AHC: Understandably Germanic English?

Actually there's strong support for Anglo-Frisian branch being close to the Old North Germanic one - look up Ingvaeonic.

Yeah, there's also arguments that Modern English can be considered either a creole of Old English, some North Germanic language, and French or a North Germanic language proper. There certainly is a heavy Norse influence on English, like the pronoun they for instance.
 
Yeah, there's also arguments that Modern English can be considered either a creole of Old English, some North Germanic language, and French or a North Germanic language proper. There certainly is a heavy Norse influence on English, like the pronoun they for instance.
Indeed, in the same way that Afrikaans can be described as a Middle Dutch creole.
Probably more accurate to describe both origins as near or subcreolisation than creolisation per se.
 
I've mentioned him on another post but David Crystal's Stories of Englsh would be useful for this as he has several fairly detailed chapters around the development of Old English and the Norse influence, as well as the Norman Conquest.

In regards to a POD a longer lasting North Sea Empire (or a longer lived Norse ruled kingdom in general) would likely have seen English retain close contacts with North Germanic and Frisian.

Avoid somehow invasion of Wilhelm the Bastard and then you can keep Old English around. It should be quiet intelligeble with Scots.

Modern English, at least in the written sense is largely intelligble with Scots, hence the continuous debate over whether it's a strong dialect of English or a language in it's own right. I personally think it's a situation similar to Galician and Portuguese, where the majority of it is intelligble, but there's enough variation for them to be separate languages.
 
But English would still be recognizably Germanic, even with that sea separating the English languages with the continental Germanic languages.
looking at the netherlands and how big the differences are between the dialects (of the 40 or so different dialects, afrikaans is only at place 20 with regard to distance to standard dutch) i wouldn't be so certain.
 
Also in regards to Eglish there were wide dialect distinctions in both the written and spoken language until the standardisation of the late 15th and early 16th centuries (and the spoken distinctions lasted a lot longer until the 18th and 19th centuries.) Which then offers the interesting proposition of which dialect would become the basis for the standard language. In the Anglo-Saxon period, West Saxon had begun to emerge as the literary standard until the conquest curtailed it.

Maybe it lasts longer? Or if it's a more Norse driven scenario, the Northumbrian dialect begins to emerge as the prestigious dialect?
 
On how "Germanic"-sounding some English dialects were even in the twentieth century:


The Pity of It

By Thomas Hardy


April 1915


I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar
From rail-track and from highway, and I heard
In field and farmstead many an ancient word
Of local lineage like 'Thu bist,' 'Er war,'

'Ich woll', 'Er sholl', and by-talk similar,
Nigh as they speak who in this month's moon gird
At England's very loins, thereunto spurred
By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are.

Then seemed a Heart crying: 'Whosoever they be
At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame
Between kin folk kin tongued even as are we,

'Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame;
May their familiars grow to shun their name,
And their brood perish everlastingly.'

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/57339
 
Well you can write a Germanic version of English no problem. Here's my own "Anglish" version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with modern English orthography (getting into alternate orthographies is a whole 'nother can of worms).

"All men are free and alike in worth and rights born. They are mid forstanding and awit begifted and shall another in the ghost of the brotherhood begain."

It's very interesting how if you make English more Germanic, or in the other direction make it more Romance/Greek, you get something poetic and/or very formal.
 
They're Germanic, sure, but they're pretty far removed from West Germanic languages, including English's closest relatives.

Not really the ancestoral dialects of English was intermedial between North and West Germanic. Of course as many of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes migrated to Britain, the Jutes and Angles was conquered and assimilated by the Danes. But you found many similar traits as in English in the Danish dialects of the Jutish peninsula. As example the local dialect had no gender, while the other Danish dialects have 2 or 3 gender (modern Danish have 2 with linguistic remnants from a 3 one), the definite article are also similar with being placed before the word instead of behind as in all other North Germanic dialects.

As for how a non-Norman influenced English develop it really depend on any alternate influence. But without the Harrying of the North we will see much morer Danish influenced dialects, if not direct Danish dialects survive in the north.
 
So, thu wisces for a cwiss licend thiss wordlength?
But scolde thine erste deedword not be "wiscest" forspelt, as hit is in the tweeth-person? Then agen, mayhaps thu brookest another writingstyl for thine moutherd?
Forsooth I am a sutherman and wroccen we all "est" as "es".
Nó problem, soothly we in the West brook speech and clinks sundered oft from their spellings anyway, hureso as we arn stemmed from fele landfromths and contryhoods alikened to lands sulch as Angland oth Frankric (thiss maketh ure deedwords and grammatica an "hochepoche" :/).

Oh god I am actually starting to understand what they're saying.
 
That makes sense. One possibility to get around it is to have more dialects considered languages - the Norfolk dialect is fairly similar to Dutch, if I remember, something that would be reinforced without the Norman invasion.

Supposedly the Yorkshire dialect is mutually intelligible with Danish.
 
Top