Quick Settings Thread

It seems that I am always coming up with interesting quick concepts such as "What if the Americas were colonized as Settler colony's everywhere?". Sometimes in the situations, starting a thread about the outcome of this is rather hard, because it would create so many butterflys. The point of this thread is mostly to pose a small prompt, then comment on how history would change, and what the world would be like, rather than focussing mostly on how the POD would occur.

I will start with: What if Anglo-Saxon England never got into the Norman Cnquest because of the availability of successors. Then, around 1300, a minor Dutch noble, maybe the Count of Holland, conquers England in a similar way to the Normans. So in this TL, Middle Dutch takes the place of Norman French. How would this worlds British isles look around 1700, especially linguistically and in the government?
 
Okay. The influence of Dutch would probably be less as Old English gets another two centuries to develop elaborate vocabulary with no other competitor than Latin before being displaced by Dutch. Mutual intelligibility is also much easier with Dutch than a Romance language. OTOH, Dutch may still be the official language when the Scientific Revolution kicks in, whereas IOTL, Anglo-Normand was long forgotten by then.
Possible consequences:
- English doesn't lose the past prefix ge- (IOTL it is the only West Germanic to have done so)
- Spelling is more in line with that of other Germanic languages (<c> not used to represent /s/ in native words, maybe thorn, edh and ash still in use)
- There's NO reason to think this would cause English to lose the interdental fricatives -at that point Dutch had them too.
- Maybe [x] will not disappear (IOTL it is still preserved in spelling as <gh>).
- The speakers of English won't be able to easily tell Dutch loanwords from native words, contrary to OTL (but similar to Northern Germanic loans IOTL - only someone with a reasonable knowledge of linguistics knows a word like 'skirt' cannot be native English frex)

Government
Not really my area of expertise but here are two observations:
- unless the county of Holland also includes OTL's Belgium, the center of gravity of the union will be firmly on the English side.
- I think the signing of the Magna Carta was a pretty improbable event, so probably more absolutism.
 
Okay. The influence of Dutch would probably be less as Old English gets another two centuries to develop elaborate vocabulary with no other competitor than Latin before being displaced by Dutch. Mutual intelligibility is also much easier with Dutch than a Romance language. OTOH, Dutch may still be the official language when the Scientific Revolution kicks in, whereas IOTL, Anglo-Normand was long forgotten by then.
Possible consequences:
- English doesn't lose the past prefix ge- (IOTL it is the only West Germanic to have done so)
- Spelling is more in line with that of other Germanic languages (<c> not used to represent /s/ in native words, maybe thorn, edh and ash still in use)
- There's NO reason to think this would cause English to lose the interdental fricatives -at that point Dutch had them too.
- Maybe [x] will not disappear (IOTL it is still preserved in spelling as <gh>).
- The speakers of English won't be able to easily tell Dutch loanwords from native words, contrary to OTL (but similar to Northern Germanic loans IOTL - only someone with a reasonable knowledge of linguistics knows a word like 'skirt' cannot be native English frex)
Do you think that the ae letter, and the thorn could survive in this world?
 
I will pose a new question.

Would it be possible for the Bantu to go north, to Egypt, or to Morocco? If so, where would they settle, and how would it affect civilizations at that time?
 
I will pose a new question.

Would it be possible for the Bantu to go north, to Egypt, or to Morocco? If so, where would they settle, and how would it affect civilizations at that time?
Not very likely, with the Sahara (and, for that matter, some of the peoples speaking Nilo-Saharan lanuages, who tended to manage higher population densities & to have better technology than the Khoisan & pygmies whom the OTL Bantu displaced/over-ran in central & southern Africa could/did...) basically in the way, unless they started their expansion a lot earlier than seems to have been the case IOTL.
 
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