
Linguist claims that English Is a Scandinavian language - mikeleeorg
http://www.apollon.uio.no/english/articles/2012/4-english-scandinavian.html
======
tokenadult
I have studied linguistics, German, and Norwegian. (I used to live with a
roommate during my undergraduate studies who insisted on maintaining a
Norwegian-speaking household.) My oldest son the hacker has studied the same
languages, as well as Chinese, all of which are family heritage languages for
us. I don't buy this press release. English was heavily influenced by Norse,
for sure, but at its core it is part of the West Germanic branch of Germanic
languages, rather than the North Germanic branch that includes Scandinavian.

[Edit to take into account that the source link has been changed, and thus
improved, on this submission.]

~~~
zeteo
>I have studied linguistics, German, and Norwegian. [...] I don't buy this
press release.

Apparently this theory's authors have also studied linguistics and multiple
languages [1]. So how do you counter their arguments regarding syntax and core
vocabulary?

[1] Here's the Amazon publications list for one of them:
<http://www.amazon.com/Jan-Terje-Faarlund/e/B001HOTQ08>

~~~
tokenadult
_Apparently this theory's authors have also studied linguistics and multiple
languages. So how do you counter their arguments regarding syntax and core
vocabulary?_

So far their publication on the contested point in discussion here is the
press release submitted here. The field of linguistics has peer-reviewed
journals like any other science, and it has authoritative secondary sources
(surveys of world languages) and tertiary sources (encyclopedias of
linguistics) and a large scholarly community of people who have more
specialized knowledge than (apparently) any participant in this thread,
including me, who know English, Old English, modern Scandinavian, Old Norse,
and German well enough to dig into the data. What's more, historians have been
publishing for generations on the general issue of how Britain was settled by
the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes after written history had already begun in
Britain, and how incursions by "Danes" in Britain were responded to by the
local populations. This is not a new field.

A new comment, more recently submitted than your reply to my comment, puts the
issue well:

 _Having studied linguistics I'd say the claim is sensationalist rather than
sensational. English is a rather wild crossbreed of many European languages,
all of which share the same Indo-European roots._

 _Old English is very closely related to Old Frisian and Low German. Later on
English has been heavily influenced by Scandinavian, Romance (mainly French
due the Norman invasion in 1066 - Norman French to be specific, which differed
quite a bit from Île-de-France French at that time) and Gaelic languages to
some extent._

That's very familiar to all of us who have formally studied linguistics of
English. What's also dismaying familiar to anyone who has studied linguistics
is the attempt of nationalists who are partisans of one language or another to
claim a connection between their language and some language that enjoys great
prestige (here, English). I have nothing against Norwegian. I speak it (a
little), and Norwegian was my late grandmother's native language. I have
nothing against German. I speak it (rather more than I speak Norwegian), and
it was the native language and sole language of schooling for two of my
grandparents. I also acknowledge, as I did in my original comment, that BOTH
the North Germanic and West Germanic branches of Germanic languages influenced
English. My uncontroversial and non-extraordinary claim here, agreed to by
most linguists, is simply that the weight of influence on English is such, and
the history of English is such, that English is better characterized as a West
Germanic language than as a North Germanic language. The most frequently
occurring word in English, which is "the," is one demonstration of that. The
word "the" is a West Germanic word.

~~~
DifE-Q
You do realize that the Norman French were Vikings right? The area was settled
by a massive group of Vikings under Rollo. They became the Normans and from
Rollo would eventually come William the Conqueror? These Normans were in no
way French.

~~~
rafcavallaro
They spoke French, having adopted it after their conquest of, and settlement
in Normandy. French, not Norse, was their court language both in Normandy, and
later, after the 1066 conquest, in England.

------
kmfrk
Can I just say on a related note that I'm chuffed to bits to see interesting
linguistics stories make it to the frontpage? No linkbait, no inane Silicon
Valley inside baseball, and all that usual stuff.

~~~
w1ntermute
> no inane Silicon Valley inside baseball

I think that a lot of this _does_ have value to people on this site. If you're
going to be involved in the SV community, it's important to stay up-to-date on
the "inside baseball".

