Talk:English language/Archive 10

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Criticism of pronunciations?

No mention of the many inconsistencies and irregularities of English pronunciation. It seems English is notorious for breaking it's own pronunciation rules with so many irregularities. I don't know if I'm wording it well enough, but i'm sure someone knows what I mean. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.210.245.151 (talk • contribs) 00:59, 7 July 2007 (UTC).

I think what you mean is the low level of consistency between spelling and pronunciation, i.e. how hard it is to deduce pronunciation from spelling. That could probably be mentioned briefly here, but any detail should probably go to English orthography instead. —Angr 05:56, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Mongolia declared English the"Second Official Language of Mongolia. ...

http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=learn.wherepc.asia.mongolia

That's interesting, but the scare quotes make me wonder how "official" it really is. This article makes it sound more like the Mongolian government is pushing toward having everyone learn English, and that at least one 20-year-old student would like English to be the second official language, but I'm having trouble finding evidence that the Mongolian government actually passed a law making English the second official language. —Angr 07:16, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Total speakers

The total speakers figure (box on left) only takes into account first/second language. What about third/fourth/fifth/.... Also a total figure should be included.--Bah23 10:33, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

"Second language" is a technical term referring to any language one learns later than the language(s) one acquired natively. Saying that someone speaks English as a second language does not imply that they don't also have other second languages, some of which may have been learned before English. —Angr 16:44, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Official language of the U.S.

It is stated that USA and Britain (UK) do not have English as an official language. The is not true as far as USA is concerned: English and German were equally used in the early USA and the government held the 'great referendum' to decide on one or the other as the official language. Of course, English won but only marginally. 81.79.215.74 14:05, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, but that story, in all its incarnations, is but an urban legend with only a small kernel of truth. See Frederick Muhlenberg#Muhlenberg legend, German in the United States#German the official US language?, and http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_026.html for what actually happened. —Angr 20:24, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

That said, English is an official language in the United States—along with French, Spanish, and Hawaiian. None of them are official federally, but they are official among the various states of the US. The Jade Knight 10:38, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

No, you said it yourself - English is not an official language at the federal level, ergo it is not an official language of the United States. QED. It may be designated an official language in some states (?), i don't know which, but that does not make it an official language of the US. To argue so would be like arguing the flag of Maryland was an official flag of the US, beacause it had a codified status in one of the states of the Union, when in fact it is the state flag in Maryland, and no more. 62.156.255.22 15:04, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Is English one of the official languages of Mongolia?

I have found two sources claiming that it is. http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,600132667,00.html

Unsourced info removed

I have removed the following information which has been tagged with {{fact}} for at least several months:

• It is also the most studied in China, Japan, Israel, South Korea, and Taiwan.
• Examples [of Euro-English] are the concept of spatial planning, the description of something being “degressive”, and the prefix "Euro-". [The term "Euro-English"] also refers to dialects of English spoken by Europeans for whom English is not their first language, especially since English is frequently used by two Europeans to communicate even when neither of them know English as the first language.
• English spelling is often considered to be one of the most difficult to learn of any language that uses an alphabet

If anyone can find sources for these statements, feel free to re-add them. —Angr 17:15, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Swearing, new words and classic literature?

Should the article be supplemented by references to swear words (which are often sexual), to where new words appear from (hybridisation from existing words, phonetics, text messaging, technology, imports), and generally recognised and significant works of literature which have affected or reflected the language i.e. The King James Bible, Shakespeare? --Flexdream 18:48, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Don't we already have an article on profanity? Maybe a brief mention here, but anything detailed should go there, or we could start a new language-specific English profanity to go with the others in Category:Profanity by language. —Angr 19:36, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Classification

I'm a scientist, not a linguist, and as such find it difficult to understand how Modern English can be classified as a "West Germanic Language" when its grammar is quite divergent from other modern Germanic languages and well over half its vocabulary is of Romance origin?

If a large cat were discovered and its genetics proved to be 25% lion derived and 60%+ tiger derived I would be laughed at if I called it a lion.

Why isn't Modern English (as opposed to the English of 1000 years ago) classified as a hybrid Germano-Romance or Romano-Germanic language?

