Was the German language influenced by any other languages? How did the German language get to what we hear today? I know that the letters were influenced by Latin, but did the language change or just adopt Latin letters?
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3The German language is not the same as the Germanic language spoken in Roman times. How much it has changed is hard to say though, as there is no longer texts of roman-age Germanic preserved. For information on the history of German, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_German This question is too broad to answer here.– Lennart RegebroJan 9, 2014 at 18:19
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Not hardly. All languages drift over time. Even in this modern age of worldwide mass media, this happens.
Linguists figure that West Germanic broke off from the Germanic language root sometime around 1AD. All West Germanic languages (including the ancestors of English, Dutch, and German) were mutually-intelligible dialects until sometime between the third century and 700AD.
The branch from this root that eventually became modern German was Old High German, which is thought to have become its own language sometime around 500AD. After about 500 further years of slow change it became different enough that we consider it a new language, called Middle High German, and then after 300 more years Early New High German, then after 300 more years New High German (what we know today as "German").
Don't let the namings fool you. Modern German has no more special status as a descendant of Roman-era Germanic than any other Germanic language. In fact, languages tend to change the least in smaller relatively isolated communities, which means you'd expect the closest living language to Roman-era Germanic to be something like Icelandic, which some in fact claim is the case.
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1Exactly! In fact, I believe that everything written in German(ic) before Martin Luther is already extremely hard to read for a current German speakers in the absence of a specific training. And that's less than 600 years ago (during which the invention of the printing press probably decreased the rate of linguistic drift).– OlivierJan 9, 2014 at 20:44
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@Olivier That sounds about right. I for the most part can't understand Shakespeare, although some English speakers can. That means he's on the verge of leaving intelligibility, and his stuff is about 400 years old now.– T.E.D. ♦Jan 9, 2014 at 21:03
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1I must point out, as a native tyke, that Shakespeare does in fact rhyme and make sense if you have a Yorkshire accent.– RedSonjaSep 10, 2014 at 12:21
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1@T.E.D.: Is that recent community edit acceptable? If so, I presume that the second instance of Icelandic should also be changed to Frisian. Jan 13, 2019 at 2:49
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2You're right about that sentence no longer working with Frisian. Icelandic is actually kind of special in how conservative the language has been. I've edited it to talk about "Germanic" rather than "West Germanic", so that I can still use Icelandic there.– T.E.D. ♦Jan 13, 2019 at 6:21