I consider myself to be a linguist and a Slavicist. I am interested in dialects and mutual intelligibility, and I am also a fairly big science fiction fan.
The idea that English is a type of German is one of the biggest misconceptions the general public has about historical linguistics.
English is as much a type of German as German is a type of English. They both share a common ancestor. At the time English evolved from Proto-Germanic, there was no ‘German’ ethnic identity, and speakers of Old High German did not call their language ‘Diutisk’ (the word that evolved into Deutsch). In Old High German, that word meant ‘popular/of the people.’
The German and Germanic label was invented by the Romans as a blanket term to describe the people of Germania (which was not a real country, but a region Romans labelled outside of their borders). After linguists discovered genetic relationships between languages, they called the group of languages comprising English, Scots, Yiddish, High German, Dutch, Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Elfdalian, Gutnish, Swedish, Nynorsk, Wymysorys, Norwegian Bokmål to name a few, ‘Germanic.’
This does not mean these languages all evolved from German. They could have called them ‘Barbarian’ or ‘Middle European.’ Just because English is a Germanic language, and the word Germanic comes from ‘German,’ does not mean 1. Germanic languages all evolved from German, 2. German is the prototypical Germanic language that is the most Germanic out of them all, or 3. German is the central language of the family and all the others are offshoots.
No one assumes Polish evolved from Russian, or French evolved from Italian. This is because, by sheer coincidence, linguists named the group of languages comprising Polish, Czech, Slovak, Kashubian, Russian, Lemko, Belarussian, Ukrainian, Serbo-croatian, Slovenian, Upper Sorbian, Lower Sorbian, and others ‘Slavic.’ Likewise, they named the group comprising French, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, etc ‘Romance.’
Oh and Linguists do also call them Italic but luckily, the general public doesn’t ever use the word ‘Italic’ so no one gets confused thinking French, Spanish, Catalan, and others all evolved from Italian like they do with Germanic languages.
If I had my way, we’d call Germanic languages ‘Middle European’ or something, that way no one would be confused thinking it is a family comprised of languages that evolved from High German. A subset of the family did evolve from Old and Middle High German, but English didn’t.
In reality, the relationship between English and German is more like this:
Just like humans did not evolve from Chimpanzees, and the Chimpanzees did not evolve from humans, German and English did not evolve from each other.
No one consciously invented or introduced English one day. It evolved when settlers from what is now Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark landed on an island mostly populated by Celts. Slowly their speech changed from the mainland as children acquired it from a speech community unique to England.
Of course, it still would have evolved into a very different language from modern German had it remained in mainland Europe. Modern Frisian is very different from modern German.