This is a subject which purturbs my scientific soul.

Urselius 09:13, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Linguists classify languages by lineage, as biologists do with organisms. English shares a common ancestor with the other West Germanic languages (i.e. German and Dutch), thus it's classified as a West Germanic language. As with animals, the evolutionary paths of languages can diverge very significantly, such that genetically related languages no longer seem to resemble each other at all.

Of course, it's all a matter of definition, but classifying languages in this manner is very useful. It tells you something about migration pattern of people, for instance. The classifications also reflect the discoveries and theories in the field of historical linguistics. Classifying languages by the percentage of shared vocabulary doesn't really lead you anywhere. That English has a lot of word borrowed from French and Latin is a boring fact. How English has evolved to be so different from the other West Germanic languages--now that's interesting.

The classification and related languages section of this article can use some improvements, I think. Right now, the usage of the word "close" isn't terribly clear. The reader can leave with the impression that closeness means similiarity, when it's actually referring to familial connections. --Chernyshevsky 14:31, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

I would have thought that vocabulary and grammar were the to most important elements in any language. In regard to both these traits Swedish and German (modern in both cases) are related in a manner that neither is to Modern English. I'm a molecular geneticist and taking the analogy to my field you might see the divergence of languages from a common ancestor as a type of speciation. Thus Swedish and German are like subspecies of Germanic, but Modern English does not fit in to this sort of analogy, it isn't the result of divergence it is the result of hybridisation, it isn't a sub-species it is a hybrid. English has two parental strains, Old English and Old French and Middle English was their hybrid offspring. Middle English was essentially a new language. An event, like the Norman conquest which results in the extinction of 70%+ of a language's vocabulary is not merely a development in the history of a pre-existing languages it the creation of something new.

Urselius 15:41, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Actually, biology provides several good analogies to historical linguistics. Your questions "how [can] Modern English ... be classified as a 'West Germanic Language' when its grammar is quite divergent from other modern Germanic languages and well over half its vocabulary is of Romance origin?" and "Why isn't Modern English (as opposed to the English of 1000 years ago) classified as a hybrid Germano-Romance or Romano-Germanic language?" are like asking "how can bats be classified as mammals when their morphology is quite different from other modern mammals and they can fly?" or "Why aren't modern whales (as opposed to Pakicetids) classified as a mammal-fish or fish-mammal hybrid?" Basically, in historical linguistics, no amount of loanword borrowing can change the genetic origins of a language (although it can make the genetic origins difficult to discern; linguists used to think Albanian was a Romance language and Armenian an Iranian language because of the large number of loanwords) [N.B. "genetic" as used by historical linguists is a metaphor and has no relationship to actual genetics!]. Loanwords can also make two related languages look more closely related than they are, as with your example of Swedish and German. Swedish (like all the Scandinavian languages) has a large number of loanwords from Low German, which can make it look deceptively closer to German than it is. You also said, "I would have thought that vocabulary and grammar were the two most important elements in any language." For purposes of classification, vocabulary is not terribly important, because vocabulary changes too rapidly and is too easily borrowed in from other languages. The grammar, on the other hand, is important, but English grammar is thoroughly Germanic. —Angr 19:24, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

English grammar thoroughly Germanic is?

Thone biscop ofsloh se cyning (dont know how to introduce "thorn" etc. apologies about my A-S as well!), meaning 'the king slew the bishop' isn't much like Modern English grammar.

Bats produce milk which is definitive of mammalian status, if they stopped producing milk and fed their young on regurgitated insects, then their status as mammals might be questionable, or the definition might have to be changed.

The whale analogy is also somewhat wide of the mark. More relevant would be the offspring of spotted dolphins mating in the wild with bottle-nosed dolphins, their offspring are hybrids.

As someone who speaks neither Dutch nor Italian, I can look at the instructions on the side of a piece of electrical equipment and make sense of the Italian to some extent but the Dutch would be totally unintelligible. How can the language I speak therefore be exclusively classed with Dutch and no relationship to Italian recognised?

The melding of A-S with O-F seems to me to be an almost unique phenomenon, Hungarian has many Turkish loan words, but the interpenetration of A-S and O-F goes beyond mere influence.

Urselius 08:52, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

There is something to your argument. Some linguists would argue that English isn't purely West Germanic, but a hybrid of North and West because of the strong influence Viking settlements had on Old English. Quite a number of our everyday words comes from Old Norse: get, take, they, are, sky, until, and so on. These are used all over the place. They're a fundamental part of the language. That's not case with French borrowings. They might be numerous, but far less frequently used, especially in colloquial speech. And the introduction of these word certainly didn't cause a mass "extinction" of the native vocabulary. Usually they ended up co-existing with the native expressions. "Hotel" might be common nowadays than "inn," but the latter is still in use. And if you say "cow's meat," while people might think you're retarded, they'll understand you. Compare that with "they are"--The Old English "hie sind" has disappear without a trace.--Chernyshevsky 11:16, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

("And if you say 'cow's meat,' while people might think you're retarded, they'll understand you." - I'm so happy I added this page to my watchlist just so I catch see that comment! --sony-youth^pléigh 11:28, 25 July 2007 (UTC))

Languages change over time. The difference between Old English and Modern English is about as large as that between Old Norse and Modern Norwegian. Modern Norwegian has lost grammatical cases and conjugation of present tense verbs. The number of genders went from three to two. The loss of word-endings in turn led to changes in word order to compensate. These simplifications are part of a trend within the Germanic branch. There are some morphological rules that are stable, like the inflection of strong verbs (sing, sang, sung) and use of -s to denote genitive relation, which you will find across the Germanic languages.

The situation with English is hardly unique. Polish also has plenty of words borrowed from Latin (because of the Catholic church). Looking outside Europe, over half of the Japanese vocabulary was borrowed from Chinese. With Korean I think it's the same. Persian has many borrowings from Arabic, the result of the Islamic Conquest. Cultural domination is really nothing new in human history... --Chernyshevsky 12:04, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

To respond to Urselius, yes, English grammar is thoroughly Germanic. Compare English verb conjugation with French and German: like German, English has weak verbs that form their past tense and past participle using a suffix involving an alveolar stop (hope/hoped/hoped = hoffen/hoffte/gehofft), and has no synthetic future tense (will hope/werde hoffen take two words to say). Like German, English also has strong verbs that form their past tense and past participle using ablaut (sing/sang/sung = singen/sang/gesungen). French, on the other hand, has two synthetic past tenses and a synthetic future tense (espérais, espérai; espérerai), no suffix using t and d sounds, and no ablaut. Even Brythonic (from which English borrowed barely any words) probably had more influence on English grammar than French did (it's possible English got the progressive constructions like I'm running from Brythonic). —Angr 16:04, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

In Norwegian: håpe/håpte/håpt, vil håpe, synge/sang/sunget. --Chernyshevsky 17:38, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

The more I look at this section, the more problematic it seems. When we talk about classification, the information ought to be precise. The usage of the word "related" need to be tighten up. It should mean genetically related only. The reference to Tok Piksin should be removed, since English creoles are not related to English. The paragraph about French load words should be cut or merge with the appropriate section. This section would be more informative, I think, if we just move up the tree: first West Germanic, then Germanic, then Indo-European. A cognate at each level as example would be nice. --Chernyshevsky 16:49, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

I can't see very much of a connection between the heavily inflected A-S grammar and the word-order based grammar of Modern English. I think there were 19 possible variants in the definite article in A-S (some repeated) depending on gender, plurality, and declension etc.!

From a rationalist approach a language that 'starts' in Germanic but 'finishes' in Romance is 'neither horsemeat nor raddishes,' but is in fact a horsemeat and raddish stew.

Urselius 20:06, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Ehhh...Latin has six cases. --Chernyshevsky 21:21, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Latine loquebar - well only a little.

The basic function of language is communication. I'd like to do a test on a group of people native English speakers and native Spanish or Italian speakers, all with no previous knowledge of A-Saxon or Latin, and give each group a passage in their "ancestral" language and see how much each group made sense out of the passage. I suspect it would be revealing.

Linguistics is a hard science, not a democracy. Biologists don't classify animals in this manner. If you show pictures of a fish, a bat, and a whale to some lay people, ten out of ten will tell you that the fish and the whale should be grouped together.

It should be noted that linguists don't classify English as Germanic because it resembles other Germanic languages. They did so because English has features that can only be explained by it having the same ancestor as the others. It's the same way in biology. Whether an animal species produces milk is certainly not its most stand-out observable attribute. That's used as a criteria because milk production is not a feature that came about independently according to evolutionary theory. Whales don't start swimming then produce milk. Bat don't start flying then produce milk. These two species must have the same milk-producing ancestor that probably neither swim or fly. --Chernyshevsky 21:38, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Urselius 08:49, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

English grammar is not that different to other Germanic languages. For example, good, better, best is gut, besser, beste in German. In Spanish it is bueno, mejor, el mejor. You tell me which language English resembles most. What about the sentence Der Mann ist jung (the man is young) or Was ist das (What is that). If you Learn German you'll see how close it is to English. For example, English t often corresponds to German ss so you get water and wasser and that and das. Sure a lot of the vocab is different but vocab is not as important as the grammar. Also, the vast majority of basic words are English.

English speakers are more likely to understand the German sentence

Der Mann hat ein Haus und eine Katze (German)

than

El hombre tiene una casa y un gato (Spanish)

meaning the man has a house and a cat.

Resemblence doesn't necessarily imply relation. Norwegian grammar resembles English's more so than German's, but the languages are more distancely related. Different languages become more like each other when they're in close contact, just as dialects drift apart when there're geographically separated. It's sort of like in the real world: You are probably more like your best friend than a cousin from another continent :-) --Chernyshevsky 22:01, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

That's not entirely true. Both systematic differneces and similarities imply relation. For example, it is highly unlikely that an English sentence I give him an apple and the German equivalent Ich gebe ihm einen Apfel are so similar just by being in contact. English and French were in contact for a long time and you don't see that kind of similarity.

And what's "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity are excellent ideals" in French? --Chernyshevsky 17:19, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Let's have none of that fancy lawyer-speak here, "Freedom, likeness and brotherlyness are outstanding standards" ;) Petecollier 16:51, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Or "His joie de vivre has a certain je ne sais quoi"? —Angr 17:36, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Speak English man! "His happiness has a certain something about it". If you prefer French, what about week-end, disc-jockey, parking, camping, marketing, mél... Petecollier 16:51, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Liberty (freedom) and Fraternity (brotherhood) are not exactly what you would count as basic vocab. Anyway, it's grammar that is more important when it comes to languages. For example like I said before compare the English drink, drank and I have drunk and the German trinke, trank and ich habe getrunken. Can you not see the similarity in grammar??? What about I sing, I sang and I have sung and the German ich singe, ich sang, ich habe gesungen. Anyone can see that the form of these verbs are similar. How about if your so smart you tell me how to say I had a good friend in French. In German the adjective comes before the verb just like in English! Ich hatte einen gute Freund! or try and translate Ich sehe das grune Gras (I see the green grass) into French. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 58.107.35.34 (talk • contribs) 00:58, 29 July 2007 (UTC).

Well, I'd say if words like Liberty and Fraternity are understood by the majority of English speakers then they do count as basic vocabulary. As for English's classification, it is without doubt a Germanic language. With some notable exceptions nearly all the core vocabulary is AS or Norse in origin. Of the 1000 most common words, 83% are AS in origin, the rest from Norse, with a few from Norman French. The underlying grammar is also Germanic in origin, with some influence from Brythonic, from the time when most Britons spoke a Brythonic language. Much like French is descended from Latin with influence from the once native Gaulish Language. For instance, the word for eighty in French is quatre-vingt which translates literally as "four-twenty" (the Latin word is 'octoginta'). This traces it's origin in the ancient Gaulish custom of counting in twenty's. (84.13.240.164 08:20, 29 July 2007 (UTC))

What a marvellous discussion. I'm a linguist, so the suggestion English is anything other than Germanic is patently ludicrous to me, but the above certainly illustrates well where the misconceptions lie and how they might come about.

