7 ms·

This relates well to one of the fascinating things I realized while learning German: the fact that so many English and German words and sounds have phonetic con

by moskie 13y ago

This relates well to one of the fascinating things I realized while learning German: the fact that so many English and German words and sounds have phonetic connections, coming from their common Germanic ancestry. For example, the letter "d" in German corresponding to "th" in English: die/der/das -> the drei -> three Donner -> thunder Ding -> thing daher -> therefore and, most relevant to this discussion: du -> thou I'm sure this connection can be better explained than I'm able to, but it was a mini-epiphany for me while studying the language.

joshbetz 13y ago
Du isn't formal though?
- moskie 13y ago
  Right, and neither is thou.
tikwidd 13y ago
This is the result of the High German Consonant Shift [1]. English - many accents, at least - retain the dental fricatives (th-sounds) that were shifted to alveolar stops (d and t sounds) in High German. Dental fricatives are relatively rare sounds among the world's languages. Icelandic and European Spanish are the only languages I can think of that have dental fricative phonemes. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift
- pietro 13y ago
  There are a few other languages with dental fricatives, including Arabic, Danish and Greek.
  - mnw21cam 13y ago
    Shibboleth. (Hebrew, apparently).
captainmuon 13y ago
The history of formal pronouns (du/sie) is also very interesting in German. As far as I remember, in the middle ages the third person singular ("er/sie", he/she) was used as a formal address for common people. Nobility used the majestic plural ("ihr", you/y'all). Now with the rise of the "Bürgertum"* in the 18th/19th century, people wanted to distinguish themselves from the peasants with their "er", but the distancing tone of the third person fitted well with their spirit. They also wanted to get rid of anything reminding them of nobility with the "ihr" address, but it seems they wanted their own bit of majestic plural and kept the plural form. So they basically invented using the third person plural "sie" (they) as a formal "you". The old forms now sound incredibly archaic, although they are still used in some dialects according to wikipedia. I also have to say that this story is very condensed and was probably more complicated in reality, as I am not a linguist. singular plural (majestic) 2. person du ihr 3. person er (sie) (distancing) (*"Bürgertum" means ~middle class, but I find it hard to translate accurately, "Bürger" means citizen or bourgeouis.)
sabbatic13 13y ago
The last class I got to help teach in Grad School was The Nature and History of the English language. Leading undergrads to this epiphany is also very gratifying (that and being able to explain the weirdness that is English orthography).
kristiandupont 13y ago
In Spanish and French, hora or heure means hour, but it also means time. If you go north, to Germany, uhr means o'clock, and watch/clock. Further north, in Scandinavia, ur simply means watch/clock, whereas time means hour. It's quite fascinating and gives you a sense how information and knowledge spread in ancient times.
- eitland 13y ago
  Be aware that Norwegians pronounce i something like a long 'ee' in English so tiem in Norwegian is pronounced very different from time in English.
xbadxapple 13y ago
It was a whatthehell moment for me too. I started learning German a bit later than English (we had to learn 2 foreign languages at school). Pronunciation exercises brought the epiphany here, haha. Was strange at first but then we thought - hell, after all, these languages have much in common going back some centuries. God but I hated pronouncing the umlauts.
- levosmetalo 13y ago
  > God but I hated pronouncing the umlauts. How comes you hate pronouncing umlauts and don't hate these various sorts of t-th-d sound? As in think-tank-they-did?
- Udo 13y ago
  > God but I hated pronouncing the umlauts. That's interesting, what's your native language? I found that the umlauts map pretty well to how a lot of people from GB pronounce their Us, As, and Os. If I had to transliterate the word "use" for example I'd write that as "jüs" in German.
vidarh 13y ago
