Well, at least from everything I've seen, Scots (*not* Scottish English) is definitely a distinct language from English, albeit the closest language to English; that kind of relationship is what I was indicating by analogizing Dutch and West Flemish with English and Scots. As for Low Saxon, Low Saxon is unambiguously a separate language from both German and Dutch; even though it shares some things with German that they do not share with Dutch, there are many things which German and Dutch share which Low Saxon, and in particular Northern Low Saxon, does not share with them.
In general, Low Saxon has a more conservative phonology than German or Dutch, a few innovations such as reduction of certain consonant clusters, fronting of some back vowels, loss of many final schwas in roots, and in Northern Low Saxon the merger of /a:/ and /o:/ aside. In many was, the phonology of Low Saxon is actually closer to early Old High German and than it is to modern German, due to the phonology of it vowel-wise being very conservative, unlike German, which has had a number of vowel shifts, diphthongizations, and monophthongizations along the way, as well as some extra consonant changes besides the Second Germanic Sound Shift, especially with respect to sibilants.
At the same, grammatically, it is more analytic than German (but seemingly less so than Dutch), while having significant differences with both German and Dutch, especially in Northern Low Saxon. Its article paradigm is more like that of Dutch than that of German, as in the nominative case it uses "de" for masculine and feminine genders (but uses "dat" where Dutch uses "het" for neuter), but unlike in many Dutch dialects today, the masculine and feminine genders are still distinct in the common (merged accusative and dative) case, as well as in adjective conjugation.
On the other hand, the pronoun system of Low Saxon is closer to that of German than that of Dutch, besides the phonological differences between Low Saxon and German. In particular, Low Saxon has not had the changes in second person familar pronouns which have happened historically in Dutch, and has third person pronoun forms which are (mostly) more like those in German form-wise than those in Dutch. However, some notable differences are that most Low Saxon dialects have replaced the historical third person neuter singular pronoun "et" or "it" (cognate with German "es" and Dutch "het") with "dat", that Low Saxon *classically* used the second person plural ("ji") rather than third person plural ("se") for the second person formal, and that there is no final /r/ or /k/ (which would what German /x/ in said position would have been) on many pronouns (compare "wi" and "di" with German "wir" and "dich" or "dir").
Verbs differ from those in both German and Dutch in that there are no dental suffixes in preterites, which are for weak verbs distinguished from present tense forms solely by a few differences in agreement, in often only the third person singular. and if anywhere else, in the plural. Also, the preterite is used little in Low Saxon, and similarly the passive voice is used less in Low Saxon than in German or English. Furthermore, in Northern Low Saxon, there are no "ge"-like suffixes for past participles, and in other Low Saxon dialect groups, usually what was "ge" in Middle Low Saxon has been reduced to a single vowel such as "i".
Another area in which Low Saxon differs significantly from both German and Dutch is the formation of possessive constructions. While it lacks a genitive case like that of standard German (even though such also does not exist in many German dialects) and very formal Dutch, it has a *prefix* s-possessive clitic construction like that in English and the continental Scandinavian languages (whereas the use of genitive case in modern German and formal Dutch is postfix), along with a linking possessive determiner construction, which does not exist in German or Dutch (but which did notably exist in Middle English). Note that it will also use prepositional constructions for possessive constructs as well, like in German and Dutch. From all of the above, it is clear that there are very significant grammatical differences between Low Saxon and both German and Dutch, which in places are actually closer to each other grammatically than they are to Low Saxon.
One note is that even though I make many specific mentions of specifically Northern Low Saxon above, Northern Low Saxon is by far the most widespread form of Low Saxon, and also the most "pure" (ie uninfluenced by German and Dutch) form of Low Saxon. However, on the other hand, Northern Low Saxon contains more North Germanic and English influence than other forms of Low Saxon, due to both trade contacts and sheer proximity to North Germanic-speaking areas.
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