What book would you recommend to start to best understand the way you described the differences and similarities between the languages? It really is a very nice post and I’d like to thank you for it.
A linguist could probably come up with a good reference for a comparative work. I mostly had to dig into some of this stuff when working on Dutch and German NLP, but I am by no means a linguist. For Dutch I found this book very helpful:
During my linguistic studies, the course material was comprised of the Oxford and Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology (and a bunch of papers on specific linguistic features). But the Oxford handbook is a very good start.
It's a very cool field of study that will allow you to identify commonalities across languages and the differences between them. A good typologist should be able the be dropped in a completely unknown language context and learn the features from use (which was basically our exam).
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/syntax-of-dutch/FB5E136...
It also has comparisons to German spread throughout the book. (Full disclosure: former colleague of mine.)
If you can read Dutch, the E-ANS is also a very valuable resource:
https://e-ans.ivdnt.org/topics/pid/ans21lingtopic
E.g., description of topological fields:
https://e-ans.ivdnt.org/topics/pid/ans21010101lingtopic
https://e-ans.ivdnt.org/topics/pid/ans21010102lingtopic