Mix in another Germanic language, and it gets even more fun. Take Norwegian: "the" doesn't have a direct equivalent in modern Norwegian - we add the article as a suffix instead (a car = en bil; the car = bilen), but for the rest: drei -> three / tre Donner -> thunder / torden Ding -> thing / ting daher -> therefore / derfor du -> thou / du Older Danish is even more similar to German, though I don't remember it off hand. At school, when I wanted to get my German grade up, I got a copy of Faust, which was way above my German level, and then I got hold of an old Danish translation (1920's or so). The old Danish translation was much closer to the German, so it was reasonably easy to figure out how they corresponded, yet still close enough to modern Danish (and by extension Norwegian) that I could read it fairly quickly when I couldn't figure out the German. And if you really want to see close relationship between German and English, read some Dutch. Dutch to me reads like German and English lightly mixed, with some other random letters thrown in.
- epsylon 13y ago
  I'm currently learning Norwegian (for fun!) and I didn't expect to see so many lexical similarities between English and Norwegian. As a French (who is already fluent in English), this helps me a lot to memorize the meaning of words: I just have to squint long enough at it until I can recognize the Germanic root and its English descendant :-)
- henderson101 13y ago
  Frisian is even closer to English than Dutch. I always liked the rhyme : "bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Fries", which in Frisian is "Brea, bûter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk". There's a hilarious video on Youtube where the comedian Eddie Izzard attempts to talk to a Frisian Farmer in Old English and gets surprisingly far. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34
mokkol 13y ago
Interesting! I think Dutch (Mix between french, german and english) is even closer to English. I am not an expert, just thinking out loud. de -> the drie -> three (ie and ee got the same pronunciation) donder -> thunder ding -> ding daarvoor -> therefore dit -> this dat -> that donderdag -> thursday vader -> father moeder -> mother and a lot more similarities: school -> school week -> week weekend -> weekend maand -> month vrijdag -> friday maandag -> monday uit -> out goed -> good voor -> for je -> you mij -> my (pronounced the same) wij -> we auto -> auto wagen -> wagen kar -> car And the p to f (I guess also in german) slaap -> sleep schip -> ship
- vidarh 13y ago
  I mentioned the similarly of Dutch in a different reply. You'll actually also find quite a few places where Dutch is more similar to Scandinavian languages than to English as well. Norway has two official languages, for the most part my examples are from Bokmål ("book language") which basically started out as a formalisation of Danish as used in Norway. I've prepended the Norwegian: tre -> drie -> three (ie and ee got the same pronunciation) torden -> donder -> thunder ting -> ding -> ding derfor -> daarvoor -> therefore dette -> dit -> this det -> dat -> that But, we also have the term "ditt og datt" -> this and that... torsdag -> donderdag -> thursday far, but also the informal/slang "fatter" and the old-fashioned "fader" -> vader -> father mor, and the older/slang form "moder" (mødre, transliterated "moedre" is the plural form of both versions) -> moeder -> mother and a lot more similarities: skole -> school -> school uke in bokmål, but "veke" in Nynorsk (based on spoken Norwegian dialects) -> week -> week weekend (though that is a modern import from English) -> weekend -> weekend måned (maaned) -> maand -> month fredag -> vrijdag -> friday mandag -> maandag -> monday ut -> uit -> out god -> goed -> good for -> voor -> for du -> je -> you min -> mij -> my (pronounced the same) vi -> wij -> we auto -> auto -> auto vogn -> wagen -> wagen bil (we got our word from the end of automobil; English got its from old French, I assume that's where yours come from too) -> kar -> car And the p to f (I guess also in german) søvn / sove (but we also have "slappe av" -> relax, rest) -> slaap -> sleep skip -> schip -> ship
  - 13y ago
nicholas73 13y ago
Any Danish speakers here? It should be even closer to English as that's where the Angles and Saxons are from.
- vidarh 13y ago
  Look at my lists of Norwegian translations. Most either apply directly for Danish too, or with minor changes ("Bokmål", the written language used by a majority of Norwegians, was largely derived from Danish, and hasn't diverged all that much)
