Which language most closely resembles German and which French?

Baloo55th

Occitan probably resembles French more than most others. It is spoken across the south of France, but is not French. The Government of France doesn't recognise it as an official language of France, but I don't think they recognise Breton or Basque either. It can also be called Provencal (with a little hook under the c to make it sound s - I must learn how to get these things up on Windows). It was the language of the troubadours. Now for German. To start off with, there are two main forms of German, Hochdeutsch and Plattdeutsch (High and Low German). What you get in films and most writings is High German, but across most of northern Germany you will find Low German, which is fairly different. The languages recognised as not being German that are closest are Dutch (in the Netherlands) and Flemish (in Belgium) which are basically the same language, and Letzeburgisch (in Luxembourg), which are closely related to Plattdeutsch. Frisian (Dutch and German coastal areas) is fairly closely related, and is also related fairly closely to English. Feb 20 06, 5:29 AM

Arpeggionist

On the other side, Yiddish was originally a dialect of Plattdeutsch, with a couple of Hebrew words thrown in here and there. And a speaker of Yiddish can usually work his way through a conversation in German. Feb 20 06, 5:47 AM

Baloo55th

True. I forgot Yiddish. Spoken, that is, rather than printed in Hebrew characters. Feb 20 06, 5:52 AM

Arpeggionist

Well, the language is still the same language, no matter what alphabet you use to write it in, The word "schlep" still sounds the same. Feb 20 06, 8:22 AM

davejacobs

As Internet users we should be well aware that the written form of a language is paramount here. Unless you have some pretty sophisticated software, you can't tell how words are pronounced. DaveJ Feb 20 06, 8:36 AM

Arpeggionist

Well, that's Bill Gates' fault. Don't blame us. My father tried to fix that problem. Feb 20 06, 10:14 AM

Baloo55th

The point I was making was that Yiddish sounds reasonably like German - which isn't surprising - but that when written down in the original script used for it, it looks nothing like. In the Roman alphabet form (based on the Lithuanian Yiddish pronounciation) it looks more like German. Dutch, on the other hand, looks more like German than it sounds quite a lot of the time. Frisian looks somewhat Dutch, but sounds more English in its original 'pure' form, before Dutch words and sounds crept in. This is getting confusing! Feb 20 06, 12:12 PM