~~~
nickpinkston
Though you have to admit that a lot of the conversation in SV sounds like a
lot like armchair quarterbacking, and is about as relevant...

~~~
etfb
There are quarterbacks in baseball now? Now I'm confused.

(Seriously, though: let me just put in a plug for the Language Log
(<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/>) which is full of juicy linguistic
discussions. Worth it just for the eggcorns.)

------
kylebgorman
It's just not true that syntactic borrowing is that uncommon (google it). That
means that the historically documented prolonged contact between Scandinavians
and the English had some effect on the grammar. No surprise there. Since
syntactic borrowing is not uncommon in contact situations, it's a bad way to
tell what language is descended from what other languages, so this proposal
isn't off to a good start.

You can strand prepositions (or verb particles, as we'd call them when they're
not heads of clauses) in final position in German, contrary to their claim: Er
stellt es auf "he sets it up".

Off the top of my head I can name many ways that Scandinavian and English
differ syntactically (forgive the jargon: you can Google it). 1) Many
Scandinavian languages maintain a form of V2, where tensed main verb appears
in 2nd position (defined syntactically); English lost it in the Middle English
period. 2) Scandinavian lacks do-support (the presence of a dummy tensed
auxiliary in certain contexts: "I don't want it", "Do you know?", etc.) where
English has it. 3) Some Scandinavian languages have V-to-T movement (where
temporal adverbs occur before verbs); English lost that a long time ago.

~~~
dbaupp
A question from someone who has only done a timy bit of linguistics:

 _> 3) Some Scandinavian languages have V-to-T movement (where temporal
adverbs occur before verbs); English lost that a long time ago._

Is this like "Nu ska jag gå" (in Swedish)? If so, I don't understand that
English lost it because "Now I will walk" is a fine translation.

~~~
kylebgorman
A simple diagnostic for V-to-T movement is that an adverb occurs after the
subject and a tensed verb. Compare French "Jean embarasse souvent Marie" to
English "John often kisses Mary".

Linguists have hypothesized since at least the 1950s that verbs are introduced
into derivations at a position adjacent to their complements: if they occur
between subject and temporal adverb, they presumably got their by raising
(because syntax is a tree structure and both Scandinavian and English are
largely head-initial, "earlier" in the sentence is also higher in the tree)
from base position to the tense (T) position above verbs. Hence "V-to-T
movement".

If you want to learn which Scandinavian languages have V-to-T and which don't,
and you can handle the jargon, check out this paper by Jonathan Bobaljik, a
specialist in comparative Germanic syntax and prof at UConn:

<http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/papers/RealizingGI.pdf>

------
BjoernKW
Having studied linguistics I'd say the claim is sensationalist rather than
sensational. English is a rather wild crossbreed of many European languages,
all of which share the same Indo-European roots.

Old English is very closely related to Old Frisian and Low German. Later on
English has been heavily influenced by Scandinavian, Romance (mainly French
due the Norman invasion in 1066 - Norman French to be specific, which differed
quite a bit from Île-de-France French at that time) and Gaelic languages to
some extent.

You'll find salient features of any of these language roots but that doesn't
make English a Romance or Gaelic language for instance, it's just that it has
been influenced by those and hence adopted grammatical features.

The main reason for this is that Great Britain before the times of the British
Empire was one of the most contested places in Europe.

Finally, some of the claims in this article are somewhat inaccurate. There
were no Scandinavians and British people at that time, 'Danes' and 'Anglo-
Saxons' would have been the correct terms.

I also have a problem with the claim that Norwegians find it easy to learn
English because their languages are so closely related. The same has been said
about Dutch not long ago.

