I think the most revolting thing about English is we Americans gave them a perfectly good language of American and then they ruined it with their poncy 'English' grammar. Ungrateful louts through and through.

FTFY

And here we see an example of the next era of language.

'Tis only a matter of time before we're reduced back to being cavemen with a language of vocalised grunts, groans and howling to signal what we're saying and thinking.

I would argue that we have been reduced to overly superfluous and obfuscatory communication. We need to progress back to more organic communication.

or

GRAAH

The linguistic invasions began long before the Angles and the Saxons. Before them, the B-Celtic speaking people pushed the P-Celtic speaking people out of south-eastern England (which is why the English call it Britain, while in many Welsh sources it is Prydain). The P-Celtic peoples were not the original inhabitants either, iirc.

You'd be better off asking this question elsewhere - preferably of someone who knows what they're talking about. The fact that so many suggestions made in this thread outright contradict each other should be enough to gather that the Internet is even less right than usual on this one...

Forget English, internet slang is the world's language!

They most certainly do, the large portion of the germanic tribes were conquored by the romans, who very much so insisted upon cultural assimilation. They absorbed portions of conquered lands culture and gave them some of what theirs had become. German may not take as much from latin as english and other langauges, but it plain and simply does.

ROFL IKR? AFAIK WE ARE THE FUTURE OF 2DAY. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE SWYP LUDITES. LOL. HAND.

Maybe you think so, but you're actually very false, german has assimilated some stuff from latin (most notably the concept of genders) but their roots are very, very distinct and are considered so by all linguists across the world. This is why we delineate between http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages in the first place.

The Romans didn't conquer anywhere near a majority of Germanic tribes. The Roman Empire at its peak didn't even include modern Germany. Anyway, the tribes would've had to be free to have participated in the conquest of Rome, which they did (as they fled from the Huns). I know for a fact that the Goths, Franks and Vandals were not a part of the Roman Empire, and those guys must have been pretty numerous because between them, they conquered North Africa, Spain and France.

Also this.

The Romans did not conquer a large portion of the germanic tribes - they barely scratched the surface. They never really held territory across the Rhine, and the germanic language group spanned from there all the way up to Scandinavia and east beyond Poland.

that is because when they came about the roman empire was all but already destroyed, infact one of their major historical relevance to the region was that they participated in the fall of rome. predating that the greek, then roman culture, trade and language had been influencing the entire region for a good thousand years. To say latin has nothing to do with english, or german languages is a proof of ignorance.

That would be ignorant, but no one has said that...

Your argument, like much of western history, shows a distinct Roman bias. But the reality was that as big as Rome thought it was, it was just a jumped-up backwater in the totality of humanity at the time. As much as some people like to think it, other cultures did not arise upon contact with Rome or its descendants, but instead had impressive empires of their own. Little is known of the germannic peoples of antiquity other than the tribes that shared borders with Rome, but they had a thriving culture, and their sphere of influence was nearly as large as that of Rome. Their post-Roman sphere of influence was larger than Rome's was, just like the Celtic civilizations that were superceded by Rome had been.

English is older than German, as a language. It comes to us from Saxon, Frisian, and Jutish, but went through Latin, Brythonic, and Romance languages on the way, so that Germanic and Romance influences account for a third of the vocabulary each.

As for Roman influence, that comes through the Romance languages derived in large part from Latin, not from Rome itself. When English began to become a language, Rome was long-gone. It simply couldn't have influenced the English language in its own right, by virtue of chronology.

My understanding was that Saxon was a Germanic language? (Not necessarily German, mind, but Germanic)

It is Germanic, but Germanic isn't a synonym for German any more than Russian is a synonym for Slavic. German is one of the older Germanic languages, at least in terms of being a cohesive thing rather than splintered into differing regional dialects.

... the people i was replying to had explicitly said that. but then again, you have a bad habit of not reading posts before responding to them.

Both languages grew out of the same root language, so how can one be older than the other?

Saxon is part of what is considered "Low German" today (from the lowlands of northern Germany) which is different from modern "High German" (from the high countries of the Alps). They split around the time of the fall of the Roman Empire.

Right. I don't think anyone's claimed that English is based on German; we've been saying it's Germanic. If Saxon is Germanic (and I think I saw those other two on Wikipedia's list of German tribes?), that makes English of primarily Germanic origins.

No, we haven't. We've said Germanic languages aren't Latin-based. Not that they don't have any Latin influence.

Most of England's invaders were Germanic. The Angles, the Saxons, the Frisians, the Jutes, the Danes, the Vikings, the Normans.... lots of Germanic peoples in England. Saxony is part of the northen half of modern day Germany.

1) the op did, which is why people are pointing that out. its right in the threads title

2) I didn't say it was based from latin, but did point out that its roots come from latin (in the case of english) while germanic languages were influenced by it via trade and conquest over a centuries by the romans.

ahahahha. Invading England seems pretty obtuse.