Talk:Germanic languages/Archive 4

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Archive 1 Archive 2 Archive 3 Archive 4

The major five groups of Indo-Eurpean languages (and their sizes)

Indo-European languages are divided into the following five sub-groups (of which this article deals with one of them - Germanic languages)

  1. Indo-Iranian languages. Examples - Hindu(stani), Farsi or Iranian, Bengali
  2. Romance languages. Examples - Italian, Portuguese, Languages spoken in Spain except Basque, Romanian, French
  3. Balto-Slavic languages. Examples - Russian, Latvian, Bulgarian, Polish, Slovakian, Serbo-Croatiac, Czech, Ukranian, Lithuanian
  4. Hellenistic languages - of which only modern Greek still exists
  5. Germanic languages - Examples - English, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian

All of these sub-branches (except perhaps Hellenistic) can be divided further. Balto-Slavic , can be split in at least North-Slavic (Russian, Polish), South-Slavic (Bulgaian, Slovenian) Baltic languages (Latvian, Lithuanian). Romance languages can be divided into Italic languages and Iberian languages. And we also have West-Germanic and East-Germanic and somewhere also Scandinavian languagers etc. Any objections so far ?

Then we have - regarding this article, Germanic languages an early lead sentence (with germanic languages = it )

  • "It is the Indo-European subdivision spoken third most often as a native language, behind Italic and Indo-Iranian, and ahead of the Balto-Slavic languages."

Since this clearly is a comparing statement, must the comparison be true. But fist - the Hellenistc subbranch is totally forgotten. Although there is no doubts about modern Greek as being an Indo-European , Hellenistc language (without relation to any of the other four sub-branches). If we must continue to compare the five sub-branches, must we also mention either "Hellenistic languages" or "Greek". Objections this far ? But putting the Germanic languages behind Italic languages, in a question of size, number of current day speakers, is wrong. If however avoid Italic languages (which is a sub-branch of a sub-branch really) and use all languages based on Latin - or Romance languages, then the sentence will possibly be true.

Proposal: Either just mentioning Germanic Languages to be one out of five sub-branches of Indo-European languages - or change the sentence in question to

  • "It is the Indo-European subdivision spoken third most often as a native language, behind Indo-Iranian, Romance and ahead of the Balto-Slavic and Hellenistic languages."

And preferably by using a source which can especially show that Germanic languages is smaller than Romance languages. In any case is Italic languages only a part of the larger Romance language. And Hellenistic languages (=Greek) are forgotten. How this blur emerged is a good question. Boeing720 (talk) 13:23, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

It is difficult to follow your various points in this section and those above and, to the extent I do, they are riddled with factual errors, misconceptions and illogicality. The same goes for your posts on my talk page. For instance, and not the only example, Italic languages include Romance ones, not the other way round. Mutt Lunker (talk) 14:25, 21 May 2017 (UTC)
But please Mutt Lunker - I presume you're talking about how languages spread from Rome and out (or something in line with that).But that's NOT the issue here ! I'm talking about all languages with a base in Latin, a wider group of (modern) languages. Like Italian, French, Romanian and all languages spoken on the Iberian peninsula except Basque. How many speak Italic languages today ? Are Italic languages excluded from the Romance languages ? (by the way, I would rather call them "Latin languages" or "Roman languages" - end by the way). Then please read the sentence (as in article currently) -
  • "It (meaning Germanic languages) is the Indo-European subdivision spoken THIRD most often as a native language, behind Italic and Indo-Iranian, and ahead of the Balto-Slavic languages."
I can believe the Indo-Iranian sub-branch of Indo-European languages is the largest such sub-branch (inculding Hindu, Farsi (Iranian), Bengal etc) and possibly also Romance languages - but if exluding Spanish (Castellian Spanish), French and Portuguese are naturally Germanic languages ahead. (As you refuse me to change from Italic to Romance in the sentence) The sentence in question has NOTHING what so ever to do with HOW languages has developed through history - it is just about today's situation. A comparing statement. Which has forgotten the Hellenistic sub-branch, but also excludes all Latin based or Romance languages, which are NOT Italic as well. This makes the sentence in question A LIE !!! Have I still failed to explain the problem with the current formulation ? Boeing720 (talk) 22:00, 21 May 2017 (UTC)
What the sentence says is that Italic and Indo-Iranian are spoken more than Germanic and Balto-Slavic is spoken less. CodeCat (talk) 22:32, 21 May 2017 (UTC)
Naturally, exact what I'm saying - but this is an error (regarding the position of Italic languages) ! According to our article Italic languages, are those languages previously spoken in Northern Italy and in the Alps approximately. Hence, they have nothing to do with the current situation, which the sentence in question was dealing with. Germanic languages are spoken by many more, compared to this largely extinguished group. (However if all of today's modern languages which are based on Latin, in other words Italian, French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Romanian and a few smaller other languages - which here on our Wikipedia are referred to as Romance languages, was compared to the Germanic languages - then it would be a different matter. But I was earlier refused to change Italic languages to Romance languages. I hope this was clear enough ? Boeing720 (talk) 22:18, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
Read the article Italic languages more carefully. It's in the very first paragraph of the article. CodeCat (talk) 23:20, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
Why change "Italic" to "Romance"? The Romance languages are part of the Italic branch. — Eru·tuon 00:20, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Frisian languages