~~~
fusiongyro
Dutch and Norwegian are also closely related. It would be surprising if there
weren't transitivity there—and IIRC there are examples where the relationship
doesn't hold in both directions. I remember reading somewhere that Dutch
speakers have an easier time understanding German than vice versa, despite
both being similar.

~~~
timc3
There was a lot of trade between the two countries for some time. Norwegians
would travel around to Bergen or other coastal towns on the west coast and
then would trade with the Dutch and the Germans.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League>

------
jfaucett
interesting article. This assertion does go against the last 200 years or so
(since the Grimm Brothers) of thought about the origins of the English
language. I'm not an expert but I did major in linguistics and have studied
the history of the english language in some depth.

For me, the strongest points this new proposal has are the syntactical
features that scandinavian and modern english share. Syntactical features i.e.
sentence structure being adopted from one language to another is very very
rare and when it does occur it happens at a much slower rate. There are a
couple week points in the theory though. #1 and the article admits this, Old
English is West Germanic. #2 Chaucer's english is vastly different from Old
English but I don't think anyone would say its a completely new Language,
there are too many similarities, shared vocabularies, etc, this has until now
led everyone to believe modern english discends from old english and was
mingled up with scandinavian and then norman french.

Also, almost all the syntactical similarities the article shows have to do
with the split verb that modern english doesn't have. In german "ich habe
gestern lange gearbeitet" is in English literally : "I have yesterday long
worked" but translated should be "I worked a long time yesterday" . I think
they'd need to give support that the split verb didn't die out, (which is kind
of suggested in the texts of chaucer and his predecessors), but rather was
something that never existed b/c the "original" language, in this case
scandinavian, never had them in the first place.

~~~
fusiongyro
Just a question, since my knowledge on this subject is very, very limited, but
is it possible that the syntactic changes could be accounted for by a single
parameter?

From what I recall, _The Atoms of Language_ makes the case that English went
from SOV to SVO because a style in which very short sentences could be uttered
in SVO arose and became popular, and within a fairly short period of time the
L1 learners of English were mostly hearing SVO during their early years, so as
they matured the head directionality parameter was set contrary to their
parents. As I recall the book had some evidence to support this, but I can't
speak to the quality of it. I'm also not sure how that would work with the
antisymmetry proposal (which nicely explains other phenomena).

~~~
jfaucett
I haven't read the Atoms of Language but this sounds plausible and is if I
remember correctly, more or less, what is believed to have happened. The
diachronic study of english from say 900 to 1300, shows a language undergoing
drastic changes such as the loss of inflections, grammatical gender, and
adoption of north germanic (danish) words and later norman french ones. The
idea is that original SOV speakers of saxon were put under the heavy influence
of the SVO languages of the danes and later (post 1066 - battle of hastings)
that of the SVO normans. It would make sense, especially since even OE was not
a truly pure SOV language and allowed a much freer word order due to the
inflection system, which upon dying out forced word order to take on a much
stricter form.

As an interesting side note to show just how big of a hack mixed up jumble of
everything modern english is, the usage of the verb do, in elliptical
sentences and questions such as "do you want some coffee?", is very rare in
indo-european languages (only found in celtic langs such as irish) and thought
to have been picked up during the time in which saxon speakers and celts were
sharing the same island.

~~~
fusiongyro
I find this proposal an interesting thought experiment, for sure, but
replacing all the vocabulary except the grammatical words seems more likely to
me than replacing just the grammatical words and the grammar and retaining all
the other vocabulary. Are there any other cases of the grammatical words being
replaced while the rest of the vocab was left intact?

The fact that there was so much and such dramatic change happening that either
of those possibilities are reasonable suggests to me that we're not going to
get a definitive conclusion anytime soon.

------
arethuza
I grew up in a part of the mainland UK that is closest to Scandinavia - North
East Scotland and as a child (at least out of school) spoke in the thick local
dialect known as Doric.

I was highly amused when someone pointed out the Norwegian terms for hospital
and vacuum cleaner - støvsuger and sykehus are pretty much exactly how you
would say "dust sucker" - "stoor sooker" and "sick house" - "seek hoos".
Hardly surprising when you consider that considerable chunks of Scotland were
part of Norway for a while (although not the part where I grew up, although
there are quite a few battles in the area between Scots and Vikings).

~~~
recoil
I also grew up in Scotland. At one point I worked with a Swede and was
interested to find that many Scots words are closer to their equivalents in
Scandinavian languages than they are to those in English.

For example, "greet" for "cry" is clearly related to the Norwegian gråte or
Swedish gråta. Likewise "kirk" for "church" is a lot closer to the Norwegian
"kirke". These are the only ones I remember off the top of my head, but I
remember there being surprisingly many.

edit: bairn (Scots) vs barn (Norwegian) for child just came to mind.

