"Teutonic is considered somewhat of a dirty..."

I think this may be a whyfor England has a bunch of "scholars" that are latter-day Celtic flag waivers; they seem to addle, and greatly downplay, England's Teutonicness at every bend. This might also be grounds for why there has been a lot of borrowing from French and Latin after 1500, markedly so in the now.

Sprache ist der Träger der Kultur!

I meant, "I think teaching born English speakers [Teutonic tongues] is one of the keys..."

I think teaching born English speakers is one of the keys to keeping and further the "Teutonicness" of the English tongue. I always found it rather odd that the "hallowed Halls of Learning" pushed the learning of Romance tongues (French, Spanish) and Latin.

Now, it's Asian tongues. All of this is said with the understanding that learning these tongues can be good for business and politics; that is not lost on me.

Lots of Dutch words in English, even Dutch words that came to English through French. I think it good for born English speakers to also learn Dutch, or any of the kin Germanic tongues.

@Jayles: "A great shame it was not taken up in Bayern."

Why? Kun je Nederlands spreken? Mijn Nederlandse taal is een beetje roestig.

Oldest written Germanic likely seems to be from about 300 BC. It is found on the Negau-B helmet, and is written with runestaves of some kind (maybe Etruscan/ North-Italic). It reads:

Harigasti teiwai < either "...to the god Harogast (Odin), or "Harigast (Odin) and Teiwaz (Tyr)". Also, maybe, "made by Harigast".

How cool is that! This is many, many years earlier than Wulfilas' Codex Argenteus; about 650 years, or so, earlier!

@ þ:

I don't see where the WIKI says it is not true. There are a lot of "if's, and's, & but's"; nothing that is hard truth. The WIKI does seem to say that this thought is indeed not within the mainstream, and many mainstream thinkers about this do not acknowledge the seeming truth of it.

I am going to look about the web and see what I can find. Thanks though.

"English was quite small, and we are left with mysterious words like ,er, "dog"." Well, one thought about where 'dog' comes from is this:

DOG < Old English docga “strong hound breed” (it had a marked, keenly drawn, meaning, not unlike 'hound' in English today), a pet-shape of Old English -docce (“muscle”) (see fingerdocce (“finger-muscle”) with ending -ga (see frocga (“frog”), picga (“pig”)), from Proto-Germanic *dukkōn 'power, strength, muscle'. See Platt dogge "a big dog"; Dutch dog "a bull-dog"; German Deutsche/Dänische Dogge "Great Dane", die Dogge "mastiff"; Danish dogge, Swedish dogg, a mastiff.

This got me thinking today > "About 80 percent of Germanic word roots are of non-Indo-European origin."

If 20% of Germanic roots are from PIE or IE, where does the other 80% come from?

Look how near Frisian and today's English are, even with all of the Latinates and Greek words it doesn't need:

English Frisian
as as
cheese tsiis
cow kou
day dei
ear ear
head haed
hear hear
thought tocht
through troch

Maybe Frisian is how weed be speaking English, if 1066 went the other way!