Background
English and German both belong to the West Germanic language branch, which comes from
the Proto-Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. The two languages have
only really diverged from their Proto-Germanic ancestor 500 years ago. During the early
middle Ages, the West Germanic languages were separated from each other, by the
development of Middle English and by the High German consonant shift on the other
continent. But despite this separation; they are so closely related hence, they still share
many features.
Intro
It is apparent that the relationship between German and English, is evident in the similarity of
pronunciation across a wide range of words however, many differences have emerged
across time, as the two languages diverged from their common ancestor; presently seen in
subsystems such as: their grammar (In particular, their sentence structure and word order),
their inflections, their phonology (pronunciations or spellings) namely the sounds of
semantically related words whose changes are described by Grimm’s law and the High
German consonant shift and even their alphabet/scripture. There are various reasons as to
why a majority of their vocabulary remains similar.
History
Historically. The French-speaking Normans invaded England in 1066 (William the
Conqueror), bringing many French and Latin words with them to England.
However, England was already full of Germanic tribes who were speaking a kind of “Old
English”, using words like “du”, “ich”, “geh” and more, that are still used in German today.
This original English language that was infiltrated by French and Latin, which was called
Anglo-Saxon, and gets its name from the Germanic tribes who migrated there around 500800 A.D. It is important to note that these were Germanic. These Germanic tribes continue
to speak their own English after the Normans came to England and the Norman and Latin
words didn’t displace much vocabulary, or subtract anything, rather they added to this early
language.
Phonology
From a Phonological standpoint, Grimm’s Law describes that the Indo-European consonants
that underwent regular changes in the Germanic languages. For example, where P becomes
F, is evident in Latin’s “pedem” which corresponds to English foot and German Fuss. And
the change of *kʷ > hw, evident in Latin’s “Quod” which corresponds to English “what” and
German “was”.
The High German Consonant shift represents when, the pronunciations of older more
primitive/old German words were changed when compared with their Modern English or
Dutch un-shifted equivalents. A good example is the letter P in German, which changed to F
1500 years ago (for example, English Ship became Schiff) and has remained the same ever
since.
Aside from the shifts in the spellings of words, The pronunciation of letters remain fairly the
same, German is very logical in structure and pronunciation, the extra letters in German ,
such as the umlaut don’t even introduce new sounds, that don’t already exist in English,
rather they exist so sounds can be clarified; for example ü can be simply written as “ue” and
ä as “ae”, in contrary, vowels and consonants in English sounds can harder to get correct,
because they sometimes sound very different to how they are written, because they are not
as phonetic, because of the conservation of foreign spellings, resulting in silent letters, for
instance: French rendezvous. And Latin Phlegm, or Receipt.
Grammar
From the past, the grammar of Old English and today’s German are quite similar, from
cases, gender and movable sentence structure, these all once existed in Old English, but
still exist in German today. Over time, as English language was going through a change from
Middle English to Modern English. A lot of these Germanic Grammatical rules were being
shed and much of the modern English vocabulary was being created. German is unique in
that it’s one of a few languages that have kept their inflections, Old English was largely
based around Inflections (the endings of words) but the use of infections were lost, for
various reasons, partly due to Germanic tribes showing considerable weakening in the
articulation of consonants — (a phonetic process known as lenition) weakening their
influence on English and English being exposed to a now different Germanic set of
languages, while in German, the words still change depending on their gender, order,
number and tense.
Conclusion
In conclusion, if you disregard the similarities in the vocabulary, it may seem that these
languages are very apart when it comes to their grammar, inflections, parts of their
phonology, but if you follow their history and trace them back only a few hundred years, you
are able to see the developmental changes English went through from Proto-Germanic to
differentiate itself from the rest of the Germanic languages and that the German language
had a close relation to English from the inception of the English language.
It is possible that just as their grammar, inflections and alphabets/scripture have diverged,
given enough time, their phonology will drift further apart and the two would not sound that
similar.