~~~
gadders
I always found heffalump (English) / heffaklump (Swedish) was a funny
similarity. And "arlskling" isn't a million miles away from "darling".

~~~
dalke
"And "arlskling" isn't a million miles away from "darling"."

It is, however, a million kilometers away. The "-ling" suffix here is from Old
English, and was used in personal nouns. "Dēorling" is "dear-ling", or one who
is dear. In modern English it's often used as a diminutive. (Eg, "duckling",
"hireling".)

The "-ling" suffix also exists in other Germanic languages. For example,
"Yuengling" is a brewing company in the US. Its name comes from "an Anglicized
version of Jüngling, its founder's surname and the German term for 'young
man'." (So says Wikipedia.)

The Swedish "älskling" comes from the verb "älska" (to love) and the same
suffix. One page describes the suffix as "ordbildningsform som användes i
fornsvenskan för att uttrycka litenhet", that is, a "word formation used in
Old Swedish to express smallness", in other words: in the diminutive.

So while "darling" and "arlskling" end the same, it's because both language
share a similar "-ling" mechanism.

The base word ("dar" and "älsk") have different background. The "dar" is from
"dear", and the Swedish cognate for dear is "dry", which means "expensive" in
modern Swedish. Consider "the price was too dear for me.")

That's why you shouldn't think of "älskling" and "darling" as being related
words. They are as related as "yuengling" and "duckling", which isn't very.

~~~
gadders
Bad example then. But the suffixes are related?

~~~
dalke
I believe so. I researched it a bit more. According to
[http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=-ling&allowed_i...](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=-ling&allowed_in_frame=0)
, which is a better resource than the sites I found earlier, it comes from Old
English, meaning " 'person or thing of a specific kind or origin;' in
masculine nouns also 'son of' (cf. farthing, atheling, O.E. horing 'adulterer,
fornicator')."

It further clarifies: "Both these suffixes had occasional diminutive force,
but this was only slightly evident in O.E. -ling and its equivalents in
Germanic languages except Norse, where it commonly was used as a diminutive
suffix, especially in words designating the young of animals (e.g. gæslingr
"gosling"). Thus it is possible that the diminutive use that developed in
Middle English is from Old Norse."

It appears then that "-ling" in Old English meant "person or thing of a
specific kind or origin", which it shared with other Germanic languages, and
grew to acquire the diminutive use after the Old Norse influence on English.

------
bitops
I am a native Danish speaker (my first language) and this article definitely
rings true to me. I wouldn't go so far as to say that English is a
Scandinavian language proper, but it was very easy to learn growing up.

Even as a kid growing up in Denmark, with all the British/American shows on TV
(not dubbed) it was easy to learn a lot just by reading subtitles and
following along. I give Saturday morning cartoon re-runs a lot of credit for
helping me to learn. I remember sitting on a train with a friend of mine and
us both realizing that we both knew a lot of English a year before we were
going to start learning it in school.

I've found that most Scandinavians (or at least Danes) have a pretty easy time
with English. Because the sentence structures are so similar, you're mostly
plugging in English words that you're already familiar with and using the same
sentence.

That said, on a deeper level, English is a very different language. That's
most likely because it is such a cross between other languages.

~~~
jeffchuber
Completely agree having lived in Denmark and my mother being Danish.

Jeg vil gerne have en kop kaffe = i would like a cup of coffee

That's my go to for similarity.

~~~
Gmo
Well, your Danish looks like Dutch to me ;)

As a matter of fact, people here in NL say regularly that Danish and Dutch are
2 close languages. I'm pretty sure Dutch is not considered a Scandinavian
language though.

~~~
upinsmoke
Dutch is much closer to German to us (Danes) than Danish.

------
timc3
Almost totally and utterly nonsensical sensationalist link bait, in the fact
that languages are far more complicated than just those simple examples.

I am English (from near Anglo-Cornish/Somerset area), have lived in Norway
(Bergen where they speak mainly Bokmål) and now live in Stockholm (obviously
in Sweden, where they speak Swedish), and live with and understand the
differences, plus I have spent some time learning the history of my mother
tongue and the history of those countries.

