Why did English survive?

[The Brain]

Fascinating slice of info: in Swedish the standard word for river is "flod", but no river in Sweden is ever called "flod" in Swedish. They are "älv" or "å". Makes you thimk.

Hm. In German it's "Fluss", but I'm trying to think of any river that actually has that as part of its name and come up empty. The best I have is the Huang He (Yellow River) in China. Smaller bodies, like creeks might have the corresponding word in their name (-bach or -au).

Additionally, rivers in German will be male or female - die Elbe, die Donau, der Rhein, der Mississippi

(Though to be fair, the Elbe's name is most likely derived from the old nordic word for river, i.e. elv/älv)

But you do use Fluss when talking about a German river, right?

[Syt]

Yeah, Fluss is the generic term when you talk about any river. Elbe, Thames, Mississippi - each one is a Fluss.

It's a bit like the use of car. You call it Auto in German, and it's the catch all term for all cars, but you would never talk of a Mercedes-Auto or Toyota-Auto.

[The Brain]

Just for clarity: in Sweden you never use "flod" about a Swedish river. "I'm going down to the river" is "I'm going down to the älv/å".

[Syt]

Ah. Well, you would use Fluss for that in German.

[Duque de Bragança]

The Dark Age Germanic peoples ruled a larger area, going from Tunisia to Edinburgh.  Yet even today the divide between French and Dutch or German is generally pretty close to the site of the Roman frontier.  England seems a big exception.  It's relatively far-off from Jutland, was the site of the settlement of as few as 100,000 Anglo-Saxons, but English still completely assimilated the greater part of England and half of Scotland.  There should be a reason for this.  The Franks left a big impact on French, the Visigoths on Castilian, but the English people speak the language of the barbarian invader.   Given the proximity of France to the frontier, you'd expect it to be assimilated, not England.

The Vandals left very few traces. The Byzantine Reconquista wiped them out quickly.

As for Visigothic influence on Castilian, it's very small. Arabic had a bigger impact, not to mention Greek. I'm not even sure it was more influential than the Iberian substratum (cf. izquierda).
Frankish had a more important role, being that the Frankish connection is one of the features separating Langue d'oïl (Northern Gallo-Romance of which Parisian is the standard French) and Langue d'Oc. If Frankish had more of an impact than the Celtic substratum is still open to debate though. Counting by twenties quatre-vingt supposedly comes from there.
Btw, Norman French is just another Langue d'Oïl dialect with a limited Norse influence. The wikipedia page stating "castel" to be Norse is suspicious since castel is an Occitan form, closer to other Romance languages i.e Portuguese, Castilian, Catalan and Italian.

1) Romania speaks better Latin than most of the Romance-speaking world today.

Where did you get that?
As for Romanian, it's the farthest from Latin, among Romance languages. Keeping cases is not everything you know.

[Queequeg]

Aren't Castilian patronymics a Goth thing? The Goths ruled effectively for 400 years, longer in Castile and Asturias, would be surprised of they just left.....the way people construct their names. That seems pretty intimate.

I always assumed Norse was a Oïl language with a layer of Norse. It shows up in some of the Anglo-Norman borrowings.

Romanian keeps entire case system. Phonetically Sardinian is pretty close, and Italian might have more vocab, but keeping the fundamental way the language was structured is a bfd.

[Razgovory]

Is saying "Russian languages" some sort of nationalist faux pax?  I imagine the languages that would one day become standardized into Russian were quite varied before Christianization.  Anglo-Saxon certainly was.

The opposite.  A Slav could pretty easily go from Murom to Prague and be understood in reasonably complex conversations all the way though at the year 900.  Even today there's less differences between the entire Slavic family than there is between "dialects" of Arabic or "dialects" of Chinese.  Differences between Russian dialects or Russian-Ukrainian-Belorussian aren't that huge, still.  The Proto-Slavs were still Pripyat' marsh dwelling cousins of the Balts, routinely subjugated by Caspian Steppe peoples and hardly noticed by anyone, when Arabic, Latin, Greek, and German expanded in the Dark Ages.

I was under the impression that German pushed pretty far into Latin territory and stayed there.  The provinces of Rhatiea, Noricum and Pannonia both became fairly German.

Weren't those areas pretty substantially mixed?  They were pretty much the home territory of the Celts, but by the time of the Empire the Germans had been pushing the Celts out of the region for at least a century. 

The German settlement of Romania does not involve Balts or Slavs.

1) Romania speaks better Latin than most of the Romance-speaking world today.
2) Yeah, it did.  The early Goth settlement of the region probably already had a Slavic component, and once the Goths move en masse in to the Western Empire it's the first place we have records of recognizably Slavic peoples. 

TBH probably best example I can think of is that all of Flanders was once Dutch speaking, and Alsace and other parts of France German speaking, but were pushed back because French was the administrative language of the European courts, and the development and strengthening of Wallonian.  Then again, the frontier movied forward a few hundred miles rather than going over the North Sea and subjugating almost all of the good land on a large island.

Rhatiea had it's own language which was an isolate I believe, and the settlement of Romania I was thinking was in the middle ages.  Anyway, they along with Noricum and other Roman provinces are examples of either Celtic or Italic languages (which are fairly closely related) falling before German

[Queequeg]

Rhatiea had it's own language which was an isolate I believe

Etruscan related, it looks like.  However, it looks like that was on the skids by the time of Augustus, and immediately prior to the migration period it was maxed Sarmatian, Germanic, Latin and Celt.  It seems reasonable that some of the German replacement happened during the period of the Empire; enough tribes were settled, or worked as Foedatori, that Germanic dialects were probably pretty common. 

and the settlement of Romania I was thinking was in the middle ages.

Languages in the Carpathians are a huge clusterfuck, one of the biggest clusterfucks in the Dark Age Europe.  There was some Germanic settlement, but no one knows how much. 

Anyway, they along with Noricum and other Roman provinces are examples of either Celtic or Italic languages (which are fairly closely related) falling before German

Seems reasonable.  But Austria isn't a big country and is really pretty close to the lands already assimilated by Germanic tribes by the time of the Principate.  Still seems different from England. 

[Queequeg]

Linguistic situation in Austria is likely complicated by the introduction of the Slavs.  With the mixture of Rhaeto-Roman, German and Slavic languages it makes sense that people became monolingual in the language of the Holy Roman Empire.

[Razgovory]

My point is that the that the German language spread quite a bit from the period of Caesar to fall of the Roman empire.  When Caesar was campaigning in Gaul and such it's not know how much of what's now Germany spoke German.  I was under the impression that that the settlement of Germans in Romania was fairly well known.  The King of Hungary said "I want some Germans" and the some Germans came.

[Queequeg]

There was also the whole Goth settlement in Romania.  That was pretty substantial after the Huns started fucking everything up.  It's the reason the Vlachs are called Vlachs; it's the same root as "Welsh" and "Walloon." 

[Siege]

TBH the Danish makes it sound like a Jewish man leaped over the flood store. 

You mean a jewish priest. Be scholarly, be accurate.

[Queequeg]

I know what the last name Cohen and Kagan and whatnot means, but it's been a thousand years since the name was much other than a name. The only Cohen I know is a twink hipster who works at Penguin Publishing.

[Sahib]

Polish: Krowa przeskoczył wielkiej rzeki.

Krowa przeskoczyła wielką rzekę. 

[Malthus]

I know what the last name Cohen and Kagan and whatnot means, but it's been a thousand years since the name was much other than a name. The only Cohen I know is a twink hipster who works at Penguin Publishing.

You are forgetting the vital cultural influence of the Spock greeting.