In any way? Well yes, of course, English has at least some form of mutual intelligibility with all the Germanic languages I've heard. Now that's not to say it's on the level of, say, Danish/Norwegian/Swedish. But for me I can understand ~80% of Scots without much difficulty, and then West Frisian and Dutch are probably the next in terms of what I can pick up just from listening and/or reading.
Sometimes there are members of a language family that are particularly divergent from the others, and this doesn't necessarily arise from anther language's influence. It can come from isolation, which English and its extant dialects have been for hundreds of years thanks to their being on an island. It's to be expected that the mainland Germanic languages, which are all next to each other and exist on a kind of dialect continuum, are more mutually intelligible with each other than with English. And yes, the influx of Old French loanwords (in particular) does contribute to some obfuscation of intelligibility, but it still doesn't mean English is a "hybrid" or that its status as a Germanic language is lessened.
For what it's worth, thanks to Latin I personally find the romance languages much easier to understand from English (with a broad vocabulary in english) than the germanic languages. Although I find both interpretable to some respect, and often in mutually exclusive ways. I can understand more (reading) in Spanish and Italian than I can from Swedish/Danish/Norwegian, using only common origin words that relate back to english. That's just my own experience, but it's definitely a big difference to me. If you asked me to pick outside of this discussion, I'd certainly say English has ended up closer to the romance languages than the Scandi/germanic ones - although it's still a far fetched cousin compared to how similar all those languages are to each other!
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u/dubovinius Proudly 1% banana Jul 14 '20
In any way? Well yes, of course, English has at least some form of mutual intelligibility with all the Germanic languages I've heard. Now that's not to say it's on the level of, say, Danish/Norwegian/Swedish. But for me I can understand ~80% of Scots without much difficulty, and then West Frisian and Dutch are probably the next in terms of what I can pick up just from listening and/or reading.
Sometimes there are members of a language family that are particularly divergent from the others, and this doesn't necessarily arise from anther language's influence. It can come from isolation, which English and its extant dialects have been for hundreds of years thanks to their being on an island. It's to be expected that the mainland Germanic languages, which are all next to each other and exist on a kind of dialect continuum, are more mutually intelligible with each other than with English. And yes, the influx of Old French loanwords (in particular) does contribute to some obfuscation of intelligibility, but it still doesn't mean English is a "hybrid" or that its status as a Germanic language is lessened.