Frisian is spoken among half a million people who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. This sentence has no reference. According to this study, mutually intelligibilty between West Frisian and North Frisian is at 38%. Furthermore, there are different ISO codes for the Frisian languages.Sarcelles (talk) 11:41, 6 August 2017 (UTC)

"Teutonic languages"

Is "Teutonic languages" a synonym -- or an outdated synonym -- for Germanic languages? --Neitram (talk) 18:32, 9 August 2017 (UTC)

Well, it's certainly outdated if you ask me.Ernio48 (talk) 18:21, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

English and V2 word order

I edited the article to say that V2 word order is "largely absent" in English rather than "no longer present" as the article itself already provides numerous counterexamples. I think this may be worth expanding on though, as to me it seems that what is really meant here is that "V2 word order typically sounds unnatural or archaic in modern English, and in some cases may be grammatically incorrect."

I don't know if there's a good source for this anywhere though. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:A443:F91D:1:E57F:8EF5:E864:13FC (talk) 21:32, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

Mistakes in table

There is a mistake in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages#Classification. Modern German and Yiddish are a descendents of Old High German, not Central German. The rest appears correct. Azerty82 (talk) 21:42, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

"German groups" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect German groups. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Utopes (talk / cont) 22:03, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

"Germanic groups" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Germanic groups. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Utopes (talk / cont) 22:03, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

"Germanic group" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Germanic group. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Utopes (talk / cont) 22:52, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

"German group" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect German group. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Utopes (talk / cont) 22:52, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

The Diachronic table

Sorry to be blunt, but the diachronic table simply does not belong in this article.

  1. It is unsourced.
  2. It contains self-evident nonsense - there are no such terms as "Primitive Upper German", "Old Upper German", "Middle Upper German", "Early New Upper German" in use in the literature
  3. The idea that all these languages have an identical periodisation is self-evidently untenable.
  4. Standard German is not descended from Upper German.
  5. Crimean Gothic is not a descendant of Bible Gothic.

I'm sure a lot of work has gone in to this table, but that's not enough to justify its inclusion. No amount of tweaking is going to rescue it from from WP:OR. --Pfold (talk) 18:21, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

I think it should be removed.--Ermenrich (talk) 18:39, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
I agree, this is a case for WP:TNT. Here is btw the earliest version of the table: Special:Permalink/38657486#Diachronic. –Austronesier (talk) 18:40, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Vocab comparison table

It might help us trim the vocab comparison table if we knew what exactly the purpose of it was. There are a number of cases where the languages in fact use different words, die, starve, for example, or head vs. cognates of Kopf. What is it we are trying to show with this table? Is it sound changes? Common vocab (which would eliminate the two examples I just gave)? Variety? At the moment the thing is far too long to be of any real use and attracts constant additions of some additional word that looks similar in some number of Germanic languages. It might be best to just select a small number of particularly representative items (pronouns and numbers for instance).--Ermenrich (talk) 15:33, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