- eitland 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure there are, at least I think I see Norwegians all the time : ) When you know Norwegian or Danish you can see a lot of similarities. The explanation I got was that around year 1000 Norway/Denmark was pretty much a naval superpower.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    It's actually more recent. From the mid 1300's the Norwegian and Danish monarchy merged through marriage, and Denmark became by far the dominant party in the union. (Schelswig-Holsten was also for some time part of The union lasted until 1814, when Denmark (and by extension Norway) had supported Napoleon, and Sweden had joined the other side. Sweden got Norway as a "price". But during that period, a lot of people had started preparing for an attempt at Norwegian independence. And while we entered into a looser union with Sweden, there was a long ongoing debate about creating a new, formalised Norwegian language. We ended up with two, but one of them - bokmål - was basically Danish + Norwegian pronunciation + various spelling reforms, as this was effectively what was spoken amongst the upper classes in the cities, and this (with further spelling reforms) is the dominant written language today (the other was based on spoken dialects, and is further from Danish but not that much) . So we've "only" had about 200 years for the languages to diverge again.
- jmadsen 13y ago
  true - many people assume small, common words come from German, until they see how much closer the (especially spoken) Danish words are. Place with the google translate pronunciation button for some simple sentences for a while - you'll be surprised how much you understand
lupatus 13y ago
Part of the explanation is the convoluted history of the people who lived in the British isles. Originally, it was inhabited by gaelic-speaking Celts. Some of their words that are still used today (): plaide -> plaid tàrmachan -> ptarmigan triubhas -> trousers peata -> pet Then, it was conquered by the Romans. Latin words that found their way into English (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_words_with_English_derivatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_words_with_Engli...): honor -> honor imbecillus -> imbecile inferus -> inferior vulgus -> vulgar Then, after the fall of the Romans, Britain was conquered by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who brought the old German words mentioned below. After this, the area was Christianized, and the priests and proselytizers brought even more latin with them because that was the language of the Church. After this, large portions of England were conquered by the Vikings, who introduced more Scandinavian-origin words that others have mentioned here. In fact, King Canute was once simultaneously king of England, Denmark, and Norway. After the Vikings, England was conquered by the Normans by William the Conqueror in the Battle of Hastings. The Normans were Viking raiders who settled in northwestern France and who had turned in francophones. They introduce french-origin words like: boef -> beef mouton -> mutton veal -> veal porc -> pork After which, all these language influences congealed, vaguely, into the English we know and love today. For this graphed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Origins_of_English_PieChart.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Origins_of_English_PieCha... Edited for formatting.
- aetherson 13y ago
  Somebody once pointed out to me that you can see class distinctions written into the language this way. The words for farm animals tend to be Germanic (the conquered Germanic people were the farmers). So German kuh -> English cow. German schwein -> English swine. German huhn -> English hen. But the words for prepared foods tend to be French in origin (the French conquerers were the ones who needed fancy terms for their food). So, as you pointed out, beef, mutton, veal, and pork are all French words.
- henderson101 13y ago
  I think you'll find that the majority of the British isles, including some of what is now Scotland, was populated by one of two peoples - pre Celts (Picts traditionally being named as one of those peoples) and P-Celtic speakers. The P-Celtic languages are the forefathers of Welsh, Breton and Cornish. Gaelic is not directly related to these languages[1], and indeed the Gaelic speakers in Scotland mostly migrated from Ireland - Scottish and Irish Gaelic being extremely closely related. Your list of "loan words" is therefore pretty late in acquisition. You can probably list the amount of actual P-Celtic loan words in regular use on 10 fingers. There's a massive body of evidence that the P-Celtic languages took a while to die out. A Celtic language was spoken in Cumbria (Cumbria itself coming from the same Celtic root word as Cymru, the Welsh name for the country "Wales"), and the traditional Shepherd counting systems[2] based on the P-Celtic counting system are still used even today to a certain extent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_languages [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_tan_tethera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_tan_tethera

