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[i2amroy]

Yeah, German and English are much closer together than German and Spanish. Dutch is a "germanic" language, but it split off about the same time German became high German.

Spoiler: Snazzy language tree (click to show/hide)

[Helgoland]

I'm pretty sure German is closer to english than Spanish is so it can't be too hard
And isn't Dutch also German based? Or am I just way off?

Dutch is like German's cute little ADHD-stricken brother.

[Arx]

Dutch is actually in some ways more similar to English than German. Non-gendered words, for instance.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Yeah, German and English are much closer together than German and Spanish. Dutch is a "germanic" language, but it split off about the same time German became high German.

Spoiler: Snazzy language tree (click to show/hide)

I meant English was closer to German than it was to spanish....

[i2amroy]

Doesn't matter, the same logic holds true. English/German are on the same germanic branch, while Spanish is all of the way over on the  Italic Romance one.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Doesn't english have some romantic roots?
I mean half the words in Spanish that we learned weren't too far off from English

[Comrade P.]

Aaaaand Slavic languages have their own branch and nothing to do with yours. That is probably because these languages are impractically complex to learn.

[Arx]

And African languages aren't even on the picture anywhere.

[Comrade P.]

That would be whole another tree, I presume.

[Arx]

Either a whole new tree or as many as four new trees. They'd be pretty stunted compared to the Indo-European one, though.

[Comrade P.]

That would be rather interesting to see anyway.

[Descan]

There already is a second tree, the Uralic languages, but yeah.

Problem with English on trees like that is that English is kind of a daughter of a lot of branches. >_>

[Orange Wizard]

And it gets more demented with every parent.

[i2amroy]

The tree is taken from a webcomic artist, so he only hit the language trees that show up/are related to the ones that show up in the webcomic.

Doesn't english have some romantic roots?
I mean half the words in Spanish that we learned weren't too far off from English

English is one of the bigger "I'm going to steal your words!" type of languages (though others certainly do it as well). Combine that with the fact that beginner classes usually hit a fair number of cognates early (since they are easier to learn/remember) and the fact that they are still distantly related, and you get a lot of cognates showing up (not accounting for the fact that they are probably the words a person remembers better after having had a "one class in high school" type of education). English/Spanish does have a rather large number of "false-cognates" though, words that sound/look similar but have totally different meanings. (A fairly basic example of this is the Spanish word 'once', which seems similar to the once in "once upon a time" in English, but in Spanish means "eleven").

[FearfulJesuit]

Dutch is actually in some ways more similar to English than German. Non-gendered words, for instance.

The real reason Dutch looks so much more like English than German is that High German went through a consonant shift about a millenium and a half ago, while Low German dialects (of which Dutch is a member) didn't. So you get triplets like Eng. drink/Dutch drinken/German trinken, Eng. ship/Dutch schip/German Schiff, Eng. make/Dutch maken/German machen.

This is also why English looks more like the Scandinavian languages than German even though it's closer to German- well, that, and the huge influx of Old Norse borrowings into Old English.