Yes. I was skeptical till I read this paragraph.
The two researchers show that the sentence structure in Middle English -- and thus also Modern English -- is Scandinavian and not Western Germanic. "It is highly irregular to borrow the syntax and structure from one language and use it in another language. In our days the Norwegians are borrowing words from English, and many people are concerned about this. However, the Norwegian word structure is totally unaffected by English. It remains the same. The same goes for the structure in English: it is virtually unaffected by Old English."
That's a very powerful point. German word order is very different from English and the word order in English does not seem to have been affected by its heavy exposure to the Romans or the Normans though the vocabulary was. Very interesting theory, indeed.
German word order very different from English is. :-)
And don’t even let me get started on my rant about assigning a gender to nouns. Too late...here goes: Masculine, Feminine, Neuter. What is this European obsession with sex anyway? The French and Germans can’t even agree upon the gender of the moon [la lune vs. der Mond). Who assigned such rules anyway? No wonder they have so many wars. /rant