Is English Really a Germanic Language?

hello everyone welcome to the Laing focused Channel and my name is Paul today I'm going to answer the question is English really a Germanic language if you've seen any of my videos on Germanic languages like my Afrikaans video like my Dutch video like my German video or like my North Germanic languages video then you probably saw that English is also a Germanic language but a lot of people write comments expressing some confusion over this they write things like Paul are you sure it's a Germanic language are you sure it's not a Romance language well that's a good question if a native English speaker who had never learned another language before had a look at a page of French and then had a look at a page of German or Dutch they would probably be able to understand more of the page of French or if they had a look at a page of Spanish or a page of Italian they would probably be able to pick out a lot of words that they recognize but on the other hand if they looked at a page of Dutch or German they probably wouldn't be able to pick out as many without deciphering the words a little bit first so in that case why is English a Germanic language and not a Romance language in the field of linguistics languages are categorized according to their genetic relationship genetic relationship means that they have a common ancestor and therefore they have some common features that distinguish them from other groups of languages this type of genetic relationship between languages can commonly be seen in the grammar and syntax of the language but the current vocabulary of the language is not really taken into account in its categorization even when a language has a huge number of lone words and its vocabulary changes a lot that does not change the categorization of that language so because English developed from proto-germanic it is a Germanic language despite massive changes that have taken place in its vocabulary the vocabulary of English has been highly influenced by Romance languages Romance meaning Latin and any language that has developed from Latin like French Spanish Italian etc so how much has it been influenced well English vocabulary is 26% Germanic and it's 29% French wait you're telling me that there's more French vocabulary than Germanic vocabulary even though it's a Germanic language that's odd oh but wait there's also 29% Latin vocabulary so that means together 58% of English vocabulary comes from Romance languages wow that's more than I thought another six percent comes from Greek another 4% comes from other languages and four percent comes from proper names I can't really think of any vocabulary that comes from proper names aside from Randy so if we ignore the origins of English and its grammar and syntax and just focus on the vocabulary for a minute then English is largely a Romance language how did so much romance vocabulary enter English much of the French vocabulary entered English after the Norman conquest of 1066 the Normans spoke a regional French dialect called old Norman or Norman French the upper classes in England spoke French for around 300 years English was influenced by the Norman French dialect but also by Parisian French due to its prestige and cultural influence in the following centuries huge amounts of French vocabulary entered English and it lost much of its old English vocabulary but in many cases there are pairs of equivalent Germanic and French vocabulary but within those pairs there's often a slightly different meaning or usage for the Germanic word and for the French word an interesting example are the pairs of words representing animals versus foods that come from those animals the animals are represented by Germanic words and the foods are represented by French loanwords for example cow comes from Old English coup but beef comes from French woof pig comes from Old English picking up but pork comes from French paw but I don't know what the pronunciation would have been like in Norman French sheep comes from Old English chez up the mutton comes from Old French Muto snail comes from Old English smile and escargot comes from Norman French escargot French also influenced English because of its huge cultural influence on Europe from the Renaissance period to the end of the nineteenth century and even now to some extent but it's not just French there's also a lot of Latin vocabulary some Latin entered Germanic dialects in their early days through contact with the Roman Empire on top of that some Christian missionaries were present in Britain in the 6th and 7th centuries and they introduced some Latin religious vocab into English many Latin words were also borrowed during the Renaissance period and also during the Scientific Revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries when many new words were coined coined meaning newly created new words were coined from Latin roots prefixes and suffixes to represent new concepts in science in technology and in industry so English is a Germanic language which absorbed a huge number of French and Latin words yes basically but some people have a different theory some people think that English is actually a creole language there's something called the middle English Creole hypothesis there are big differences between Old English and middle English of course there was the importing of lots of French vocabulary but that alone does not make it a creole language but there were other changes to the grammar of English which became highly simplified there was a lot of simplification like the loss of most mountain cases and gender so that aside from the possessive form with apostrophe s and the plural forms most nouns in English don't have any inflection also adjectives used to have inflection but that disappeared too the word inflection