This article is conflating language and ancestry. The seed of the confusion is in Reich’s research but the WSJ journalist blows it up to preposterous levels. Take India as an example. Most of the population is speaking some variant of an Indo-European (Indo-Iranian to be more precise) language but only a minority is genetically traced to Indo-European steppe people [1]
I think that numbers relying on self-identification from census can also be far from the actual genetic makeup of the American population. But after some searching I couldn't find any comprehensive study that tried to trace today's Americans to different European ethnicities. And I'm not sure if this is possible anyways, given that Europeans were mixed in many ways.
Germans are a distinct ethnolinguistic group that existed prior to the unified German nation state.
Many (most?) countries exist because pre-existing ethnolinguistic groups got their own country. For example, Bengalis have existed for long enough that you can easily identify them as a tightly clustered, distinct group in genetic profiles,[1] but never had their own country until 1971.
This has often meant displacing huge numbers of people in order to create contiguous nation states. Some 15 million in the partition of India and a similar number in Eastern and Central Europe.
The German Empire of 1871 is just one of many. Germans have lived in those lands for quite some time. Already Julius Caesar was conducting campaigns in Magna Germania.
The place existed, and people existed in the place, and the communication about that place is taking place today, and the way for one person to communicate a reference to that place to another person today, is to use the label Germany.
Given that English is itself germanic to an extent, yes. But it's also clearly got a lot of latin influence.
All of northwestern europe, of course, had quite a bit of DNA mixing over the centuries, so to what extent some DNA is particularly "German" or "English" largely depends on the time period.
While English is a Germanic language a huge number of words come from Old French since that was the language of the ruling elite following the Norman conquest of 1066 and continued to be used in administration for a couple of centuries.
Amusingly the Franks after whom French is named were also Germanic but they adopted the Vulgar Latin derived Old French then spoken in Northern France and which the Norse who invaded Northern France adopted before invading England.
Modern English didn't pop up out of nowhere, or relied on borrowing everything. Old English was a Germanic language, and while modern English borrowed quite a bit from other languages, it didn't start from scratch. It is still based upon Old English, which was Germanic. Even if you mean extremely modern, the base language is Old English, although the language evolves constantly. You would have a harder time comparing what is currently being spoken to Old English, but at the same time, you can't disconnect the two just because comparing the two now sounds entirely different. Language should evolve, since it's meant to communicate, not on it's own merit (as much as those who study language would like it to be). It's not crazy to think that in the future that a language could evolve even further to convey more meaning in a smaller amount of speech.
We’re well past “quite a bit” at this point. Overall 29% of English words have Latin roots, 29% are French, and only 26% are Germanic in origin. Common vernacular favors French.
I upvoted because that make sense, but isn't that Old English still a kind of "glue language", where words are replaced and of different origin, but ultimately just chosen based on contact with other languages and/or slang that matches another language? I'm honestly interested, because translating from Old English or Germanic seems to be easier to do with automated tools, than what you'd consider modern English. Granted, being American, I am pretty good with figuring out slang or new words (especially having a teenager). I can definitely see American-English being a creole language, with a lot of evolution towards Spanish, given a lot of Hispanic culture being blended into American culture. I wish I knew more about language evolution, because it seems exciting and actually useful for tracking meaning between people.
I guess I explained so much so that you could tell I wasn't trolling, and looking for a legitimate answer (or your educated opinion). I appreciate whatever you respond with!
> On the other hand English has copied enough from French to make it noticeably easier to pick up at the beginning than German. Some of that is simply being a more recent exchange with less time for linguistic drift, but these kinds of classifications are ultimately based on arbitrary criteria.
I think the difficulty with learning German is the complex grammar which is quite different from English. I suspect Dutch or Norwegian would be easier as their structure is more similar. And while there are more shared words in French, Spanish is normally considered easier to learn as it is more regular.
I agree. I may not have been clear enough when I said “at the beginning” but I was referring to shared vocabulary being more obvious vs German.
Perhaps a better way to say it is the overlap between Modern English and Old English is nearly useless when looking at an old text without prior training because of everything experienced linguistic drift.
Meanwhile more recent exchanges in either direction just pop out. The pop up here has buttons labeled “Accepter et continuer” which looks like accept and continue, and “S’abonner” which looks enough like Abandon to suggest what clicking on them does even if that’s the first exposure an English speaker has to French. https://www.lemonde.fr/
So IMO when looking at how closely related things are it’s worth remembering not just where something comes from but how much of that shared history is still around.
> I can definitely see American-English being a creole language, with a lot of evolution towards Spanish, given a lot of Hispanic culture being blended into American culture.
I don't think American-English is likely to become a creole language through mixture with Spanish because modern media is such a huge standardizing force. As a Brit I've never had trouble understanding anyone in the US while in the UK there are regional dialects I struggle to understand.
Linguists focus on grammar and generally agree with you. To be fair, Dutch is really close to modern English in terms of grammar and they have a lot of shared vocabulary.
On the other hand English has copied enough from French to make it noticeably easier to pick up at the beginning than German. Some of that is simply being a more recent exchange with less time for linguistic drift, but these kinds of classifications are ultimately based on arbitrary criteria.
All the base structure and common words are Germanic/Scandinavian. Yes, "fancier" vocabulary and constructed words like television or telephone are Latin/Greek derived. You could restrict English to its Germanic roots and still make (stilted) conversation. You could not do the same using only its added French/Latin/Greek vocabulary.
Reducing things to exclusively Germanic/Scandinavian roots without any crossing to old French etc would massively restrict vocabulary so yes you could hold a conversation but you could also hold one without any of those words. Both could seem natural or really stilted depending on the subject and your approach to dialogue.
