As the very article explains later on:
The Norman conquest of England in the 11th century gave rise to heavy borrowings from Norman French, and vocabulary and spelling conventions began to give the appearance of a close relationship with Romance languages[14][15] to what had then become Middle English. The Great Vowel Shift that began in the south of England in the 15th century is one of the historical events that mark the emergence of Modern English from Middle English.
For those who come from Latin origined languages (french, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, ...) these points are very clear and IMO they are at least 50% of English (thanks God
)But what I was objecting was that these guys defended that English is similar to Scandinavian with examples like the following (i'll include my own translation to spanish in red and you'll see that their arguments could be used to defend that English comes from Spanish (which obviously is not true, or from French, which makes as much sense):
Note: What I mean is NOT that English is no originally Germanic or Scandinavian but that the way they are trying to prove it is laughable.
"We can show that wherever English differs syntactically from the other Western Germanic languages -- German, Dutch, Frisian -- it has the same structure as the Scandinavian languages." Here are some examples:
* Word order: In English and Scandinavian the object is placed after the verb:
I have read the book.
Eg har lese boka.
Yo he leído el libro
German and Dutch (and Old English) put the verb at the end.
Ich habe das Buch gelesen.
* English and Scandinavian can have a preposition at the end of the sentence.
This we have talked about.
Dette har vi snakka om.
* English and Scandinavian can have a split infinitive, i.e. we can insert a word between the infinitive marker and the verb.
I promise to never do it again.
Eg lovar å ikkje gjera det igjen.
(Yo) prometo no hacerlo nunca mas.
* Group genitive:
The Queen of England's hat.
Dronninga av Englands hatt.
"All of this is impossible in German or Dutch, and these kinds of structures are very unlikely to change within a language. The only reasonable explanation then is that English is in fact a Scandinavian language, and a continuation of the Norwegian-Danish language which was used in England during the Middle Ages."
"But why the inhabitants of the British Isles chose the Scandinavian grammar is something we can only speculate on," says Jan Terje Faarlund.
I don't know enough about German to speak about whether they use group genitive or not, but I can tell you too, that in German (not only Scandinavian) you can indeed have a preposition at the end of a sentence. Example: "Rufen Sie an!"
