Ruby Impressions

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Edward Diener <eldiener at earthlink.net>:
| Luigi Ballabio wrote:
...
|> If I were to try and reproduce idiomatic Italian expressions in English 
|> by translating word by word, I would naturally come to the conclusion 
|> that English is a bad ripoff of Italian (which might be partly true if 
|> one takes Latin into account, but I won't enter into that---I don't have 
|> a flame-proof jacket nearby :)
|
|
| English grew out of an early Germanic variant called HochDeutsch, or so 
| I was taught many years ago in high school. Perhaps a linguist can 
| correct me if I am wrong. Of course there are English words which come 
| from Latin but the main linguistic elements come from this early German.

I'm not much of a linguist, but enough to correct you.  English belongs
to the "low Germanic" family, along with Dutch.  I believe "low" and
"high" ("platt", "hoch") are in the geographic sense, a more meaningful
translation for "Hochdeutsch" might be "hill German".

I would apologize for diverging from the topic, but since a topic like
this isn't going anywhere anyway ...

	Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu