anghyflawn

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

No, it was not a Low German dialect. It was what is called an Ingvaeonic dialect, most closely related to Old Saxon and Old Frisian. Old High German is what is sometimes called Istvaeonic (and the Franconian dialects that were to become Dutch is also part of that group). There is a bunch of important differences between Ingvaeonic and Istvaeonic, and both are quite, quite different from North Germanic.

anghyflawn

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

Uh, really?

Japanese: topic instead of subject marking, deference forms, completely different morphological categories?

Chinese: productive verb serialization, very different syntax?

That's just off the top of my head

But that's not the point really. Learning any language well is mind-bending for any speaker of another language. It does help if the languages are different (I remember very vividly the click that went in my head in high school when I was taking English, Chinese and Hebrew simultaneously... that's how I ended up in linguistics grad school), but different people have their minds bent by completely different things. I mean, root-and-pattern morphology is really cool when it's that regular, but if you think of it it's not horribly different from Germanic strong verbs (write-wrote-written). Weird agreement patterns? Well, Welsh only uses the 3pl verb forms with a pronominal subject, so "they they-went" but "people he-went" (as, for that matter, do some varieties of English). And so on.

I mean, sure, whatever floats your boat, and it's awesome that studying Arabic can be so fulfilling; I've had the same experience with Welsh. But at the end of the day all languages bend your mind, and I don't think there can be an objective metric. They are just hard.

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