With reference to a couple of points at the very top:

'English grammar thoroughly Germanic is' - I think this is a very spurious example, using German subordinate clause word order to try and prove a point that doesn't exist. The more usual word order (for West Germanic languages at least, I'm not familiar enough with North Germanic) is V2:

(English) [The] English grammar is thoroughly Germanic

(German) Die englische Grammatik ist ganz germanisch

(Dutch) De Engelse grammatica is grondig Germaans

'Thone biscop... isn't much like Modern English grammar.' - No it isn't. But then, neither is 'De gustibus non disputandum est' much like modern Italian/French/etc grammar, nor does the Old German 'Phol ende uuodan uuorun zi holza, du uuart demo balderes uolon sin uuoz birenkit' much resemble anything like modern German.

One might suggest that liberty and fraternity were basic English vocabulary. I would argue though that, in common with most of the Romance vocabulary in English, these belong to a 'higher' register (if you like, a more official, or 'well-educated' style of language). The everyday basic vocabulary here, i.e. freedom and brotherhood (or, in context perhaps, neighbourliness), are Germanic.

Just to really put the cat amongst the pigeons, I could mention that one of the reasons that French has diverged so much more from proto-Romance than some of the other Latin derived languages, is the very large influence played by the Germanic language of the Franks after they took over from the Romans in Gaul. The large Germanic influence, and numerous Germanic borrowings (France, guerre, garder, haume...) doesn't stop French being anything other than a Romance language though... Petecollier 16:21, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

But isn't English the exception in Germanic languages, in that it doesn't follow the V2 word order syntax? (84.13.253.59 07:56, 1 August 2007 (UTC))

It does n't? That' s odd. I am pretty sure that it' s usually V2, i.e. SVO, in the majority of cases? Petecollier 14:29, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

According to Wikipedia it isn't. "V2 word order is primarily associated with Germanic languages, English being a notable exception" (84.13.253.59 14:57, 1 August 2007 (UTC))

Not V2, huh? Well, that right then must be... I away shall go, my mother tongue for to relearn :P Petecollier 23:16, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Today, go you forth into a brave new world. (84.13.243.187 07:20, 2 August 2007 (UTC))

After a re-think perhaps my basic challenge to the way languages are classified is that they are not really like biological evolution, and that that [an A-S construction! like "swa swa"] analogy can be taken too far. Language is essentially a cultural trait, not a biological one. Some of the changes that a language undergoes through time can seem "evolutionary," but the evolution is like that of an art-style or a technology, not an organism. To take this parallel between language and physical culture further I'll try a for a paradigm.

In the parts of the British Isles the La Tene art style lasted throughout the Roman period. In the 5th century a new art style arrived in Britain, this "Germanic" art style was a synthesis of provincial Late Roman decorative art and a plastic animal-influenced style derived from the Steppes. The La Tene and Germanic art styles fused within Britain and the resultant decorative style is termed "Hiberno-Saxon." This term recognises that the new style is a hybrid and also recognises both pre-existing "parental" artistic influences. I really cannot see why when a language goes through a revolutionary change, under the impact of another language, this is not recognised in its classification. I think that when a language looses over 70% of its vocabulary, as Anglo-Saxon did when compared to Modern English, its classification should be modified to reflect this fact.

Urselius 11:55, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I disagree about that. Many other languages have also lost most of their "original" vocabulary. However, that is a bit beside the point. Even if we all would agree with you, it wouldn't matter for this article. Wikipedia is not for inventing new alternatives within different academic fields and the classification of languages is, luckily enough, not dependent upon us. :-) And I can only agree with a previous comment here, the idea that English would be anything else than a Germanic language is more humorous. JdeJ 12:24, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

More humorous than what? More humorous than the opinion that Frisian is the closest related language to English - ale and green cheese!

My problem is that linguistics is not based on scientific principles. In chemistry, if compound A reacts with compound B then the resultant product is not called A again. Science recognises change.

