What language does English SOUND most like? (loan, coastal)
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Frisian words still used in modern English are: Bread, Butter, Cheese, Yacht, Spoon and many others. Old English would have sounded most similar to Frisian and Old German. It also would have been close enough to have been mostly understood by Danes, Norwegians and Swedes as well in early times.
However modern English has borrowed so much from so many other languages it almost cant even be called English anymore.
They did some Dna studies of the modern English talking a sampling of DNA markers from men in villages spanning from the Norfolk coast across a swath of central England to the Welsh border. The dna markers didnt match Norway or Germany, rather Frisians from the NW coast of Holland across NW Germany into the western half of the Danish peninsula.
This would be consistent with Frisian and other coastal Germanic tribal war bands in the 6th and 7th centuries setting sail from their western coastlines in longboats where south westerly tradewinds would have brought them to landfall from the fens southward along the norfolk coast to the Thames estuary and Kent. Exactly as the venerable "Bead" had written years later in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles as the history of the English people and their origins
Last edited by EricOldTime; 08-15-2014 at 10:23 PM..
I've always had a fantasy of hearing someone who 100% doesn't know English mock the English language to see how it sounds.The same way Americans do with other languages.
It's notable that most of the germanic languages are much more divergent amongst themselves than romance languages, except the nordic languages. English and German are completely different to each other, almost in the same level of distance between French and Romanian. It's also difficult to recognise Frisian as the closest language of English. The distance of both seems to be larger than the distance between Portuguese and Catalan.
This is because the Latin languages outside of Italy developed with the benefit of the written word and later, with the authority of the Catholic church. The Germanic languages developed more organically in dispersed populations without the unifying influence of literacy.
I've always had a fantasy of hearing someone who 100% doesn't know English mock the English language to see how it sounds.The same way Americans do with other languages.
Based on that, I would say English sounds like a Northwestern Germanic language developed in close contact with other languages spoken on the North Sea.
Also, I would say it sounds 'cool' but that may be the context.
The description of the English people as a 'mongrel race' is apt. I can often tell that if a native British person, without any 'foreign stock' is dark featured, he is likely to come from the South of England or Wales. Many Irish also have the dark-featured. Weirdly enough I think of dark haired Irish women as being characteristically Celtic too. You could visibly tell that people in Northern England tend to have a more Northern European look, with paler skin, eyes, hair etc.
Well the Irish and Welsh might be slightly darker-haired or have more of the brown hair than the English, but definitely not darker-skinned or darker-eyed, rather paler in most cases. The Welsh are not less dark-eyed either. The English look more "Germanic", while the Welsh or Irish are more "Celtic".
A look at the frequency of blue eyes in the southern and eastern regions of England and Wales:
Southwest England - 35%
Southeast England - 44%
East England - 41%
Wales - 45%
The traditional "Irish look" with a very light or pale skin complexion, piercing blue eyes, dark hair is definitely not dark featured.
Celtic woman
Typical Celtic, is the red hair, light eyes, freckled-complexion.
Irish lass.
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