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Only half correct. English is roughly 50% French and 50% German. The English dictionary is also about 50% larger than the French Dictionary. The length of the
by adamzwasserman 1y ago
Only half correct. English is roughly 50% French and 50% German.
The English dictionary is also about 50% larger than the French Dictionary. The length of the German dictionary is irrelevant because: Hottentotenstrottelmutterattentäterlattengitterwetterkotterbeutelratte
It is very frequent in English to use both the French word and the German word for the same thing in different situation.
Beef (French: bœuf) / Cow (Germanic)
Pork (French: porc) / Pig/Swine (Germanic)
Mutton (French: mouton) / Sheep (Germanic)
Veal (French: veau) / Calf (Germanic)
Venison (French: venaison) / Deer (Germanic)
Poultry (French: poulet) / Chicken/Fowl (Germanic)
Purchase (French) / Buy (Germanic)
Commence (French) / Begin (Germanic)
Inquire (French) / Ask (Germanic)
Receive (French) / Get (Germanic)
Odor (French) / Smell (Germanic)
Aroma (French, positive) / Stench (Germanic, negative)
Cardiac (French/Latin) / Heart (Germanic)
Ocular (French/Latin) / Eye (Germanic)
Dental (French/Latin) / Tooth (Germanic)
- guerrilla 1y agoGermanic* not German.
- adamzwasserman 1y agoyes
- xg15 1y ago> Hottentotten etc I mean, you too can have an infinite vocabulary if you just leave out the spaces between words.
- adamzwasserman 1y agohahaha. exactly!
- IncreasePosts 1y agoI don't know how much truth there is to this, but I've heard a story about the difference in French/Germanic word usage may stem from inequalities from the Norman invasion - the masters were speaking French, and the common folk were doing the dirty work speaking old English derived from germanic languages. So, the masters were dealing with the finished product with French words - beef, pork, mutton, veal, venison, poultry - and the commoners were dealing with animals with Germanic words - cow, pig, sheep, deer, chicken, etc
- bioneuralnet 1y agoI remember the "History of English Podcast" covering a lot of this. I'm more a programming language nerd than spoken language, but I still found it fascinating. Old English was a Germanic language, later heavily influenced by Norman/French vocabulary. French of course descended from Latin, and Latin and Germanic languages both belong to the Indo-European family of languages. (The "C" language of humanity, if you will.)
- Joel_Mckay 1y agoIt was more that early English commoners had kept a more Germanic dialect, and french was slowly popularized with the aristocracy. =)
- nine_k 1y agoFrench was forcibly thrust on the population in 1066, but of course the conquerors were the elite, and the defeated, their servants. So if you tend a cow, you call it with the Germanic word: cow, not vache. But if you consume its expensive meat, you name it in French: boef / beef, not rind(fleisch).
- Balgair 1y agoOne I'll (badly) remember about English is: English is the result of Norman soldiers trying to woo Anglo-Saxon barmaids, and for that task was, evidently, effective enough.
- devilbunny 1y agoAt least in the case of meat vs animal, this was pointed out in Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe, published 1819-1820.
- b112 1y agoIt is absolutely not french anything, but instead, french and english both decend from latin. English decending from french you say! The nerve! (I assure you, my 6th grade english teacher would correct you thusly)
- hidelooktropic 1y agoYou might want to review the influence of William the conqueror on the English language.
- alentred 1y agoYou mean, Guillaume le Conquérant ?
- mrsvanwinkle 1y agosnortèd
- dragontamer 1y agoHow fitting for that bastard to be the one who bastardized our language!!
- fooker 1y agoFrench had several hundred years of established literary tradition when English was still 'descending'. Not that it matters, given that we are talking about this in English, which has become the lingua franca in an amusing twist of fate, thanks to the East India Company.
- School-Cotton 1y agoBeowulf, the earliest major work of English literature, is from somewhere between the 8th and 11th centuries. French certainly did not have "several hundred years of established literary tradition" by that time, even if you pick the latter date.
- tadfisher 1y agoCareful: English is just as Germanic as German is. It's easy to conflate "German" with Proto-Germanic and create the incorrect assumption that English evolved from German, when both languages share a common ancestor as part of the West Germanic family of languages.
- adamzwasserman 1y agotrue
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pqtyw 1y ago> English is just as Germanic as German is. Well yes and no. English generally diverged much more from the common ancestor than pretty much every other Germanic language. Yeah other examples like Maltese which is technically an Arabic dialect but with half the vocabularies coming from Romance/Italian languages.
- nicole_express 1y agoEnglish has certainly diverged quite a lot, but there are other ways it stayed the same and German diverged; for example, the infamous "th" sounds were at one time common to all Germanic speakers, but was lost among mainland Germanic speakers while English (as well as Icelandic) kept it.
- insane_dreamer 1y agoNo, because unlike Germany, England was for hundreds of years ruled by a nobility that was French speaking (until English emerged from a blend of French and Old English (which was Germanic).
- tadfisher 1y agoYou could certainly make the case that English is not a Germanic language. You would be in contradiction with the linguistic mainstream, who recognize a direct lineage between Old English, Middle English and Modern English. You would also be placing much import on the influence of loanwords on a language, enough so that the presence of such would divorce the victim language from its linguistic family entirely!
- usrnm 1y agoModern English is a poor bastard child of a fair Germanic maiden brutally raped by French barbarians
- devilbunny 1y agoThey were Norse barbarians, they had just figured that Normandy was worth learning a new language (cf., “Paris is worth a Mass”).
