I know, I read it. It's based on perspective. I know the history of English very well, but it is my interpretation and definition that people don't like.

Mostly because you're disregarding other people's interpretations out of hand, interpretations which are firmly set in place and backed up with more evidence than yours.
 
Let's remove the Romance now, since people seem to like doing that:



Is this understandable? No. Don't pretend it is.

If you put yourself to the hard task of replacing everything that was removed with Germanic equivalents, you'll get something that every third person familiar with Tudor English might understand.

The notion that you can strip out the "rare" Romance borrowings and still have functional English is preposterous. The declaration of human rights and Turquoise's translation were likewise preposterous artificial things that can be parsed, to be sure, but only on the same level as any foreign language, by someone who knows a lot of word roots. They are academic chimerae at best, cute but non-viable.

Of course that sentence is nonsense, because you've just taken out the Romance words and not put anything in their place. What you've given us is just half a sentence. Of course it doesn't make sense.

As I had said, it might be more easily understandable for speakers of obscure English dialects, especially the elderly. This is still the mid-late 20th century we're talking about, before the English dialects in general seem to have lost a bit of diversity if the BBC project (I believe it was the BBC, during the 60s or 70s) to record rural/old English dialects compared to modern dialects in those regions is anything telling of the diversity lost. Look at all the continental Germanic cognates for obscure English dialectual words (not even counting Scots which is full of them). Those are (or were until recently) understandable to a certain amount of people, who incidentally happen to be mainly lower class thus further confirming the idea of Romance borrowings being upper class. I know the OP is going in circles, but yes, this is more proof that at the core of the English-speaking people, English is a Germanic language.

You might be able to make even more comprehensible English if you limited Romance borrowings to anything other than what West Germanic languages borrow. And nobody's about the argue that German or Dutch are Romance languages because of their French borrowings anytime soon.

My old history teacher once told us that the old Yorkshire dialect is mutually intelligible with Danish. I haven't got any Danes or Yorkshire dialect fans to confirm, though.
 
I was going to rejoin this... but there's no point. The OP obviously isn't going to see reason, no matter how hard we try.
 
I was going to rejoin this... but there's no point. The OP obviously isn't going to see reason, no matter how hard we try.

Au contraire, I think I am starting to see it. English vocab is much Latin. But for the sake of practicality, English is called Germanic. Maybe it's a little historically "shy". I still think we can classify as a hybrid language, perhaps a new definition that hasn't been thought of. Not a creole, but something else. I don't think that would be a bad thing. Of course it may seem unnecessary to some people, but it could only help. That might be interesting to nerds like me. XD
 
Au contraire, I think I am starting to see it. English vocab is much Latin. But for the sake of practicality, English is called Germanic. Maybe it's a little historically "shy". I still think we can classify as a hybrid language, perhaps a new definition that hasn't been thought of. Not a creole, but something else. I don't think that would be a bad thing. Of course it may seem unnecessary to some people, but it could only help. That might be interesting to nerds like me. XD
But then we have other problems. The Silesian language is a Western Slavic language, along with Polish, Czech, and Slovak, but has many Germanic words in it as well. Does that mean Silesian is a Germanic language? Or that it needs a new category?
 
Au contraire, I think I am starting to see it. English vocab is much Latin. But for the sake of practicality, English is called Germanic. Maybe it's a little historically "shy". I still think we can classify as a hybrid language, perhaps a new definition that hasn't been thought of. Not a creole, but something else. I don't think that would be a bad thing. Of course it may seem unnecessary to some people, but it could only help. That might be interesting to nerds like me. XD
You really are not seeing anything whatsoever. No offense intended, but please go and talk to an academic linguist.

Basic English vocabulary is nearly entirely Germanic.

English is called Germanic because its entire grammar, nearly the entirety of its core vocabulary, and its descent (i.e. if you go up the generations you will find an unbroken link of mutual intelligibility from Beowulf's writer to the Queen) are Germanic.

It's not a hybrid language any more than any language with loanwords (so basically every single language in the world) is a hybrid language. If English is a hybrid language, why not French with its Germanic loans ("blanc," "guerre")? Why not Urdu with its Persian loans and Korean with its Chinese? (Almost?) every language has loanwords. Many languages use loanwords far more frequently than English, like Korean and Chinese. Korean is still not a Sinitic language. There's no need what all for a new definition.