Lets face it the the grammer structure is different, its the first thing an
English person has to learn when learning Scandinavian languages. English
heavily borrows from other languages. Swedish heavily borrows from French -
there was a King who was obsessed with France and everything french, some
Norwegian words are from Sweden. English borrows French words heavily for
obvious reasons.

Bokmål adopted words from those countries that they traded with and he doesn't
even expand into the different languages and dialects that used to be in the
Norway that Nynorsk tried to consolidate.

The fact is that these languages have changed and are constantly changing
based on trade, fashion, rule and migration and to singly say that English is
a Scandinavian Language is at best trying to make a name for yourself and at
worst ignorance of history.

~~~
HaakonKL
> languages > Bergen speaking any form of normal Norwegian > Norwegian words
> are from Sweden

And you just lost any and all credibility you may have once had. You're just
wrong.

------
skrebbel
I'm curious, I'm absolutely no expert in the field of linguistics, but it
appears that linguists insist that the hierarchy of language families is a
strict tree [1]. In OO terms, that there's no multiple inheritance.

Really, how unlikely could that be? Why can't English be both North _and_ West
Germanic?

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family> " _A family is a
monogenetic unit; that is, all its members derive from a common ancestor, and
all attested descendants of that ancestor are included in the family._ "

~~~
timc3
Think of it more like plant evolution from seeds that travel far and wide, it
might be closer to the truth.

~~~
skrebbel
Um, I don't think I completely understood your analogy. Plants can have
multiple parents. Why can't languages?

------
teyc
I'm of Chinese descent watching my children grow up in Australia is
interesting. While they speak Chinese, they tend to think in English. This
means that their sentence structure is totally messed up (from a Chinese
standpoint).

Perhaps a similar thing happened in England. The vocabulary is Germanic, but
the syntax is Norse.

~~~
stan_rogers
A better way to put it is that the syntax is neither. There was that whole
Danelaw episode to mess up the grammar. Along with word borrowings (which are
pretty much inevitable when an adult population--the Viking settlers--is
forced into something of a pidgin situation with a related language), there is
going to be some damage done to word order and endings/affixes. And since both
Old English (or, rather, the Old Englishes--there were regional differences
among the Angle-, Saxon- and Jute-dominated areas), a set of languages very
much like Old Frisian, and Old Norse were card-carrying Germanic languages
with grammatical gender, which is largely arbitrary and the gender assignments
didn't align well with each other, grammar simplified. The characteristic
German habit of postponing verbs under various circumstances (which also
differed between languages) gave way to a more streamlined and generally more
consistent SVO. Gender was pretty much abandoned for words that didn't denote
things having an actual sex. (Afrikaans underwent a very similar
simplification under very different circumstances.) Rather than speaking
English words in a Norse grammatical framework, people were speaking a mixture
of English and Norse words in a common framework, avoiding the difficult
subtleties of either language. But I'd imagine that the children of those
Norse settlers (who probably had native British mothers) thought in the hybrid
and spoke neither parent's language perfectly.

Mainland Scandinavian languages have also simplified somewhat, but in the time
_since_ native Norse speakers had a direct influence on English. The Danes
that occupied northern Great Britain spoke something that looks and sounds a
lot more like Icelandic or Faroese than modern Danish, Swedish or Norwegian.
To suggest that the simplification of grammar in mainland Scandinavia after
the Norman invasion of Britain is the reason for English's current structure
is to posit a sort of quantum entanglement between languages.

Correlation is not causation. I still hear mostly English (highly dialectical
English, but English of England nonetheless) when I listen to recordings of
modern Frisian. I hear something merely related to English when I listen to
Scandinavian languages.

------
sramsay
I didn't study linguistics, but I'm an English professor and my first thought
was of _Beowulf_ \-- an Anglo-Saxon poem that takes place entirely in
Scandinavia. Grendel, in fact, lives in Denmark.

------
jchrisa
I've been teaching myself Danish (a little) and this rings true to me. Mostly
Danish feels like English but with different pronunciation, and occasional
non-cognates. Danish certainly feels closer to modern English than German
does.