means changes to a word to represent different grammatical categories for example the word cat and the cat's paw here the apostrophe s is a kind of inflection to show possession and we have one mouse but two mice so here the word is inflected to show plural so let's take a simple phrase like the good king and look at it in Old English in Old English notice that all three words in this phrase can change in the nominative case say gol de Kooning in the accusative case so nee golden tuning in the genitive case fast golden tuning is in the dative case thumb golden tuning so the definite article changes the adjective changes and the noun changes depending on the case but the article and adjectives also change depending on the gender and the case endings are different depending on the gender let's look at a similar phrase a good queen say or go Dec win the golden Quin fat a golden Quin thought I go down Quinn notice the different feminine form of the definite article and the adjectives this is just an example of the grammatical complexity of Old English so you can imagine how much it became simplified by the middle English period most of these forms had disappeared or merged together so now we just have a genitive case and the others form a common case this is the type of simplification that happens when Creoles arise so it's very possible that Old English underwent a process of creolization inserting lots of French vocabulary into an old English substrate or underlying structure but there might have been a different reason for that simplification of English some people don't believe in the Creole hypothesis and they point to things like some of the irregular forms that still exist in English like irregular verbs or irregular plural forms in a typical creole language those forms would have been regular eyes but of course creolization is not an all-or-nothing process it's possible that English was partially creolized well let's look at a couple of sentences in English and let's look at the influences we can let's see if there's more Germanic or more romance influence this one's a newspaper headline Trump pushing immigration plan meets with family of women killed in 2007 push this word comes from old French would say or modern French who say immigration this word comes from Latin immigrant plan this word comes from the French word claw which means map or ground plan meat this comes from Old English mitten with this comes from Old English with family this comes from the Latin Familia according to the source I used but there's also the French word from me which I suppose could be the source of this word comes from the Old English half or off woman this comes from Old English women or women kill this might come from the Old English kweilyn to quell in this word comes from Latin so out of those ten words five are Germanic and five are Romance words but let's have a look at a more casual sentence because I have a feeling that newspaper vocabulary tends toward romance vocabulary more than common speech I had lunch with my friend and we read some books I this is Germanic comes from Old English each had this is also Germanic it comes from Old English hub bun lunch the origin of this one is vague but it seems to be from a modern English dialect word with this is from Old English with my this is Germanic it comes from Middle English meat or mean friend this comes from Old English Freund and this comes from Old English ond or owned we this comes from Old English way read this comes from Old English an add-on or they done some this comes from Old English soon book this comes from Old English book so this time all of the words are almost all of the words are Germanic so it's interesting that the majority of English vocabulary comes from French or from Latin but in the most commonly used words in casual speech there tends to be more Germanic vocabulary this is a good argument in favor of English being classified as a Germanic language so do I think that English should be classified as a Germanic language well by a linguists criteria yes but most people don't really care about a linguist criteria they just care about the practical application the practical use of the language and in practice I think the vocabulary is a very important element of the language so I think it's fair to say that in practice English is a hybrid language it's partly Germanic partly romance but that's my personal conclusion I'd like to know what you think do you think that English should be considered a Germanic language or do you think it seems more like a Romance language leave your answer in the comments down below be sure to follow Lange focus on Twitter on Facebook and on Instagram those are places to kind of keep in touch with me between videos and I also post some little bits of bonus content on those social media channels and I'd like to say thank you to all of my patreon supporters especially these people whose names are on the screen for they're especially generous monthly pledges thank you for watching and have a nice day [Music] you

Channel: Langfocus

Views: 1,980,103

Keywords: language study, polyglot, foreign language, linguist, linguistics, vocabulary, grammar, syntax, uk, united kingdom, england, English language, history of English, norman conquest, old norman, norman french, french language, french vocabulary, old english, anglo saxon, middle english, modern english

Id: 2OynrY8JCDM

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 08 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Seijuro2012]

That was a very interesting watch, thanks for posting it.

[u/Scienceismymuse]

Yes

[u/temujin64]

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[u/TIE_FIGHTER_HANDS]

That was really interesting, but the guys voice seemed strange, like he was over enunciating.