In a message dated 12/16/99 12:31:13 AM Mountain Standard Time,
gpiotr@... writes:
<< but the _basic_ vocabulary, things like kinship terms, body parts, and
common
objects, is almost all Germanic in origin... and, in fact, mostly PIE.
>SIGH. This is patently untrue. Sister is a loanword from Old Norse (or it
would be *swester
-- my source lists Modern English 'sister' as derived from Old English
'sweostor' not Norse 'systir'.
In any case, Old Norse and Old English were still mutually intelligible
during the Viking-era settlements in England, no more different than some
English dialects are from Standard English today, so it's more a case of
intra-dialect influence.
>Aunt and uncle are French
-- but mother, father, brother, sister, son, daughter, etc. are Germanic.
Of the 1000 most commonly used words, a large majority -- not all, but a
majority -- are Gemanic, while considerably less than half the total English
vocabulary is.
Nobody could doubt, even with no knowledge of the historical circumstances,
that English is a Germanic language.
Which was my point.