It's good to see this bloated table trimmed. Can I suggets, though, that we could do with a couple more verbs? --Pfold (talk) 10:12, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes, 2-3 more verbs would be nice. What about incomplete sets like 'moon'? Yiddish has no direct cognate, only the mon- in montik (מאָנטיק). –Austronesier (talk) 10:30, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
We should cut moon I guess then - we formerly had “to sing”, which we cut restore, or does anyone know some better verbs?—Ermenrich (talk) 12:15, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
Weak: live; do or go or have from the minor groups; can or must from the pret-pres. ? --Pfold (talk) 12:30, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
Does “do” have a Nordic cognate?—Ermenrich (talk) 12:52, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
No, do has not survived in Nordic.--Berig (talk) 05:06, 19 October 2021 (UTC)
Apparently "go" has no cognate in modern Icelandic and Faroese. "To have" would be another example where all the variants would be between v/b as the middle consonant. I'm going to do "to stand" instead.--Ermenrich (talk) 22:08, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
I've added "can", but I did it with the infinitives as I couldn't find out what the inflected form of, e.g. the Limburgs form was. I assume they're actually all quite a lot more similar to the English than this makes them look.--Ermenrich (talk) 22:23, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Why not add a Proto-Germanic reconstruction? It would make sense to show how all the forms are related.--Berig (talk) 05:08, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

Seems like a reasonable idea to me. I would prefer we use an etymological dictionary like Orel then rather than using Wiktionary though. I'm already sort of unsure about the forms in e.g. Scots for some of the Wiktionary entries.--Ermenrich (talk) 13:59, 19 October 2021 (UTC)
I added PGmc. Now the table is too wide though, if anyone knows how to make it narrower. Otherwise, perhaps we could remove Scots, whose status as a language is debatable.--Ermenrich (talk) 22:37, 19 October 2021 (UTC)
@Berig: I think something went wrong here[1], you wanted to remove Limburgish and Luxembourgish, but accidentally deleted the Dutch and Low German data columns instead. –Austronesier (talk) 16:42, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
Oops, I counted the columns, but messed it up.--Berig (talk) 16:43, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
I went ahead and removed Scots.--Ermenrich (talk) 17:31, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
I think the German dialects should to go, except perhaps Low German. There are many other Germanic dialects that are at least as quirky as they are.--Berig (talk) 17:39, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes, the original idea was good. Low German should stay since it is quite a kind of its own and somehow represents the last stage of a (not fully direct, but anyway...) lineage from Old Saxon and Middle Low German. Limburgish and Luxembourgish are nice to have, but too much stuff on the left side pushes everything else out of view when reading on a mobile screen. Yiddish, in spite of its closeness to Standard German should stay, and if it's only to annoy Wexler fans. –Austronesier (talk) 18:06, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

what about Faroese? It’s very similar to Icelandic and about as widely spoken as Luxembourgish I would assume. I’m also not sure we need Afrikaans.—-Ermenrich (talk) 19:24, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Faroese is a good candidate for removal. Its written language is actually based on Icelandic.--Berig (talk) 19:27, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
And Norwegian Bokmål is basically written in Danish, so it is not very representative of a native Norwegian development.--Berig (talk) 19:38, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
In fact, it sometimes rather accurately said to be Danish spoken in Swedish, and it is easy to see its intermediary position between Swedish and Danish in the table.--Berig (talk) 19:43, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
I removed: Afrikaans, Limburgish, Luxembourgish, and Faroese. The table looks quite a bit more manageable now. Do we want to remove Bokmål as well? It requires a lot of footnotes, I notice...--Ermenrich (talk) 19:45, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
Not necessary. I think it looks great now. Thanks Ermenrich!--Berig (talk) 19:46, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
I think we could probably add a few more vocab items now without it looking as crazy as before. I notice the only kinship word we have is "daughter" for some reason. Maybe we could add "father" or "mother"? "Word" might also work. Any other words that seem like they could be there? I think we should choose ones that result in a variety of outcomes from sound outcomes.--Ermenrich (talk) 19:51, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
Go ahead! :-)--Berig (talk) 20:05, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
Geminate glide fortition in North and East Germanic is sexy. Is there any correspondence set that would include all languages here? –Austronesier (talk) 20:05, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
Egg? That's of course a Norse loanword in English though. If that doesn't matter we can use it though...--Ermenrich (talk) 20:24, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
"True" works - it's in every language. It appears "egg" is only attested in Crimean Gothic (as ada). We should try to find something showing the "d" gemination as well. The question is what...--Ermenrich (talk) 20:37, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
I'm going to add "egg" with a reconstructed Gothic form and a footnote.--Ermenrich (talk) 21:13, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

I've fiddled around with it some more - let me know if you think there's anything else we should add or subtract. If we could find a word that has "-dg-" in English and -kk- in German that also exists in Norse and Gothic that would be great. The obvious words like "ridge", "bridge", "midge", and "edge" all seem to be missing in Gothic.

