Sure, but who believes english comes from modern german? The OP is laying out a strawman of confusion. The article certainly does not make this claim. It’s being pulled from the OP’s ass with no context for a dopamine hit.

Edit: removed accidental condemnation of sodomy.

I regularly teach a historical linguistics course. Despite my repeatedly telling my students that Germanic is not the same as German (it's easier in German, where the distinction is clearer: Germanisch vs Deutsch), and that English doesn't come from German, a surprisingly high percentage still end up thinking that English comes from German.

So, the Strawman is realer than one would like, albeit still lacking a brain.

When I first learned about the history of English as an adolescent, I used to say that English was "a mixture of French and German". I think I was thinking that Germanic languages had not diverged significantly from each other at the time of the Norman Conquest and that French and German were also conservative enough that the modern languages were recognizably similar to or even mutually intelligible with their ancestors from a thousand years ago.

These intuitions that I held about language change are not right, and they did allow me to confusedly use "Germanic" and "German" pretty much interchangeably. (After learning more linguistics and modern Germanic and Romance languages, I can now return to my old intuition and see it as a useful metaphor.)

I think you and other people in this thread are right to actively try to correct this misconception, because it's a real misconception that people, including me, have held literally instead of metaphorically.

It's an unfortunate accident that English uses 'German' for the language and 'Germanic' for the language family which easily leads to this sort of confusion.

[Even ca. 700-1000 A.D., Old English and the ancestors of modern German (modern 'Hoch Deutsch') were pretty different, if obviously related, e.g.:

Old English:

============

Fæder ūre, ðū ðē eart on heofonum,

Sī ðīn nama gehālgod.

Tō becume ðīn rice.

Gewurde ðīn willa

On eorþan swā swā on heofonum.

Urne gedæghwamlīcan hlāf syle ūs tōdæg.

And forgyf ūs ūre gyltas,

Swā swā wē forgyfaþ ūrum gyltendum.

And ne gelæd ðū ūs on costnunge,

ac alȳs ūs of yfele.

* * * *

Old High German (Bavarian):

===========================

Fater unser, du pist in himilum.

Kauuihit si namo din.

Piqhueme rihhi din,

Uuesa din uuillo,

sama so in himile est, sama in erdu.

Pilipi unsraz emizzigaz kip uns eogauuanna.

Enti flaz uns unsro sculdi,

sama so uuir flazzames unsrem scolom.

Enti ni princ unsih in chorunka.

Uzzan kaneri unsih fona allem sunton.

That is also useful because that is further apart than I would have expected. :-)

Is there a continental European Germanic language that was closer to English at that time? An ancestor of modern Frisian or something?

Old Saxon will be the closest thing to Frisian for the same time period, and it does look closer to the Old English:

Fadar usa firiho barno,

thu bist an them hohon himila rikea,

geuuihid si thin namo uuordo gehuuilico,

Cuma thin craftag riki.

UUerða thin uuilleo oƀar thesa werold alla,

so sama an erðo, so thar uppa ist

an them hohon himilo rikea.

Gef us dag gehuuilikes rad, drohtin the godo,

thina helaga helpa, endi alat us, heƀenes uuard,

managoro mensculdio,

al so uue oðrum mannum doan.

Ne lat us farledean leða uuihti

so forð an iro uuileon, so uui uuirðige sind,

ac help us uuiðar allun uƀilon dadiun.

[these are all of course translations from Latin, so there are also differences in translator choices as well.]

Yeah, also the problem of the translation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiousios (or the vernacular translation of Latin translations of that word)...

Thanks for the Old Saxon example. Very interesting!

You are probably right, but the original article is more of a "freestyle". It is entertaining and engaging. Conflating (deliberate or not) of cousins and ancestors is a small price to pay to keep the reader on the subject. [pardon my English, I am sure you will find enough to critisize]

It was pretty entertaining, sure. English in all its phases is a fascinating language. Hence why I hate to see it reduced to some kind of debased German :-) I like German, too. I wish I spoke more of it.

What's interesting is the gap of time between our last written Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and the time that Middle English was written down. In-between is a couple hundred years of time where the aristocracy spoke and wrote in Old Norman French. Interesting things happened phonetically in that time but we know little of it.

It would be pretty easy to say something like "Go far enough back, and English and German (and Dutch &c.) were the same language...."

Is that not true? Certainly you can find a period of time when populations in both England and Saxony spoke mutually intelligible tongues. This confusion seems to arise out of a deliberate misinterpretation of your quote out of bad faith, not any semantic misunderstanding of the past.

If you believe this isn’t true you’re wandering into a territory of objectively demarcated language and dialect classification to little benefit. Pedagogically useful I’m sure, but to what semantic end? Hell I thought this was the type of problem linguistics intended to solve.

No, it is true: that was exactly why I suggested it. My point was that rather than saying something along the lines of "English used to be German" (which makes as much sense and is just as true [false] as saying "German used to be English"), it would have been easy enough to quickly say that they used to be the same language.

(Though, as to your point about England and Saxony: (1) mutual intelligibility is not the same as being the same language (2) Old Saxon isn't the same as Old High German.)

[But, you're right about demarcating language: it gets tricky pretty quickly. E.g., from a certain perspective, English (and German, and French, and Hindi) don't exist in the first place. A bunch of people have some sort of instantiations of formal grammars + lexicons in their brains and the output of these is such that some sort of more or less effective communication takes place and so we say these people 'speak the same language'.]

It's also not even clear that Saxon is actually the origin for English; yes the Anglo-Saxons often called themselves Saxons, but it is likely the ethno-linguistic pool they came from was something closer to Frisian than Saxon. Or some sort of Common West Germanic, from what is now Schleswig-Holstein and Frisia, not Saxony proper.

So yeah there would have been mutual intellegibility, because at that point there was likely high mutual intelligibility between all Western Germanic languages. But like you said that doesn't make them the same language. And like you aluded to, it's kind of a lumpers vs splitters thing.