Comparing Shaetlan and English grammar
It is sometimes claimed that the grammar of Shaetlan is "mainly English". This implies two things: (1) that Shaetlan descends from English, and (2) that if a language has grammatical features that overlap with English, then they must come from English. Both are factually incorrect: (1) Shaetlan does not descend from English, but is a blend of Scots, Norn and the Low Germanic languages; and (2) all Germanic languages, (Swedish, Dutch, German, etc) have many grammatical features that overlap with English but that doesn't mean that they have taken them from English. It simply means that they are closely related.
We have combined the major features listed for English in the Grammar of Spoken and Written English with the features listed for Shaetlan so far in our primer. Some features were identical. For example, both languages have the same basic word order (subject-verb-object), but so do 35.4% of the languages of the world. Some features were similar but not the same. For example, both languages have regular and irregular verbs (as do all other Germanic languages), but they differ in WHICH verbs are regular or irregular. Some features had no overlap between the languages. For example, StE has relative pronouns (who/which), but Shaetlan does not. Relative pronouns are very rare, only found in 7.2% of the languages globally. On the other hand, Shaetlan has an associative plural (an dem) and a special form for the 2sg person (du), but StE has neither. Again that makes StE globally quirky: 84.4% of the languages globally have an associative plural; and to not have a 2sg person is globally "rarissimum" (extremely rare).
The result of our comparison is that of the 243 major features in our database, 69 (29%) are identical, 111 (46%) are similar but not the same, and 54 (22%) have no overlap between the two languages. These data therefore do not support the claim that the grammar of Shaetlan is "mainly English".
References
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey N. Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward Finnegan. 2021. Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) 2013. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at http://wals.info.
Rara & Universals Archive. Das grammatische Raritätenkabinett & The Universals Archive. Available at https://typo.uni-konstanz.de/rara/.
Velupillai, Viveka. 2012. An Introduction to Linguistic Typology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Velupillai, Viveka & Roy Mullay. 2022. Shaetlan. A Primer. Available at: https://www.iheardee.com/shaetlan/shaetlan-grammar-dictionary.
