So for me, as I stumble and bumble my way through learning French (mostly through DuoLingo, hey), I’m often thinking about this issue.

Now-- on the surface of things, Modern English is almost exclusively comprised of German & French, and almost every word in these sentences are specific examples of such in terms of direct etymology. Which is a big part of why I’ve typically regarded French & German as my sibling languages. It’s a nice, bright thought, anyway!

Let’s take the modern English word “fight”-- WP claims:

From Middle English fighten, from Old English feohtan (“to fight, combat, strive”), from Proto-West Germanic *fehtan, from Proto-Germanic *fehtaną (“to comb, tease, shear, struggle with”), from Proto-Indo-European *peḱ- (“to comb, shear”).

My point is that there’s so many ways to run with that over time… in any language whatsoever! Indeed, IIRC there was a “fisten” variation which meant an entirely different thing in earlier German.

But, “shear?” Yes, yes back in my schoolyard days, I wanted to shear my opponent like a little lost lamb, but… I don’t think that’s right.

So here’s my point, assuming you’ve lasted this far. Modern German in fact split from modern English maybe around ~~800AD? And Modern French, around… perhaps slightly earlier than the Norman Conquest (1066), meaning that even though Modern English is absolutely PACKED full of French & German pronyms, we can’t just assume they mean the same thing, anymore, as with the examples above.

It sort of breaks my heart, but it’s just reality, non?

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyzEnglish
    5·
    3 months ago

    So moreso the German split happened around when Roma finally collapsed?

    Roughly so. The date is mostly for reference though; you could argue that it happened even earlier, because even as far as 1 AD you already got some dialectal variation. To complicate it further, Standard German is slightly artificial, since it’s the result of a written standard shared by speakers of different varieties. So we might as well argue that what’s being dated is not the English-German split, but rather the split between English and those varieties that eventually formed German. (With then for example Dutch being the result of one of those varieties [Old Low Franconian] getting its own competing standard.)

    But to the point: yes, Rome collapsing is a good reference, and directly tied to that.