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German is a Germanic language. More specifically, it belongs to the West Germanic language family, which includes German, Dutch, English, Frisian, and Afrikaans
by exiguus 1y ago
German is a Germanic language. More specifically, it belongs to the West Germanic language family, which includes German, Dutch, English, Frisian, and Afrikaans.
Latin itself belongs to the Indo-European language family.
I think that because they have almost the same geographical origin and cultural overlaps, they share many words.
- schoen 1y agoThey're far enough apart that the words they share by common descent (cognates) are often hard to recognize. For example, Latin /k/ is often German /h/ (canis/Hund, centum/hundert, cordis/Herz, cornus/Horn). Philologists actually had to discover some of these laws in order to recognize the existence of the Indo-European (Germans say "Indo-Germanic") family that German and Latin are both a part of. The directly-recognizable ones are usually "learned borrowings", because Germans have been very enthusiastic about learning Latin as scholars for a long time, and often consciously chosen to use Latin (or Greek) words.