The news feed is unusually fat tonight — more than a hundred items. Two major stories have contributed to the flood: the talk of new gun restrictions by the Obama administration using executive orders, and the (seemingly serious) proposal by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman that the U. S. Treasury mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin and use it to pay off the Fed and bring down the national debt. Presumably the new coin would not actually have a face value corresponding to the amount of platinum in it, otherwise it would have to be more massive than a manhole cover.
In other news, a young man and a young woman (not married) in Tunisia have been sentenced to jail time for kissing in public. This is the latest example of enlightened jurisprudence practiced by the new sharia-compliant democratic government that was installed in Tunisia as the result of the “Arab Spring”.
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2 comments:
"Linguist Makes Sensational Claim: English Is a Scandinavian Language
Nov. 27, 2012"
Quite interesting, actually, considering history in the area, Scandinavia, the North Sea, and all those islands including Great Britain, isn't it?
I suppose the answer is that English is almost a Scandinavian language. It depends on what you term Scandinavian.
The Angles and Jutes came from Jutland, now part of Denmark, although Angeln was stolen from Denmark by Bismarck during the
19th Century. The Saxons and Frisians came from North Germany and Holland.
The language they brought with them was closer to Frisian and Dutch than to Danish, Norwegian and Swedish.
However, because of the Viking raids and the existence of Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon side by side in the kingdom of Mercia (and Northumbria) - the Danelaw -Mercian English became heavily influenced and it was Mercian that was spoken in London and so became standard English. Of course, had it not been for the Normans who spoke Norman French here for 300 years the similarity would have been much greater.
Not only did Old Norse words replace Anglo-Saxon words or compliment them - the most dramatic is the pronouns they their and them; but it greatly influenced word order.
The result is that English word order is closest to that of Norwegian than to that of Dutch or German. In fact, except for the fact that English never adopted the post-enclitic definite article of Scandinavian languages, it is remarkably close to Norwegian, whilst in other respects being closest to Dutch.
More importantly is that England has retained the democratic institutions of Germanic warrior society, thanks to the Anglo-Saxons, which have actually been lost on the Continent. These she passed on to North America.
However, the same spirit was until recently evident in Scandinavia and in Holland and - to a lesser extent - North Germany. Unfortunately, this love of freedom and democracy is fading fast through mass immigration and the EU where the former maritime peoples of the North Sea now find themselves losing their homelands to those who will be more compliant when faced with the totalitarian one world state to come.
To show how low we have sunk, we have all been lured into the totalitarian Marxist EU and the US has succumbed to the same totalitarian influences as it tells England she must remain in the EU's non-democratic clutches or face the wrath of the Obama administration.
Fortunately, we still have a few left in Scandinavia, Holland and here who will not be bullied and display that same love of freedom and democracy as their forebears who plied the sea in their longships.
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