------
Svip
Estonians have an easy time too,[1] learning English apparently. So clearly
English is also a Finno-Ugric language.

[1] Based on the fact that almost all Estonian youth (16 - 26 years old) can
speak English properly.

~~~
timc3
Do you have access to a wide range of media in English that isn't dubbed or
translated from an early age?

~~~
Svip
Oh, I am not Estonian. But Estonian television is not dubbed, merely
subtitled.

I just don't believe that 'X population is generally good at speaking Y
language' means that 'X's mother tongue is related to Y' is a sound argument.

------
charonn0
Given the location and history of England, English is probably the biggest
mutt of the Indo-European family.

~~~
kemiller
Hindi/Urdu and other subcontinental languages are also Indo-European and their
lands have histories and linguistic influences at least as colorful as
England's. But English has got to be in the running.

------
oofabz
It's not sensational to claim that English is Scandinavian. German and English
are both descended from Norse, so they are both Scandinavian if you go back
1500 years.

What this linguist is saying is that modern English is more Scandinavian than
Old English. But Old English was never spoken throughout the island, back then
many British inhabitants spoke Norse! So I am not surprised that over time,
they standardized on a language halfway between Old English and Norse.

Middle English developed around 1100. Take a look at this map of languages
circa 900:

<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_norse,_ca_900.PNG>

~~~
kylebgorman
No, English is not thought to be descended from Norse until this press
release: see Wikipedia
[<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages#Diachronic>]. It's thought
to be related to the modern Scandinavian languages by a split that occurred
around two millennia ago. You're confusing "descended from" and "related to".

Linguists, like biologists, draw a distinction between "descent" and
"convergent evolution" (with "lateral gene transfer" being like what linguists
call "contact-induced change").

[edited to add wiki link]

~~~
oofabz
Thank you, I stand corrected. I believe they are still both Scandinavian.
Proto-Germanic, which all of these languages descended from, was spoken
primarily in Denmark and Sweden:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic_language>

~~~
jonsterling
Yeah, but you're still sensationally wrong. PGe may have been spoken in
Scandinavia, but that's not even close to what people mean when they say
“Scandinavian languages”. That means “North Germanic”, or, languages which are
descended from Old Norse. As opposed to every other Germanic language, like
German, Frisian, Dutch, Old Saxon, Old English, Gothic, etc.

------
curiousdannii
This really isn't a sensational claim -- English has long been called a
creole!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesis)

------
hso9791
As a Norwegian having lived in English-speaking countries for many years, I
find the conclusion plausible, but the evidence lacking.

We do share a lot of the same rules for word order as English. There are,
however, notable exceptions.

For instance, if the sentence starts with another word than the subject, then
we swap subject and verb.

If we ask a question, then we start with the verb. Of course, this is done
with 'to do' in English, and there's a nice, archaic sound to it if one simply
place the verb first ("Went you to the store?").

In the sagas it is written that at some point earlier in history, the vikings
and the inhabitants of Great Britain (the island) understood each other.

With all the wars, conquests and migrations done by people of a similar
language, it is hardly strange that one cannot pinpoint exactly what English
is. At the time, one may summarize the situation that the Norwegians and Danes
were organized(1), as well as the Normans, whereas the inhabitants of Great
Britain were less so. The language of power, the courts and records will
disproportionately influence the common language.

1) Organized in the sense that they had picked up how to maintain power from
the remnants of the Roman empire. Vikings used, among other things, to serve
as the imperial guard of Constantinople.

edit: removed an asterisk that caused formatting changes

------
demetrius
The article gives a one-sided.

For example, while enumerating the similarities between the Scandinavian
languages and English, it fails to enumerate differences (e.g. Scandinavian
languages have suffixed articles while English, Old English and German have
articles before words).

