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> Fußgängerzone We have these in Norway as well. Here they are called “gågate” (“walking street”), but what I actually wanted to say was that I think it’s inte
by codetrotter 8y ago
> Fußgängerzone
We have these in Norway as well. Here they are called “gågate” (“walking street”), but what I actually wanted to say was that I think it’s interesting how similar some words are. The German word for pedestrian, “fußgänger”, is very similar to what it’s called in Norwegian, which is “fotgjenger”.
You’ll hear how similar they are if you know how to pronounce these words in both German and Norwegian. If you don’t you might see the visual similarity but not realize just how similar they sound as well.
And in both cases the word is composed of the word for “foot” (fuß / fot) and a word derived from “walk”.
- wenderen 8y agoThey're both Germanic languages! Learning Norwegian definitely helped me brush up on my German for free - at least, reading and to a lesser extent speaking.
- smallnamespace 8y agoAnd of course 'footganger' almost makes sense in English — 'gang' in the sense of a passage is preserved in 'gangplank', and modern 'gang' has the related sense of 'group of people who go together'.
- Scarblac 8y agoBut "gang" here doesn't mean passage, it's the noon of the verb to go. It's foot-goer.
- MisterOctober 8y agoYep! It also shows up in loan vocabulary like "doppelganger" [double-goer] and old-timey quotes like "gang aft agley" [go often awry, via Robert Burns' "To A Mouse"]
- smcl 8y agoIn the case of Burns it’s not a loan word from German in English, but an actual Scots word: http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/gang http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/gang
- NicoJuicy 8y agoFootwalker would be a more appropriate translation, German uses more describing words.
- jhanschoo 8y agoWell, there's already the footwalk. I think the parent comment was going more for using etymologically related words.
- benc666 8y agoIn Afrikaans - spoken in ZA (south africa) - that is pretty much the actual word :) "voetganger" "voet" - foot/feet "ganger" - someone who moves along using the former noun The Latin Root is what connects many European languages.
- idontpost 8y ago> The Latin Root is what connects many European languages. Not in this case. Proto-Germanic before the Norse languages split off would be the root that connects English, Dutch, and German with Norwegian.
- NicoJuicy 8y agoVoetganger is the same in Dutch ;)
- chupasaurus 8y agoAfrikaans is a derivative of Dutch, so no surprise.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoEnglish "foot" (and the equivalent Germanic words) are cognate with the Latin word "pes" (= foot), but do not descend from it. It's not a Latin root.
- dmichulke 8y agoNot an etymologist, but I think they still have a common ancestor (proto Indo-European?). Lots of words in Latin with p have an equivalent with f in the Germanic languages: Pater - father Pes - foot Primus - first Note the English word is not necessarily the closest to the Latin one. P and f are also considered the same sound in a few word distance metrics such as Soundex for the very same reason.
- idontpost 8y agoYes, but Latin still isn't the root. PIE would be.
- wingerlang 8y agoDid you only now realize this similarity?