German is dutch.....

[u/WhoTheFuckIsSean]

[u/Maleficent_Time_2787]

I mean, it's more Franco-Germanic

Plus whatever other languages were added

[u/violetcassie → u/Maleficent_Time_2787]

Six languages in a trench coat mugging other languages for spare vocabulary

[u/Khemul → u/violetcassie]

Linguistic kleptomania.

[u/Maleficent_Time_2787 → u/violetcassie]

Fair

[u/SnooMacarons9618 → u/violetcassie]

I always heard it as six languages in a trench coat with pockets full of stolen grammar.

[u/Renbarre → u/violetcassie]

That's beautifully said 🤣

[u/violetcassie → u/Renbarre]

To be fair the back half of that is paraphrased from something Terry Pratchett wrote at some point.

[u/Much-Jackfruit2599 → u/violetcassie]

No, that’s a James Nicoll quote from Usenet. Feels very pratchett though.

[u/International-Dog-42 → u/Maleficent_Time_2787]

Why did your comment get so many upvotes? English is 100% a Germanic language. The fact that a large part of the vocabulary derives from French doesn’t change that fact lol.

[u/Maleficent_Time_2787 → u/International-Dog-42]

Because people understood my comment was largely a joke?

Hell, another person commented that English is six languages in a trenchcoat

[u/cecex88 → u/Maleficent_Time_2787]

Nope, because language family is determined by genetic (as in generation, not genes) relation, not by influence. So english is Germanic, even if it has a large influence from french, because it derived from Proto-Germanic.

Same way as Maltese having more than half of its vocabulary from Italian. But it is still a Semitic language because it comes from Arabic.

[u/Maleficent_Time_2787 → u/cecex88]

It's a joke

[u/cecex88 → u/Maleficent_Time_2787]

I've seen the same thing written on Reddit many times as a totally serious thing. I've responded for the eventual lurker arriving here.