Can anyone describe to me, in detail, how English evolved from German?

Question

I know how the Celts were pushed into England, but when?

What role did (those who were to become Americans) play in England?

We were slaves to the King, were'nt we? Therefore we spoke "Low English" when we lived in England? Or "Low German"?

Answer 1

english did NOT evolve from german. english and german both had a COMMON ANCESTOR. i think you're getting confused because english is called "germanic". --- also,, the celts and colinization of america had nothing to do with the process.

still,,, here are some details:

about 5,000 years ago, there was a language that was probably spoken in russia, but it could've been spoken in hungary or turkey. today we call that language "proto indo-european", or PIE for short.

the people who spoke PIE spread out across europe and india. their isolation caused different dialects and those dialects eventually evolved into different languages, such as sanskrit, ancient greek, proto-celtic, proto-italic, proto-baltoslavic, and proto-germanic, to name a few.

you're concerned with the language proto-germanic. this language soon evolved into three separate languages; east germanic (which would later evolve into the gothic languages and become extinct), north germanic (which evolved into languages like norwegian, danish, swedish, and icelandic), and finally west germanic (which evolved into languages like english, frisian, dutch, plattdeutsch, and high german).

now, the way that all of these languages changed can only be explained in great detail, but i will give show you the evolution of one word, the word "tooth".

you probably know that the word tooth in latin is "dent" (which is where we get the word "dentist") and that in ancient greek it is "dont" (and that this is where we get the word "orthoDONTist"). --- also, the sanskrit word for "tooth" is "dant" and the lithuanian word for it is "dantis". (lithuanian is the most archaic of all the indo-european languages.) ----- this is because the languages all evolved from PIE, and the PIE word for "tooth" is "*dent-". (the asterisk means that the word is hypothesized rather than attested due to our having no records of PIE.)

now,, it might be obvious that the words dent, dont, dant, and dantis are all cognate with one another (related to each other), but the word "tooth" looks quite different, right? well,,, the proto-germanic word for tooth was "tanth-". --- this may not look similar to the others at first, but you have to understand that in proto-germanic, original D's became T's, and original T's became TH's. this is called "grimm's law".

(this is why our words for "two" and "three" start with T and TH respectively, when in other languages like spanish and french (which evolved from latin) their words still start with D and T respectively. compare to spanish "dos" and "tres" and frent "deux" and "trois". --- other examples include the english words "ten" and "thou" which are cognate with spanish "diez" and "tu".)

but how then did proto-germanic "tanth-" evolve into english "tooth" and german "zahn"??

when proto-germanic evolved into old english, nasals that come before fricatives were dropped. nasals are letters like N and M, and fricatives are letters like TH, S, and F. so, the N before the TH dropped, and the word became "toth". (vowels change very easily, which is why there's an O instead of an A.) from there, it was very easy for old english "toth" to become modern english "tooth". --- other examples of nasals being dropped before fricatives in english are the english words "goose" and "five" (old english "gos" and "fif"). compare to the german words "gans" and "fumf" which still retain the N and M before the fricatives.

when proto-germanic evolved into german, the nasal was retained, but something called the "hochdeutsch shift" happened, which changed all T's to Z's and all TH's to D's. (this is why the german words for "two" and "ten" are "zwei" and "zehn" respectively, and why the german words for "three" and "thou" are "drei" and "du" respectively.) -- so it makes sense then that the proto-germanic word "tanth-" evolved into high german "zand". ----- the modern german word for "tooth" is "zahn". the D dropped later.

if you'd like to learn more about this sort of stuff, then read up on http://en.wikipedia.org or do search on google for the words:

germanic, grimms law, PIE, indo-european languages

Answer 2

English derives from Old English, which derived from Germanic languages (which were quite different from German by the way) for the structures and grammar, but a whole lot of the vocabulary comes from the French language.
Have a look there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language

Answer 3

English evolved out of Proto-Germanic, NOT German. LOL at "in detail". The average textbook describing that process in detail is about 300 pages long.

Answer 4

Uhh, it was Intelligent Design?

:p

Answer 5

I think you need to do your own homework.

Answer 6

r u mad or what??? whats your sources???