Franconian Beer Message Board

Seems to me that this discussion has drifted in two directions: one, on the origins of English and two, whether modern German is evolving towards a different method of conjugating verbs.

The article mentioned by Jimbo, which mentioned the proposition that ‘that English is Celtic grammar with Germanic words’ agreed that this was a fairly extreme position and, since it was posted in 2007, I can’t see that much progress seems to have been made in proving this hypothesis. There now seems to be a measure of agreement that there was probably more mixing between the contemporary indigenous population and the invaders. Equally, more thought seems to have been given to tricky question of the ratio of invaders to indigenous and studies of the home regions of the invaders suggest that they had relatively small populations compared to the estimated population of contemporary Britain. It is thought that the invaders numbered maybe 25,000 and the indigenous population (post Roman departure) more than 1.5 million. If this is so, one wonders how this small number of people managed to conquer a whole country and why their language should become dominant.

It was hoped that large-scale studies of the genetic makeup of Britain and Ireland might provide some answers but these seem to have only added to the confusion. Trying to pick a path through the claims and counter claims is really difficult but the facts seem to suggest that the population of Britain owes more, in terms of genetic origins, to the centuries well before the Anglo-Saxon invasions and that we are a fairly mixed up bunch.

If the claims made for English being a kind of German version of a Celtic language are correct, surely Gaelic, Welsh etc would not have been preserved as separate languages but would also be a kind of mixture. The only way that this might have happened is if sizeable Celtic rumps had headed west, south-west and north in splendid isolation at the time of the invasion, leaving the majority of the population to mix with invaders. But this still does not answer the question as to why English became the dominant tongue.

However, none of this arcane speculation necessarily affects the second strand of our discussion; that is, whether modern German is, for whatever reason, actually developing some of the grammatical tendencies of English. This seems to me quite a reasonable proposition given the impact of English speakers on life in Germany as a result of post-second world war occupation plus the undoubted influence of English language culture over the last 50 years.  After all, it is rare to meet a person in German under the age of 40 that doesn’t speak decent English and a sizeable proportion of the over 40s are also pretty proficient.