I was also thinking a clear example of rhoticism might be nice, such as "to hear".--Ermenrich (talk) 22:02, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

I don't see the problem in having one or two items without na Gothic cognate - after all, it signals the poor corpus. Oh, and good work, @Ermenrich:. --Pfold (talk) 08:58, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
I have added 'deep' as an example for *eu. Initially, I wanted to add 'deer' which has *eu and rhotacism, so this would have killed two birds with one stone, but I've left it out because of the semantic shift in English, which requires an additional note. And yes, great job, Ermenrich!. –Austronesier (talk) 11:10, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
Thanks! I went ahead and added "to hear" for rhoticism, but if you know a better word than go ahead and replace it. I had also thought of "deer", but I believe it's missing in Yiddish. There are still a few more phenomena we could illustrate - I'll probably add "ridge" even though it doesn't have a Gothic cognate.
Also, I'm still not entirely convinced that Bokmål is doing a lot on the table. Would anyone object to it being removed? It's mostly just the same as Danish or Swedish.--Ermenrich (talk) 17:36, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
I have been thinking the same. The risk is however that a Norwegian will take offense sooner or later. --Berig (talk) 17:43, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
I'll wait a bit longer to see if anyone else objects on the talk page.--Ermenrich (talk) 20:02, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
We're always going to get people whose patrotic ourage at the omission of their local variety causes them to complain. I suggest we put a comment at the head of the table saying that the selection is based on carefully considered consensus and no language should be added without discussion on the Talk page. That at least means we can rv without compunction.--Pfold (talk) 22:16, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
Done. I wouldn't be entirely opposed to removing Low German and Yiddish either. Low German almost always agrees with either Dutch or German (or both), and Yiddish is extremely close to German.
How many more words do we think the table can take? I was considering adding "earth" and possibly "word" (both because of the Norse developments mostly), but I have a feeling that if we're not careful the thing will get too long again.--Ermenrich (talk) 23:59, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
Well, Low German is actually already represented by Dutch (a Low German dialect raised to language status). Yiddish was elevated to language status so late that it can be removed, IMHO.--Berig (talk) 06:31, 22 October 2021 (UTC)
Actually, Low Franconian ≠ Low Saxon, and the latter is a language degraded to dialect status with the demise of the Hanseatic League – that's how many see it. Anyway, less is more, so I don't feel strongly about keeping Low German and Yiddish. –Austronesier (talk) 09:39, 22 October 2021 (UTC)
I'd keep Low German — even if the forms we've chosen are close to those of Dutch — as a historically important branch of WGmc. --Pfold (talk) 14:27, 22 October 2021 (UTC)
I guess there's enough consensus to remove Yiddish then? I think "standard" Yiddish, which we are using, is sort of artificially kept close to German, unfortunately. It would be more interesting to see one of the variants that are actually in common use, where, e.g. "gut" is pronounced closer to "gīt" (at least to my ears, maybe its more like gɨt).
Low German also suffers from not having a standard - a lot of the dialects vary quite a bit more from standard German or Dutch than the forms Wiktionary lists as "Low German". I'm not always sure which one on Wiktionary to choose, honestly. If anyone knows a Low German dictionary online we could say that we use the forms listed there and dispense with the need to select forms via the rather problematic process of looking at Wiktionary. This would be useful for West Frisian as well.
FYI, some of the Gothic forms that were formerly on the list appear to have been made up (those for bread and formerly for apple, for instance), so it might be worth checking those against an outside source as well. I have Lehmann's Gothic Etymological Dictionary, which is one possibility.--Ermenrich (talk) 15:43, 22 October 2021 (UTC)
Surprisingly standard Yiddish is based on the pronunciation of North-Eastern Yiddish ("Lithuanian Yiddish"), due to the prestige of the Yiddish in Vilnius. The kind of Yiddish you're thinking of is Polish Yiddish (I wrote a book for my children documenting their family history).--Berig (talk) 15:52, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

