Final answer:
D)Chinese is the most distant from English in terms of linguistic distance, due to its place in the Sino-Tibetan language family, its unique character-based writing system, and its distinct grammatical and phonological characteristics.
Step-by-step explanation:
In the context of linguistic distance, between German, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese, the language most distant from English is Chinese. While English, German, and Russian all belong to the Indo-European language family, Chinese is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family. This places Chinese on a completely different branch of the language family tree. Moreover, Chinese has a character-based orthography that is significantly different from the alphabetic systems used by English, German, and Russian.
Considering the languages' historical developments, alphabets used (English and German use Latin script, Russian uses Cyrillic, and Chinese uses logograms), and the linguistic characteristics including grammar and phonology, Chinese stands out as the most distinct language relative to English.