Franconian Beer Message Board
Good, back to basics. |
| Posted by Barry on 2016-03-13 03:48:01 |
| No, the line of succession is: * Proto-Indo European (a language re-constructed by linguists/philologists, which has most of the grammatical features found in modern German, is derived from Sanskrit - probably - and is the origin of most of the major European language but not Hungarian and Finnish!). * Proto-Germanic (the Germanic development of PIE, which includes the many early Germanic languages) * West Germanic (which split into many varieties, including old high German from which modern German comes, and Anglo-Frisian, which includes old Frisian and old English; the latter descends to modern English, via middle English, which has a lot of Norman-French!). Old English still retained the grammatical structure found in modern German (which makes it a devil to learn, as I found at Uni!) but this gradually dropped away under the influence of the Norman-French, which also makes up about half the vocabulary of modern English. Somehow, I think modern German is quite tricky for modern English speakers because of the way that English dropped all those grammatical features (declensions etc.). Although there is a strong historical similarity between English and German, I have always found French much easier. |
| Followups: |
 Good, back to basics. by Barry on 2016-03-13 03:57:43 |
| Good, back to basics. by Nick B. on 2016-03-13 04:13:08 |
| Good, back to basics. by Barry on 2016-03-13 05:49:37 |
| Good, back to basics. by Uncle Jimbo on 2016-03-13 23:50:13 |
| Good, back to basics. by Barry on 2016-03-14 03:19:03 |