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A comment on Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (2024). Parent comment

Re:Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (2024) by jessekv on Saturday February 22, 2025 @05:49PM (#43144091)
And therefore, Dutch is English :D
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Re:Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (2024) by stavros on Saturday February 22, 2025 @05:53PM (#43144127)
No, English and Dutch are distant cousins.
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Re:Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (2024) by jessekv on Saturday February 22, 2025 @08:07PM (#43145135)
Haha ok- but then so is German. Dutch has Low Franconian origins, and the more you learn about it the weirder it gets. Also, it did not have the consonant shift- e.g. water (en) vs water (nl) vs wasser (de).

That said, after centuries of relative stability, modern Dutch is absorbing English words as fast as it can, who knows if it is still recognisable in 50 years.

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Re:Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (2024) by stavros on Saturday February 22, 2025 @09:45PM (#43145892)
I don't know, I think maybe Dutch and German are more estranged siblings. English is a weird case because the German part is very German, but then the non-German part is pretty big!
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