Urselius 13:06, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, my sentence was cut. But yes, much more humours than the fact that Frisian is the closest related language to English. Lingustic, like any other science, is based on sound scientific principles. That is not to say that those principles are any more obvious to laymen than the principles of chemistry. JdeJ 13:15, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

I think the crux of the issue is that Urselius is thinking rationally along the lines of a+b=c, rather than thinking diachronically. It is very easy to think of Old English (a) as being something in stasis, until the Norman invasion, when a bunch of Norman French speaking people (b) came to the country and the two groups "invented" a new language (c) in which they could both communicate. This is not the case. Old and Modern English are not different languages, just one language at different points in time. English was (and is) continually evolving - sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly - and outside factors just influence the direction of that evolution. However, you can't study that change at a day by day level, you can only look at a snapshot of the language at different points in time and, given enough time, the incremental change will be such that a more modern version no longer resembles the original. This doesn't alter the fact however, that they are the same thing. I don't look anything like the photos of me when I was a baby. Time and numerous external factors have changed me such that I now in no way resemble my younger self. Am I therefore no longer me? Or, was I not me then?

As bizzare as it may seem to somebody on first glance, the fact that Frisian is the closest related language to English (leaving the thorny issue of Scots to one side) is not an opinion, it is fact. It does not imply speakers of the two languages can understand each other, only that these two languages diverged more recently than any others in the same family and have the fewest differences phonemically, morphologically, syntactically etc - don't be blinded by orthography (which is irrelevant) or vocabulary (which is transient).

Let me return to the woefully overworked biological analogy. Humans and Bonobos are the closest related extant primate species (so I am led to believe). They share many common features, some are immediately apparent, some are only apparent to the informed eye or with careful study. But they are not the same animal. However Humans and Bonobos had the same proto-ancestor at some point in the past, and that point was closer to the present day than the ancestor that both share with an orang utan, or a rat, or a shellfish. In the same way, English and Frisian could be said to be like Humans and Bonobos. So by this tortuous analogy, West Germanic languages as a whole could be imagined as "hominids", Germanic languages as "primates" and Indo-European languages as "mammals".

While the biological analogy (almost) works in describing the relationships between different languages and language families, because you are talking about evolution, divergence, common ancestors and so on over very large time spans, it tends to fall over when considering the evolution of a single language over (relatively) shorter periods. Neither can you really think of it as chemically mixing compounds. The interaction and the change isn't that great on the overall linguistic level. You're not so much making sulphuric acid from water and sulphur as... i don't know, putting a bit of Norman French coloured dye into a beaker of Anglo Saxon water. It looks a lot different, it's changed some, but under it all it's basically more or less still water. It just looks prettier!

The science of linguistics needs a way to classifiy languages and their relationships with each other. This is done, like biological taxonomy, by grouping them into ever larger families based on shared features and evolutionary origins. The fact that one language may have changed considerably in relation to others in its family, doesn't argue for it to be reclassified, rather only for a new sub-grouping to be created. From the outside, you could argue a dolphin more closely resembles a fish than a land mammal. But it's not a fish, it's a mammal that has much adapted to the external influences of its aquaeous environment. Many 1000s of millennia from now when it has diverged yet further from other mammals there may come a time when it could be in a distinct separate group to all other mammals, but it still wouldn't be reclassified as a fish, it would be split off as a divergent branch from the rest of the mammalian stem. Likewise, languauges branch out from a common root, they aren't lopped off at will and regrafted elsewhere. If English resembles a romance language (and i don't think it does, but that's by the by) you can't just arbitrarily reclassify it as one. In so doing, you would be applying a label to the language that says "English evolved from Latin" and implying it is more closely related to Romanian than Swedish. What in fact you would would do is create a new label that says English and sister languages x, y, z have all been affected in the same way by a,b,c and consequently show common features that distinguish them from other languages in the overarching group. (which indeed has been done, there are at least a further 2 groupings along the branch from W-Gmc bfore you get to (Old/Middle/Modern) English.

No matter what English evolves into in the future, how many forks and splits it and the other West Germanic sister languages may undergo along the way, and how different they all end up from each other, they all nevertheless began to diverge 1400 years ago or so from the same starting point, and for that reason alone English can only be a West Germanic language. That is it's family group. Petecollier 19:39, 3 August 2007 (UTC)