When you say fancy it’s not just allure or autocrat, but also words like age, air, alarm, aunt, chair, money, beef, dance, etc
Modern English is still a Western Germanic language. If you don't speak English, it sounds remarkably like Dutch. The cadence, the intonation, the sounds - they are all distinctly Germanic.
Languages constantly borrow words, but there's a deeper foundation to the language (grammar, phonology, basic vocabulary) that remains.
This shouldn’t be downvoted. Except for colonizer languages, most languages in the world are coextensive with an ethnic group or closely related ethnic groups. Virtually everyone who speaks Bangla, Japanese, Korean, or Thai is ethnically Bengali, Japanese, Korean, or Thai.
That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a lot of (often forced) assimilation or worse involved for that to happen.
e.g. it’s not like Japan didn’t have a “native population” that spoke a different language(s). The colonization just happened a few thousand years earlier than in the Americas.
This is both pedantic and probably worth the correction. English is a Germanic language, originated in an exceedingly small continental territory nestled among other Germanics. Virtually no one would be able to discern the Germanic people who originated the English language from other Germanic people. If you are referring to the English people from the UK, then of course they are more mixed. But the English language was brought to the UK by the aforementioned continental tribe(s).
Nobody can. There's far too much overlap regionally between Britain and North-Western France.
And nobody in Britain has just Brittonic ancestry, or Frankish ancestry in France. For the most part the populations in Europe have been stable since a time that predates the expansions of the Celtic and Germanic linguistic groups.
And yet the genetic differences are so insignificant so as to make them pointless to mention in the context of (paraphrasing) "it's super strange that German immigrants speak the Germanic English language that originates from the cultural region of Northern Germany".
The person you responded to explains that the most common ancestry in the US is German, but English is the dominant language.
You seem to be making the point that the most common ancestry in England is from England, but the Germanic language of English is dominant, rather than the Celtic one it replaced.
It's the same phenomenon, not a correction. That languages spread even when genes don't.
>The most common ancestry in the US is German, not English, but English is still the dominant language. Language isn't DNA.
Their specific point is that "language isn't DNA". To support that argument they note that Continental German immigrants to America now speak English.
My specific point is that English originates not only within the language family of German speaking peoples, but that it originated with the DNA pools that comprise Northern Germany.
Therefore, I don't see how "the Germans are speaking English" makes the point that language isn't DNA.
I'm not saying that it is, at all. Its very obviously not. But the example being argued didn't make that point.
When they immigrated to the US, they spoke German. Now, almost all their descendants speak English.
Your objection is that English is a Germanic language. That's interesting, but irrelevant here. German and English are two different languages that are mutually unintelligible, and the fact that immigrants went from speaking one to speaking the other within a few generations illustrates my point that language does not have to (and often doesn't) follow genetics.
It's not only German immigrants to the US who now speak English. Pretty much all immigrants to the US speak English after 1-2 generations, regardless of what language they originally spoke.
> Therefore, I don't see how "the Germans are speaking English" makes the point that language isn't DNA.
Because German isn't English. Speaking one doesn't let you understand the other in conversation, not even a little bit. They're not like e.g. Spanish and Portuguese.
The fact that English is Germanic is a historical fact about where it came from, what it evolved from a millennium ago. But only a small percentage of Germanic influence remains in modern-day English vocabulary. It doesn't have anything to do with Germans in the US learning English.
Most simple words in English are still Germanic in origin. In fact, in the previous sentence, I count six Germanic words (most, word, in, English, are, still), versus only three Latin/French words (simple, Germanic, origin).
But as you say, the relationship between English and German doesn't have anything to do with what we're discussing. English and German are two different languages. Immigrants who spoke German gave birth to children who learned English, and after a few generations, their descendants didn't speak German any more. And that didn't just happen with German immigrants. It happened with every non-English-speaking immigrant group.
>> This article is conflating language and ancestry
From the article:
"DNA detectives, including at Reich’s lab, analyzed DNA samples from the remains of around 450 prehistoric individuals taken from 100 sites in Europe, as well as data from 1,000 previously known ancient samples"
Ancestry, not language.
"Reich’s award-winning lab at Harvard has one of the largest ancient DNA databases in the world and uses proprietary gene-analysis software co-developed by Nicholas Patterson, a British mathematician who once worked as a codebreaker for U.K. intelligence services."
Ancestry, not language.
"DNA evidence shows that the proto-Yamnaya population migrated from the Volga region to Anatolia"
Ancestry, not language.
"In many places, indigenous male DNA disappears upon the arrival of the Yamnaya, while indigenous female DNA is traceable in the following generations"
Ancestry, not language.
"Within years of their arrival, some 99% of the indigenous people disappeared, according to Reich’s analysis of DNA samples from the time"
Ancestry, not language.
I rate your claim that "This article is conflating language and ancestry" as false, and I award you no points.
This article's confusion is where it states "half the human beings alive today are descended from the Yamnaya." He thinks because half of the world population speaks an Indo-European language, and because the original speakers of the Proto-Indo-European languages were the Yamnaya culture (as Reich's research suggests), then half of the world population are descendants of the Yamnaya culture.
Archive version of the above science.org article "Where did India’s people come from? Massive genetic study reveals surprises
Analysis confirms Iranian influx, but also finds genes from Neanderthals and a mysterious human ancestor": https://archive.is/Wd4tP
That article says nothing about the percentage genetic component of the Indo European step people in the Indian population. It does mention a high genetic similarity to Iranians.
And interestingly Iranians are mostly not the descendants of the so-called Indo-Iranian steppe nomads (genetically). But they speak various Iranian languages.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/where-did-india-s-pe...