuguese, Slavic languages etc), but am I right in saying that Dutch is officially our closest language to our own? (Even though its obviously not that close as we can't understand it)
It also fascinating to the reveal an insight to the actual origins of the English language. You'd think with living on the same island as Welsh, Scots gaelic and Irish not too far away English would be similar but its not, there's almost little/no relation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGSVGiiBfuk
And I couldn't believe how frightenly similar their numbers are to ours! Some of it sounds like a weird accent trying to pronounce English.
I found some of those numbers as close as anything I've heard to anything to English in any language! By the time I got 17 I was beginning to giggle (because its literally the same). Even numbers like 30 and 70 are pronounced similar to how they are in English!
It fascinates me cause in English we don't have any other language that's so similar we can understand roughly the topic of conversation like some of our European friends can (Scandinavian languages, Spanish/Portuguese, Slavic languages etc), but am I right in saying that Dutch is officially our closest language to our own? (Even though its obviously not that close as we can't understand it)
It also fascinating to the reveal an insight to the actual origins of the English language. You'd think with living on the same island as Welsh, Scots gaelic and Irish not too far away English would be similar but its not, there's almost little/no relation.
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English is very widely spoken in the Netherlands. 90 percent of the population speak some English, business is done in English and even some graffiti I've seen is in English. If you go on a train, the staff will be able to communicate easily to you.
But owing to the Norman conquest our language underwent a massive change between 1066 and about 1350. Norman French infused the language to the extend that by 1350 the language was almost unrecognisable other to experts. This is why most modern English speakers wouldn't be able to read a text in Old English.
From that period we gained huge input from the Romance branch of Indo European languages. This fusion means that English is often said to be the richest language with many nuanced ways of expressing very similar ideas. The classic example is that we use the word cow for the animal and beef when it becomes food, sheep for the animal and mutton when it becomes food etc. The food words came from the Norman French, the animal words were already here.
Plus we are also language magpies who have 'borrowed' words from Greek, Latin, Arabic, Indian languages etc over the year.
The history of English is fascinating. If you are curious I really would encourage you to get a book on the subject and have a read.
Love the Dutch language.
The amount of Latin and later French derived words in the language today can't be ignored and I think it makes English distinct from Dutch, German and some of the Scandinavian languages which all seem closer together.
My German teacher complimented my pronunciation in the first week and asked if I had studied it before (I hadn't).
Make of that what you will.
Robin, when I learned Old Norse at uni, my old professor found me endlessly fascinating as the other students were poshos speaking RP but I had grown up speaking full-on Yorkshire dialect and I could sometimes translate words without even looking them up, as they resembled dialect words.;-)
Mind you, one of the greatest philogists ever was a man called Joseph Wright, who started life as a mill-hand in Yorkshire, and ended up as an Oxford don.
As GeoBa92 pointed out I would say that Frisian is the closest, though it is also very closely related to Dutch.
e.g.
Hoe giet it mei jo? (How goes it with you?) = How are you?
If you heard that spoken by a Frisian speaker, it would just sound like archaic English.
English and Welsh are only related insofar as they are Indo-European languages.
There are cognates but they are descended from two different families. English from Germanic and Welsh from insular Celtic.
No Germanic language was widely spoken in the UK until the 6th century... which is why England has no indigenous mythology, for example.
Funny old world innit. I wish I could have studied languages more, but went the Science route after O Levels.
My sister became the languages expert in our family. Fully tri-lingual and a working knowledge of another two.
The accent in Belgium is much different and slightly harder to understand
Goldmember said Aushtin Powersh Fasher :-)
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah,
I'm not sure I have quite grasped this point. And isn't England too big to have a mythology that would identify as 'English'? There are surely all sorts of fragments, locally, that seem to harp back to an ancient mythology.
Yes, and this was nicely explained in the Beeb programme The Adventure of English. The doc series narrated by Melvyn Bragg. The Saxons actually settled the tricky low lying coasts of modern day Netherlands and along the Heligoland Bight. Modern day Frisians are descended mainly from the Saxons and Angles.
Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mother-Tongue-Story-English-Language/dp/0141040084) is fantastic and is a very accessible non-academic history of the language.
The split between Germanic of old English of the native population and French influence from the Norman gentry means the "posh" words in English mostly come from French while the more "common" words come from German. A "cordial reception" is posher than "hearty welcome". The names of farm animals are mostly German while the names of their meat are mostly French - so beef comes from a a cow while pork comes from a swine.
Edit: as above The Adventure of English is also good and probably has more actual history, but the Bryson book is a more entertaining read.
Yes, Chaucer is a walk in the park. OE, I still struggle to read fluently and need a dictionary although I studied it daily for three years.:D I can pronounce it, even where I can't understand it though.
Although England was separate kingdoms throughout a lot of what we call Anglo Saxon times, and each area had its own dialect, they were just that - dialects and utterly mutually comprehensible. So yes, it is perfectly likely the now lost gods of England were the same all over England but it is also likely, like say pagan Rome, we had local variants/household gods, etc.
We can piece together a bit from Anglo Saxon poetry, charms etc - fragmentary mentions of Welund the smith, for example.
A classic book on this is Kathleen Herbert's 'Looking For The Lost Gods of England'. More uptodate, Brian Bates' 'The Real Middle Earth'. Also Brian Branston's 'The Lost Gods of England'. Stephen Pollington's 'Leechcraft' and Bill Griffiths' 'Aspects of Anglo Saxon Magic' also worth a look, if not as relevant.
Linguists firmly place English in the Germanic family. Certainly English has been influenced by Norman French but moreso by Latin (like all Germanic languages to an extent. It was a pan European language of the educated at one time). But it's influence manifests itself mostly in conceptual and academic aspects of the language. There are actually about as many latin root words in modern German as there are in English (thank the latter Renaissance period for that). Mainly the Norman influence was characterised by adding alternative versions of words rather than replacing what already existed. Most of the historical changes from Old English were just naturally evolving and had little to do with the incursion of aristocratic Norman influence which was resisted by the indigenous population.
I need a facebook 'like' here. Meaning "That's interesting. I might have a look at one of those."
As others have said, English is a Germanic language brought over from the continent by the Saxons. Because of this, the basic grammar system and most basic of words are all Germanic based. However, because of the Norman invasion a lot of Old Norman (close to Old French) was injected into the language and there were was a lot of borrowing of words from Latin meaning, solely in terms of vocabulary rather than grammar, English has an awful lot of influences from the Romance languages (languages descended from Latin).
In addition to the addition of new words, English grammar underwent a hell of a lot of changes. Nouns completely lost their gender and the case system now only has remnants in pronouns and possessives (ie. English no longer alters the endings of words depending on whether they are the subject, the object or going towards or for something except in the case of pronouns).
It also helps that we borrow words indiscriminately. Other languages such as French have institutions which control which words enter the language and which do not (L'Academie Francaise) and they even change words to make them more French before letting them into the language.
Hence the common phrase "A'm gaaning yaam" would be instantly understood by a Dane as "I'm going home"
Geordie dialect actually originates from the Angles.
As does (low) Scots language ...sshhhh!!