|
| quote: | Originally posted by Kylle
Perhaps not that identical. Maybe more like Danish and Norwegian, or Swedish |
Hello guys,
Icelandic, Faroese, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are all North Germanic Languages, a sub-branch of closely related Germanic languages. The problem with English is that, unlike the rest, it incorporated a huge amount of French loanwords, so that it stands out a bit more than usual, so it's hard to compare it with the others.
Here's a sample sentence in all North Germanic Languages plus English, and you can see speakers of Icelandic and Faroese would have little trouble understanding one another (and, for that matter, their brethren from the continent if these numbers are to be trusted), because the different word endings and diverging grammar notwithstanding, you have many familiar roots to help you figure out what's being said - specially if you speak an insular language, as opposed to the ones in the continent, which are apparently more conservative.
As for the varieties of English, they're all too recent, and the language has not diverged as much, reason why they're way way way closer than all these languages combined.
Last edited by Lira on Feb-03-2013 at 21:30
|