- fchollet 1y agoOne interesting observation is that French-derived words in English tend to be fancier -- formal, sophisticated, higher-class -- while Germanic ones tend to be more casual, everyday vocabulary.
- euroderf 1y agoMy rough estimate is that words of two syllables or less are mostly Germanic and words of three syllables or more are mostly Romantic.
- DemocracyFTW2 1y agoça je ne crois pas
- euroderf 1y agoUm I meant words in English. Sorry..
- shagie 1y agoMany of these words transferred during the Norman Conquest. During that time, England was ruled by French speakers. The upper class and nobility in England were French (and French speakers). When someone in the upper class wanted boeuf, they wanted the meat of a cow - not the cow itself. And so beef entered the English language as the meat. This extended to other animals. In general, the word for the meat in English is the French word for the animal and the word for the animal is derived from the German word. https://www.etymonline.com/word/beef https://www.etymonline.com/word/beef and https://www.etymonline.com/word/cow https://www.etymonline.com/word/cow This also extended to the language law and things that the upper classes (rather than the commoners) dealt with. When the common English (germanic) did have to deal with those topics, they used the French words and those words were brought into English.
- bobbylarrybobby 1y agoI believe this is because the Normans were wealthier than the native Brits
- School-Cotton 1y agoEnglish is 0% German other than loanwords like "zeitgeist". What is more accurate to say is that English and German descend from a common ancestor: Proto-Germanic. Saying English descended from German would be just as wrong as saying German descended from English. The fact that "German" and "Germanic" sound similar does not mean that they are the same thing, nor that modern standard German is somehow the official representative of the Germanic languages.
- adamzwasserman 1y agotrue
- madcaptenor 1y agoIIRC the reason that the family got the name "Germanic" is basically that it was some Germans that came up with the idea. I'm having trouble sourcing this though.
- paleotrope 1y agoLast I heard was that the German tribe the language group was named after weren't even germanic soeakers. Like the fact that the Franks were a germanic speaking tribe who abandoned their language for the local dialect of latin which become French.
- School-Cotton 1y agoThe German word for the ancient Germanics isn’t the same as their word for present-day Germans (Germanen vs. Deutsche).
- paleotrope 1y agoThe romans called the area Germania after the germani that lived there. Germani is believed to be a celtic word though. So it's possible that the original Germani were actual celtic speakers. Which is another branch of old indo-european.
- Joel_Mckay 1y agoExcept "German" is an English word for Deutsch You are welcome, and I will see myself out.. lol =3
- Joel_Mckay 1y agoDon't fall for the divisive trolling... many places teach all three languages as part of the grade school curriculum. French is less concise structurally, German has phoneme that are difficult to pronounce, and English was derived from centuries of merging in countless trading partner pop cultures. The reason English is difficult to learn is many generation 2 languages words are no longer directly correlated with the original meanings. There were even writers that made fun of what English would sound like to an unbiased observer. Don't ask your LLM "is there a Seahorse emoji"... =3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok
- ajfkfkdjsfi 1y agoI always describe English as having a Latin alphabet, a Germanic grammar, and a universal vocabulary.
- aaplok 1y ago> Only half correct. English is roughly 50% French and 50% German. The article claims different proportions: "Half of all English vocabulary comes from those three Romance roots, compared to less than a third that comes from Germanic sources." Still only half correct, but based of those proportions it is more correct than claiming English is a Germanic language. It's not clear where the quite significant remaining proportion of the English language comes from. Colonial languages? The real point of the essay discussed in the article is that the French origin of (part of) the English language is Norman French, which was distinctly different from Parisian French and has pretty much vanished from Normandy since. So the argument is that English might be as close to Norman French as French is. The influence of Norman French on the English language was downplayed for political reasons, argues the author. Ultimately words of Germanic origins might be fewer but more frequently used. The grammar is also potentially closer to the Germanic origins than to the French ones? Let the linguists debate this forever I guess.
- adamzwasserman 1y agogood points, thx
- palmotea 1y ago> The English dictionary is also about 50% larger than the French Dictionary.... > It is very frequent in English to use both the French word and the German word for the same thing in different situation. It's kind of like in genetics: if a gene gets duplicated, it creates the opportunity for one copy to evolve to do something else. Likewise with language: having two words for the same thing allows their meanings to diverge without loss to cover more shades of meaning.
- Youden 1y ago> German dictionary is irrelevant because: Hottentotenstrottelmutterattentäterlattengitterwetterkotterbeutelratte English has compound nouns too, you know: "Coffee table", "finance department", "wine cellar". German dictionaries have very similar rules for including them as English dictionaries; they tend to include them when there's a common use that isn't immediately clear. If it gets to the dictionary, English often has a corresponding word as well: "Handschuh" -> "glove", "Zahnarzt" -> "dentist", "Hausaufgabe" -> "homework", "Fussball" -> "football" (or soccer if you're American or Australian), "Sonnenbrille" -> "Sunglasses". Note that the last 3 have basically the same morphology as their corresponding English words. In the end, the word count of the German dictionary isn't so different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number_of_words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number...
- adamzwasserman 1y agoOh! For some reason I thought there were upwards of 300k words in the German dictionary.
- Izkata 1y agoTheir link does include German at 330k, but both languages are listed several times with a massive range.
- seec 1y agoAs a native French speaker who reads a lot of English I can attest that the vocabulary thing is very real and quite annoying when you try to translate stuff. There are many words that are just inexistant in French and a pain in the ass to translate conceptually even using multiple words (and/or composed). Most Frenchs are incredulous about this because they somehow think their lang is the best thing around.