Germanic origins

The English language grows out of many sources, French, German, Latin, no doubt some proto-Britannic speech which might have some relationship to Gaelic, Cornish, Welsh. Vikings certainly had input, though south of the border people have been a bit reluctant to take Scots on board. It’s all a bit of a mess, but obviously English works. In his essay on Karl Kraus in In the Age of Prose: Literary and Philosophical Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1984) Erich Heller agrees with Goethe who “believed that German, ‘this strange and wondrous tongue’, was so responsive to the subtlest stirrings of soul and mind that it could attune itself even to the spirit of another language. He who knows German, he said, is well equipped for the literature of the world, for German translations are more successful than any other.” Heller continues, “And it is certainly true to say that, compared to the awkwardness of Goethe’s Faust in English, Hamlet in German is almost a German drama.” I guess we…