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by trchek 341 days ago
Solidly Germanic with an absurd amount of French, down to nearly identical spelling for many common words. I’m not talking about cognates but actually 100% the same spelling and meaning and they’re often not from some recent century but from old French.

I’m sure you have a solid basis for saying this but it’s basically impossible to write many sentences without by accident using French down to the original spelling.

I was going to highlight all the examples I used by accident myself in this post but I gave up because the links were making it too long.

This is why something like Anglish even exists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_English

1 comments

I believe this is because England was conquered by the Normans (french speakers). I think it was within the last 100 years or so that the English aristocracy finally stopped speaking French among themselves.