What about Plautdietsch as representative of Low Saxon? It's based on East Low German (and indeed very similar to the Platt I've heard from old folks who still grew up speaking Low Prussian), and much less influenced by Standard German than Low German as spoken in present-day northern Germany. –Austronesier (talk) 16:21, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

I changed the LG forms to follow this dictionary. It has a few features I wouldn't have associated with Low German (use of ei where I would expect ee in "twei", for instance), but it does provide forms that are less like German or Dutch and generally more unique ("gaud" for good) than those found in Wiktionary, where I think the rule is sort of to just undo the second sound shift...--Ermenrich (talk) 16:24, 22 October 2021 (UTC)
I think Plautdietsch would be an intersting kind of Low German to include.--Berig (talk) 16:25, 22 October 2021 (UTC)
To be fair, Wiktionary's Low German is pretty authentic Northern Low Saxon which has been less affected by vowel shifts than e.g. Westphalian, Reuter's Mecklenburgisch or Low Prussian (incl. Mennonite Plautdietsch), maybe that's why it looked somewhat boring in the table. –Austronesier (talk) 17:28, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

Numbers

Would it perhaps make sense to include numbers 1-10 (or twelve) and maybe some multiples of ten in a separate table?--Ermenrich (talk) 13:32, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Personally, I would like a table of the numbers in both the modern and the historic Germanic languages, but that would probably be too big.--Berig (talk) 13:48, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Moving info from Germanic peoples?

@Alcaios, Austronesier, Pfold, and Berig: the section on language at Germanic peoples is currently much better sourced and written than this article, despite not yet even covering everything that probably should be covered there. That article is oversized however. I wonder if we could move that text here and then cut it down in size and scope there. However, given the different organization of the two articles, we need to figure out exactly how we want to do that first.--Ermenrich (talk) 18:03, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

@Ermenrich: it would take a lot of time and effort to rewrite this article. I've started a draft; there's only an (incomplete) general bibliography for the moment. Alcaios (talk) 19:43, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
Yes, this is a huge task. One thing we should probably separate from scratch is a strictly synchronic typological section, à la Harbert (2007). In the current version, synchronic and diachronic facts are all mixed together. And maybe a separate main article for the detailed phonological and morphological history would be helpful, so we can condense the presentation here to give room for expanding things like "Writing" (which is comparatively weak next to Germanic_peoples#Early_attestations). –Austronesier (talk) 20:51, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
Just to clarify my remarks- the Germanic peoples article doesn’t cover everything, I think the language section there is excellent. We can move it into the draft and use it as a basis for at least a partial rewrite here, don’t you think.—Ermenrich (talk) 20:58, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
It could be a start but the section in the Germanic peoples article is (quite rightly) focused on Proto-Germanic and early medieval Germanic languages, whereas this article is about Germanic languages in general. Alcaios (talk) 21:10, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
To clarify – the history section of this article doesn't even mention the worlwide expansion of Germanic languages from the 19th century onward led by the British Empire, the US cultural influence and, to a lesser extent, the Dutch (e.g. Suriname and South Africa) and Danish (e.g. Greenland) colonial expansion. The recent developments are mixed up in a section called /modern status/. Alcaios (talk) 21:23, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Map

Quebec should not be colored dark red. English is not its primary language (as we correctly note on the map on the English language) page. Funnyhat (talk) 19:16, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

Yes the map is wrong, English is not the language of the majority of the population in Québec. Azerty82 (talk) 21:43, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
The caption states, "Countries where the first language of the majority of the population is a Germanic language". Since Quebec isn't an country, and since English is the first language of a majority of people in Canada, the map is correct. BilCat (talk) 04:42, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

Vocabulary comparison

@UsagiDreams: there is a consensus on this page not to include every Germanic language. We only include one version of Frisian, one version of Low German, one High German language, and one version of Norwegian, although two are official in Norway. This has nothing to do with being a bigot, it has to do with showing our readers variety within the Germanic family. Scots and English are similar enough that they would often be exactly the same (the same reason we don't include Afrikaans).--Ermenrich (talk) 18:52, 23 October 2022 (UTC)

I might add (though it doesn't seem you care to discuss the matter) that your edits have messed up the formatting of the table.--Ermenrich (talk) 19:09, 23 October 2022 (UTC)
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