Am 24.03.2002 22:28 schrieb Sören Kuklau: > German is Indogermanic, as is English. > > French, Italian, Spanish etc. are Romanic. > > Russian etc. are... hmm... Hunnic? ^ Indogermanic... you are going back a long long way. Ancient greek and Latin are also "indogermanic" languages. And it's called indo-european nowadays anyways... :-) Most european languages are indogermanic... except Hungarian and Finnish and the language of Estnia. English is a very close family member of the old-high-german languages (a comparison of old english and old german is very fascinating, it looks like the same language), spoken around 500 A.D., then angles and saxons from what is now Northern Germany, when they sailed to the British Isles. The original English is probably welsh. And while the Germanic tribes on the continent changed their germanic dialects and used different words suddenly, the angles and axons kept certain things alive, like the old "thorn" (th - most th sounds in german changed to d - "thorn" became "dorn" for exmaple) which was abandoned on the continent (that's why Germans have difficulties with the th *g*).
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