tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post3088289989165604850..comments2024-03-26T07:09:21.701+00:00Comments on linguistlaura: Footballers' Foreign Accent Syndrome?Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-76829953382085736412013-08-19T21:15:59.966+01:002013-08-19T21:15:59.966+01:00Well, of course Northern English is Dutch, or Norw...Well, of course Northern English <i>is</i> Dutch, or Norwegian, or something. Ringe, Tarnow, et al., the people who figured out the <a href="http://www.cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/CPHL/" rel="nofollow">most parsimonious Indo-European family tree</a>, ran the same software on the modern Germanic languages. There are so many criss-crossing loans that the software coughed up a complete hairball, with no sensible family tree at all. If we didn't have the older forms of the languages, we'd know they were related but we'd never figure out just how.John Cowanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11452247999156925669noreply@blogger.com