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'understand' is from German, 'comprehend' is from French. We get 'Fort' from French, but the equivalent concept 'Stronghold' has Germanic root words and constr
by dfawcus 7y ago
'understand' is from German, 'comprehend' is from French.
We get 'Fort' from French, but the equivalent concept 'Stronghold' has Germanic root words and construction.
What does that prove?
Yet your central point remains, the core of the language is Germanic.
- davidw 7y ago"Yet your central point remains, the core of the language is Germanic." Of those words, the ones with latin origins are: * central * point * remains * core * language * Germanic I guess you can run some statistics on all this, but subjectively, to me, Italian felt much easier to learn because much if it - including the grammar - felt more familiar than German.
- dfawcus 7y agoThat is largely down to the choice of multiple words to express similar concepts in English (due to its mongrel roots), and those having subtly different meanings, hence the high information density in English. So in one having access to an expansive enough vocabulary, one will often use fewer of the core words. Partially as a way to remove ambiguity in written English (which can be very difficult), partially to write a shorter sentence than would be the case using Germanic root words alone. For the second phrase you quoted, I could have written 'the heart of the tongue', but that could be read to imply a different meaning.
- jackjeff 7y agoFor a native English speaker, Italian is easier to learn than German according to the Foreign Service Institute. https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty/ https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/languag...