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“Are you coming with?” After a few years living in Germany (as a native English speaker), my English and that of my friends became peppered with these German-i
by stevoski 2y ago
“Are you coming with?”
After a few years living in Germany (as a native English speaker), my English and that of my friends became peppered with these German-isms.
- Clamchop 2y agoThis example at least sounds perfectly natural to me, in California. I can remember my dad saying it, who was also a born and raised Californian. No German around whatsoever, shrug.
- bradrn 2y agoI say this as a native English speaker… but I speak South African English (or something similar), and I’ve heard that this expression is due to Afrikaans influence!
- stavros 2y agoThat's probably because Afrikaans is Dutch, and Dutch is German.
- bradrn 2y agoWell, ‘is’ isn’t quite the right word… but they’re all closely related languages, yes, which is why I mentioned it.
- stavros 2y agoYep, I was being liberal with "is" there, but hopefully the point came across.
- jessekv 2y agoDutch is German, and English is French.
- stavros 2y agoEnglish is French and German.
- jessekv 2y agoAnd therefore, Dutch is English :D
- stavros 2y agoNo, English and Dutch are distant cousins.
- jessekv 2y agoHaha ok- but then so is German. Dutch has Low Franconian origins, and the more you learn about it, the weirder it gets. Also, it did not have the consonant shift- e.g. water (en) vs water (nl) vs wasser (de). That said, after centuries of relative stability, modern Dutch is absorbing English words as fast as it can. Who knows if it is still recognisable in 50 years.
- stavros 2y agoI don't know, I think maybe Dutch and German are more estranged siblings. English is a weird case because the German part is very German, but then the non-German part is pretty big!
- yapyap 2y agoAfrikaans is Dutch yes, Dutch is not German. Learn your languages before spreading unwise nonsense on the internet.
- carlmr 2y agoNot OP here. You're right, but you could be more charitable in your reading of the previous comment. While it's wrong at the micro level it's not even nonsense on the macro level. Dutch and German are at the very least very related. They share a lot of constructs and words. There's no reason to be so disrespectful.
- eps 2y agoSimilarly "I've been here since two days" is usually a giveaway that somebody's translating from French.
- raphael_l 2y agoIt’s actually also indicative of German! (and I would assume a few other languages?) “Ich bin seit zwei Tagen hier.”
- dizhn 2y agoDo you notice an increase in this usage lately? I see it a lot on reddit and hn. All romance languages probably have it by the way. I know Italian does for sure.
- OJFord 2y agoHindi too, maiñ do din se yahāñ hūñ. I wouldn't be surprised if it were most languages really, English 'for' seems the weirder construction.
- ninalanyon 2y agoYou could use it in English too so long as you add 'ago' on the end. "Since two days" makes no sense in English because "since" refers to a point in time not a duration.
- OJFord 2y agoThat still doesn't sound natural to me. You could answer 'since when' with 'two days ago', but declaring it as a statement I'd say 'for the last two days' or 'since the day before yesterday'. You could get away with it in speech since it sounds like 'since.. [thinking] two days ago' and it's acceptable to change construction like that in casual speech, but written it doesn't seem right to me.
- selimthegrim 2y agoCould also be do din tak but that implies you’re about to take off
- yurishimo 2y agoI said this long before I moved out of the US. I live in NL now. I wish I could tell you where it came from. Probably from my stepfather who was raised in a rural Texas area that probably had some old Germanic roots.
- OJFord 2y agoThat sounds perfectly British English to me, to the extent that I thought your point was going to be it was something German had stamped out of you. Interestingly, I'm not sure if it's nationwide, or a local dialect (Dorset/West country) thing - interesting because there's a lot of German/Saxonism retained in the dialect, usually about word choice or spelling though, not phrases. As far as I'm aware anyway, not an expert. (For example we tend to prefer the -t ending of -ed verbs: 'burnt' not 'burned' etc. including in stronger cases words like 'turnt' ('turned' in any usage, not the modern slang for drunk) that Wiktionary etc. will tell you are obsolete.)