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But in Celtic, verbs come first in a sentence, which is less ordinary worldwide, and downright freaky within Indo-European languages.
democratic impulses in the wake of the Reformation
In Middle English, waking up like Rip Van Winkle around 1200, case and gender were largely as they are now: vestigial and absent, respectively.
English is not, then, solely an offshoot of Proto-Germanic that inhaled a whole bunch of foreign words. It is an offshoot of Proto-Germanic that traded grammar with offshoots of Proto-Celtic.
The argument is about what constitutes artful and effective usage.
English, as languages go, and especially Germanic ones, is kind of easy.
spelling, þ was the th sound in thin, and ð was the th sound in this.)
That is actually a misconception. The symbols didn't consistently distinguish voiced and voiceless /th/
Decade after decade, no one has turned up anything showing that grammar marches with culture and thought in the way that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis claimed.
To Whorf, Hopi and the world view it supposedly conditioned was not just different, but better:
Abley marvels at the fact that Native Americans are capable of carrying on conversations among multiple participants—which is like praising a culture for cooking food or, really, being more cognitively advanced than their pets.
No one is “primitive,” but just as important, no one is privileged over others with a primal connection to The Real.
that no less than a third of the Proto-Germanic vocabulary does not trace back to Proto-Indo-European.
borrowed a third of its vocabulary from another language.
Languages? Why just one?
All languages do.
I am not sure that is true
