By Jason Pickett
English is considered a Germanic language, but if it were truly Germanic could you understand this “Das ist Deutsch, warum kannst du es nicht verstehen?” What was just written was “This is German, why can you not understand it?” Although our language may be Germanic, it does not necessarily reflect the German vocabulary that one would expect it to. English acquires its grammar from German and consequently German and English grammars are very close in appearance. Both languages are particularly alike in syntax (word order), in both languages they have the following order: subject, predicate, object, and out of this rises the foundation for both languages’ grammar. This is also not to say that English acquired no vocabulary from the Germans, indeed most of its monosyllabic words are of German descent. They also share some less obvious properties that can be demonstrated in
Grimm’s Law, which states that in Germanic languages there is a tendency to have great consonant shifts from their Greek and Latin roots. For instance the letter ‘p’ in Greek and Latin turn phonetically into ‘f’ in English and German: ‘pater’ in Latin changes to ‘father’ in English, and ‘Vater’ (faughter) in German. Greek’s ‘Pod changes into ‘foot’ in English, and ‘fuss’ in German. This occurs in other consonants as well ‘d’ to ‘t’ and so forth. This is not to say that German and English do not share an immense amount of homophones (like sounding words) because they do, it is just that English has a high tendency to change rapidly and therefore barely resembles the original language it was 1500 years ago. To demonstrate English’s similarity to German take the example “Mark kam zu das Bus und sass” “Mark came to the bus and sat” though it may not look alike, the pronunciation is quite similar (Carruth p1212)
Now for the reason why English is Germanic: about 1500 years ago after the fall of the Roman Empire, Germanic tribes such as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes came to England, bringing with them their West Germanic dialects, which eventually turned into Old English. This form of Old English is considered to be eerily close to Old High German, which means that the languages of England and Germany (as well as parts of Scandinavia) were indistinguishable at one point and each could understand the other. This time in English history is considered the time of Old English, and it continued until the year 1066 anno Domine. During six hundred years unless a language is very rigid with its vocabulary and grammar it can change dramatically and this happened to the English language, due to the influence of the German tribes and also due to the influence of other cultures such as the Celts. Although English changed much in that six hundred years it changed much more in the next few hundred years than ever before.