And TBF it's not "nerds" who get to define new linguistic categories. It's linguists. And for several centuries the vast majority of linguists have agreed that English is Germanic.
 
It's not a hybrid language any more than any language with loanwords (so basically every single language in the world) is a hybrid language. If English is a hybrid language, why not French with its Germanic loans ("blanc," "guerre")? Why not Urdu with its Persian loans and Korean with its Chinese? (Almost?) every language has loanwords. Many languages use loanwords far more frequently than English, like Korean and Chinese. Korean is still not a Sinitic language. There's no need what all for a new definition.
Another loan word: ミラージュ. You don't read Japanese? Well, it's written as Mirāju in Romaji. It means mirage. I can't tell what language they got it from (probably French) but it is not the only one I have found in my slow path to learning how to read Japanese. And that's basic Japanese. The more advanced word for it is 蜃気楼, or Shinkirō.
 
You really are not seeing anything whatsoever. No offense intended, but please go and talk to an academic linguist.

Basic English vocabulary is nearly entirely Germanic.

English is called Germanic because its entire grammar, nearly the entirety of its core vocabulary, and its descent (i.e. if you go up the generations you will find an unbroken link of mutual intelligibility from Beowulf's writer to the Queen) are Germanic.

It's not a hybrid language any more than any language with loanwords (so basically every single language in the world) is a hybrid language. If English is a hybrid language, why not French with its Germanic loans ("blanc," "guerre")? Why not Urdu with its Persian loans and Korean with its Chinese? (Almost?) every language has loanwords. Many languages use loanwords far more frequently than English, like Korean and Chinese. Korean is still not a Sinitic language. There's no need what all for a new definition.

And TBF it's not "nerds" who get to define new linguistic categories. It's linguists. And for several centuries the vast majority of linguists have agreed that English is Germanic.

Well then there should be a classification of degrees of hybrids. For example English would be pretty high on the scale due to its high percentage of loanwords. On the other hand pretty low on the scale would be languages without much foreign contact. That's all my subject is. How do we classify these hybrids?
 
I don't think that there are any real hybrid languages. Creoles would be the closet, but even then they have their own grammar which seems common the Creoles and not as a compromise with either language.
 
Well then there should be a classification of degrees of hybrids. For example English would be pretty high on the scale due to its high percentage of loanwords. On the other hand pretty low on the scale would be languages without much foreign contact. That's all my subject is. How do we classify these hybrids?

That sort of thing *is* taken into account. In fact, there is a whole subfield of linguistics - contact/areal linguistics - to describe it, which, incidentally, is one of my specializations. I can link you to one of my published papers if you'd like, or to papers by other linguists that show the interplay between language classification and genetic and contact factors.
 
That sort of thing *is* taken into account. In fact, there is a whole subfield of linguistics - contact/areal linguistics - to describe it, which, incidentally, is one of my specializations. I can link you to one of my published papers if you'd like, or to papers by other linguists that show the interplay between language classification and genetic and contact factors.

I would be happy to read your paper.
 
That sort of thing *is* taken into account. In fact, there is a whole subfield of linguistics - contact/areal linguistics - to describe it, which, incidentally, is one of my specializations. I can link you to one of my published papers if you'd like, or to papers by other linguists that show the interplay between language classification and genetic and contact factors.
Thanks for your help in this.
As a matter of interest what languages have you covered?
 
That sort of thing *is* taken into account. In fact, there is a whole subfield of linguistics - contact/areal linguistics - to describe it, which, incidentally, is one of my specializations. I can link you to one of my published papers if you'd like, or to papers by other linguists that show the interplay between language classification and genetic and contact factors.

What is the link?
 
Thanks for your help in this.
As a matter of interest what languages have you covered?

No problem. I focus on American Indian languages, specifically looking at questions of genetic relationships, language contact, and typology (analyzing global patterns of structural variation in languages). I'm also involved in endangered language revitalization - I'm currently a consultant for the Mishewal Wappo tribe of Sonoma County, CA.
 
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