It gives us some examples, but fails to give a large picture (e.g. what is the
share of Norse words in the N most frequent words).

~~~
tehwalrus
indeed; smacks of cherry picking. I would also have liked to see those stats
compared with the same ones for German, since that was also part of the
hypothesis.

------
IanDrake
While watching the English subtitled "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" I was
surprised by how many time I didn't need to read the subtitles.

Obviously I'm have no knowledge of linguistics, but maybe there's something to
this theory.

------
anthonyu
It's an interesting argument; however I am a little dissuaded by the fact that
half of the support for the claims of similar syntax between Norwegian and
English (split infinitives and placing a preposition at the end of a sentence)
are generally considered poor grammar in English.

~~~
fusiongyro
They're considered "poor grammar" for historical reasons (mainly because
they're impossible in Latin), not because they are not understood (compare to
"I the dog kick" which is ungrammatical in a much more rigorous sense). From a
linguistic standpoint what's interesting is what is understood and what isn't,
not what is the most proper.

------
stcredzero
This is why we think German and Dutch to sound quaint and love the Swedish
Chef from the Muppets.

------
wololo
this is also on r/linguistics:
[http://reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/13vn3j/english_is_a...](http://reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/13vn3j/english_is_a_scandinavian_language_what_do_you/)

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jonsterling
Let's not forget that Old English also puts prepositions at the ends of
sentences! That's not a valid argument for a claim of closer affinity toward
Scandinavian than Old English.

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mcmire
So if English is derived from Middle English which arose when the existing
inhabitants of the British Isles took on the language of the newly arrived
Scandinavians... where did Old English come from?

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ricardobeat
Second paragraph:

    
    
        Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is a West Germanic language,
        which the Angles and Saxons brought with them from
        Northern Germany and Southern Jylland when they settled
        in the British Isles in the fifth century.

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timc3
Actually its still not 100% understood and still being studied

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jon6
This is the most useless academic 'discovery' I've ever seen. Am I wrong?

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acuozzo
The number zero was considered useless for a long period of time [1].

A certain piece of academic information isn't useless just because you can't
think of a use for it, so I'd say yes, you're wrong.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Zero-The-Biography-Dangerous-
Idea/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Zero-The-Biography-Dangerous-
Idea/dp/0140296476/)

~~~
smegel
> The number zero was considered useless

It still is as far as I can tell. Try adding/subtracting it - it makes no
difference. Multiplying it just gets you back the same useless number no
matter what. Dividing by zero? Don't even go there!

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bitops
I can't tell if you're trolling or being willfully ignorant?

Zero represents the state of "nothingness" - the universe before anything
exists. The blank slate, tabula rasa, etc. The empty page before you write
anything it.

Zero is a very deep concept and it is far from useless. See the book "Zero:
history of a dangerous number".

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femto
Being funny I think.

I'd think it's actually a valid point though, if the question is put in the
form: Does zero (or its reciprocal) have any existence beyond being a useful
theoretical construct? Can the physical world actually reach zero, or only
asymptotically approach it?

Is the universe infinitely big? Can infinitely small things exist? Can a thing
be said not to exist (ie. we have zero of it), or is there always a miniscule
probability of it spontaneously appearing due to quantum effects? Is a vacuum
really empty? If we have zero, how do we measure it in the face of quantum
uncertainty? And so on...

\---

Edit: grammar

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whatshisface
>Can the physical world actually reach zero, or only asymptotically approach
it?

Five minutes ago, I had zero apples in my hand. At this exact moment, I have
no way of knowing how many apples are in my hand due to signal delay and
processing time.

Numbers as we know them are only useful for describing the past, but at that
task they can work perfectly.

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femto
Rather, your brain is telling you that you had zero apples in your hand five
minutes ago. Given that any measuring tool (including a brain) is a physical
system, isn't it also subject to fundamental uncertainty?

Granted that the probability is negligibly small for uncertainty causing two
measuring devices (such as my brain and yours) to return different answers for
how many apples were in your hand five minutes ago, but is it truly zero?

Also granted that in practical terms it's not worth arguing over, and I don't
propose that such possibilities should be taken into account in everyday life.

~~~
whatshisface
We may have flawed measuring devices, but they are attempting to measure
something with a real, constant value. The fact that we are not directly
connected to reality doesn't mean that reality is an illusion.

If, in reality, there were zero apples in my hand, I could say that I was
holding one apple, but then I would be wrong.

