Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Is English really a Germanic language?" video.

@alephnull7007 oddly, William and his lot introduced a lot less French into English than most people think... most of it comes a Lot later when French was the dominant langauge of and diplomacy in Europe. And, of course, Normandy (or whatever it was called before the Normans set up there) was Right There across the channel, so a lot of French words slipped in over time as a result of trade. Not to say that they weren't responsible for Any of it, of course. Definitely some there.
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@Knappa22 Indeed. Though place names certainly stuck around, and various bits of latin get into the germanic languages well before English became a thing, and then some more make their way in via the christian monastries (before the vikings looted and burned basically all of the major ones). England was actually a major centre of literature and the like, as such things went, before that).
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Because the netherlands was part of 'the germanies' who all spoke various types of 'deutsch' (or however you want to spell that), rendered in English as 'dutch' (and English usually uses the same word for both a people and their language)... and the Netherlands were the ones right next to England who the English interacted with All the Time, so when they split off it was Everyone Else who got renamed, so now the people of 'the germanies' (and then the German Empire, and then just Germany) were germans who spoke german, and the people of the netherlands were the dutch, who spoke dutch. And then you get the Pensilvania Dutch in the USA who are/were... ... German.
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@nicholassinnett2958 Frenchness becomeing a sign of being cultured wasn't so much a post-1066 thing as a 'several centuries later when French became the dominante langauge of the aristocracy and diplomacy throughout Europe' thing. You'll find far more French vocabulary in English tracing it's origin back to that than to the norman conquest.
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By every meaningful trait that is used to identify what family a language belongs to, English is Germanic. You're hard pressed to find anything about how English works that isn't either Germanic or functionally unique to English (in that if it shows up elsewhere at all it's in a Completely unrelated language for unrelated reasons). Every language borrows words and phrases and the like from it's neighbours and such. English is only unusual in quite How Much it's done so. Celtic's the only one that Might have a claim to influencing what language family English belongs in, and even then it's highly debatable if it's even a thing (and if it is, if it's enough to matter). You can rip all the non-germanic languages out of English and still have a functional langauge. But if you remove the germanic parts and try to use only the non-germanic parts it falls apart entirely. You don't just have to come up with new words (and often enough just use germanic roots rather than romance roots and form them from exactly the same parts), but completely rebuild the entire grammar from the ground up.
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they end up similar enough to "believe", "old", "sheen" (related to shine), "Shield" or "Child" (depending how you do it), smash, (thorp is probably fine actually), one, (tharm Might be ok?) as to cause issues.
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... Viking is also germanic (it is a subset of North Germanic while English is a subset of West Germanic), and Norman is French + north germanic too. So it's 'germanic+different germanic+germanic-ish'
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@Thinkagain-d7x English only ever really compounds two words, or two latin/greek fragments (... admittedly, sometimes we'll grab one of each just to annoy everyone). What makes them Long is that we'll then pile on the prefixes and suffixes. "antidisestablishmentarianism", for example, has only a single root (the verb establish, I think? I don't think you can really break that down any further in English), and then 4 or 5 modifiers stacked on it. And that's not even getting into the whole 'spend a while hyphenated before being acknowledged as an actual compound' thing. It's worth noting that, at least so far as I can recall, every attempt by an inventor to call their new Thing an English name with more than two words saw the thing completely renamed by others in short order and the original name drop completely out of use.
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Most English adjectives go before the noun... but some can go either before or after depending on what you're trying to say, and some gramatical structures move them around.
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English sentice structure started out as fairly standard for a Germanic language... then it lost half the bits that made that work (gender, verb agreement, probably some other stuff I'm forgetting (we get to blame the vikings for some, but not all, of that)) and over time the current system developed out of finding ways to make the remaining pieces fit together again properly. May or may not have picked up a couple of little bits of celtic somewhere along the way too (and, if they were celtic in origin, whether that was due to interacting with the pre-anglosaxon inhabitants of England or the Welsh next door at a later point is a whole other issue).
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ahh... by accent, you mean stress, yes? In which case... NO. Very no. I always forget which is which, but of nouns and verbs, with two syllables, one defaults to stressing the first syllabe and the other the second, with adjectives and adverbs derived from them flipping to the other pattern. With three syllables, the stress moves all over the place, and then you start sticking Prefixes on it and it becomes even more of a mess. A seven syllable word in English Must have it's primary stress as the Centre syllable.
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You probably weren't alone... but for people who've had to deal with them (see: anyone in Europe, anyone who ever got the European versions of video games, anyone who played strategy games set in europe, and probably several others) they're really good shorthand... and for everyone else, they're not that hard to look up.
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Thing is... it doesn't actually matter? there's the same number of them either way.
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