I'm reading The Unfolding of Language: an evolutionary tour of mankind's greatest invention, by Guy Deutscher, and will be pulling gems from it to bore you with.

Here's one. If you ever doubted that English a "Germanic" language, note this:

English:. . Give. us . this day. . our . . daily . .. bread.
Swedish:. Giv. . oss . i. dag. .. vårt . dagliga. . bröd.
Icelandic: Gef... oss . ì. dag. . vort. . daglegt .. brauð.
Dutch: . . Geef. ons.. hedn. . . ons. . deglijk. .. brood.
German:. Gib... uns.. heute . unser . tägliches. Brot.

The original language began to split up around the time of Christ, says Deutscher. "They all stem from one prehistoric ancestor, which linguists today call Proto-Germanic, so in fact they were all one and the same language until the beginning of the first millenium AD."

quote:

so in fact they were all one and the same language until the beginning of the first millenium AD."

Unless, of course, you're not a christian, in which it's the first millenium CE.

Reading such ancient English texts as "Beowulf" leaves one feeling that one is really reading a Germanic dialect. Even Chaucer's English seems to be an amalgam of German and French, which stnds to reason, since the Normans had strongly influenced the language by then.

I worked for a Volvo dealership many years ago, when the spare parts packages were still written only in Swedish. I was surprised to see "Volvo service is god service" on the packages. Initially I thought it was in English, but a Swede assured that it was not. Except for just one "o" in "good," it's the same!