why is it so different than irish or scottish?
different ancestors?
2007-01-25 05:39:07 · 7 answers · asked by Anonymous in Arts & Humanities ➔ History
Irish, Scottish and Welsh are members of the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family.
English comes from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European tree. It came from northern Germany in the 5th-6th centuries AD, with the migrations of the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes.
BTW, I just had a look over some of the answers below. Yes, the vocabulary of English is quite mixed. In addition to the native vocabulary from Old English, there are words from Old Norse, Norman French, and technical vocabulary from Latin and Greek. Despite the mix in vocabulary, English is Germanic in structure.
2007-01-25 05:46:02 · answer #1 · answered by darth_maul_8065 5 · 1⤊ 0⤋
English has the unique priviledge of being developed from a variety of sources.
Most Europeans languages are derived from Latin, and Ancient Greek.
English however is derived from Gaelic (old France), Prussian (old Germany) and old Nordic. Mostly Prussian.
Because all of those countries are now speaking Latin based grammars, English has been left in a position of uniqueness when it used to not be.
There are of course always foreign influences being introduced which partly change a language over time, but while all of this has caused English to become quite a simple, logical language, with no bias toward sex, the rest of the world speaks in a different kind of language with very differen t grammar, so learning English for a foreigner is really quite difficult.
2007-01-25 05:53:00 · answer #2 · answered by Bloke Ala Sarcasm 5 · 1⤊ 0⤋
English is a mixture of many languages. Celtic, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, French are its main contributors.
It's different from Irish and Scottish because those did not have the same mixture. Their's is mostly Celtic.
2007-01-25 05:46:09 · answer #3 · answered by Sophist 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
singsong!??! it's a harsh staccato, nasal, high-pitched whine full of unpronounced 'R's and 'H's and they pronounce 'L' at the end of a work as though it's a 'W' and "Ian B" who answered you earlier is way off the mark when he called old french "Gaelic" WTF?!! Gaelic is Irish, I guess he means Gallic, which has nothing to do with old french either. English is different because it is German in origin, even with all the other influences (Latin, French, etc.) while Irish Scottish Welsh etc. are Celtic in origin.
2007-01-25 07:21:06 · answer #4 · answered by Dave O 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Not all would agree with you as the English tongue as spoken in the Thames Valley area can sound very drole and boring. This is because people from this area have dropped vowels similar to people from Normandy and other parts of Northern France.
2007-01-25 05:49:55 · answer #5 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
y'what? English? song-like?
Who are you kidding?
It's the most staccato, consonant filled language in the world, second only to German.
As I understand it, it's a concoction of Icelandic, German, Latin and probably Martian.
Cheers.
2007-01-25 05:51:37 · answer #6 · answered by chopchubes 4 · 0⤊ 3⤋
From "American Idol" stone-age. It was popular back then!
2007-01-25 06:50:29 · answer #7 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 1⤋