by moskie 13y ago

joshbetz 13y ago

Du isn't formal though?

moskie 13y ago
Right, and neither is thou.

tikwidd 13y ago

This is the result of the High German Consonant Shift [1]. English - many accents, at least - retain the dental fricatives (th-sounds) that were shifted to alveolar stops (d and t sounds) in High German. Dental fricatives are relatively rare sounds among the world's languages. Icelandic and European Spanish are the only languages I can think of that have dental fricative phonemes. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift

pietro 13y ago
There are a few other languages with dental fricatives, including Arabic, Danish and Greek.
- mnw21cam 13y ago
  Shibboleth. (Hebrew, apparently).

captainmuon 13y ago

The history of formal pronouns (du/sie) is also very interesting in German. As far as I remember, in the middle ages the third person singular ("er/sie", he/she) was used as a formal address for common people. Nobility used the majestic plural ("ihr", you/y'all). Now with the rise of the "Bürgertum"* in the 18th/19th century, people wanted to distinguish themselves from the peasants with their "er", but the distancing tone of the third person fitted well with their spirit. They also wanted to get rid of anything reminding them of nobility with the "ihr" address, but it seems they wanted their own bit of majestic plural and kept the plural form. So they basically invented using the third person plural "sie" (they) as a formal "you". The old forms now sound incredibly archaic, although they are still used in some dialects according to wikipedia. I also have to say that this story is very condensed and was probably more complicated in reality, as I am not a linguist. singular plural (majestic) 2. person du ihr 3. person er (sie) (distancing) (*"Bürgertum" means ~middle class, but I find it hard to translate accurately, "Bürger" means citizen or bourgeouis.)

sabbatic13 13y ago

The last class I got to help teach in Grad School was The Nature and History of the English language. Leading undergrads to this epiphany is also very gratifying (that and being able to explain the weirdness that is English orthography).

kristiandupont 13y ago

In Spanish and French, hora or heure means hour, but it also means time. If you go north, to Germany, uhr means o'clock, and watch/clock. Further north, in Scandinavia, ur simply means watch/clock, whereas time means hour. It's quite fascinating and gives you a sense how information and knowledge spread in ancient times.

eitland 13y ago
Be aware that Norwegians pronounce i something like a long 'ee' in English so tiem in Norwegian is pronounced very different from time in English.

xbadxapple 13y ago

It was a whatthehell moment for me too. I started learning German a bit later than English (we had to learn 2 foreign languages at school). Pronunciation exercises brought the epiphany here, haha. Was strange at first but then we thought - hell, after all, these languages have much in common going back some centuries. God but I hated pronouncing the umlauts.

levosmetalo 13y ago
> God but I hated pronouncing the umlauts. How comes you hate pronouncing umlauts and don't hate these various sorts of t-th-d sound? As in think-tank-they-did?
Udo 13y ago
> God but I hated pronouncing the umlauts. That's interesting, what's your native language? I found that the umlauts map pretty well to how a lot of people from GB pronounce their Us, As, and Os. If I had to transliterate the word "use" for example I'd write that as "jüs" in German.

vidarh 13y ago

Mix in another Germanic language, and it gets even more fun. Take Norwegian: "the" doesn't have a direct equivalent in modern Norwegian - we add the article as a suffix instead (a car = en bil; the car = bilen), but for the rest: drei -> three / tre Donner -> thunder / torden Ding -> thing / ting daher -> therefore / derfor du -> thou / du Older Danish is even more similar to German, though I don't remember it off hand. At school, when I wanted to get my German grade up, I got a copy of Faust, which was way above my German level, and then I got hold of an old Danish translation (1920's or so). The old Danish translation was much closer to the German, so it was reasonably easy to figure out how they corresponded, yet still close enough to modern Danish (and by extension Norwegian) that I could read it fairly quickly when I couldn't figure out the German. And if you really want to see close relationship between German and English, read some Dutch. Dutch to me reads like German and English lightly mixed, with some other random letters thrown in.

epsylon 13y ago
I'm currently learning Norwegian (for fun!) and I didn't expect to see so many lexical similarities between English and Norwegian. As a French (who is already fluent in English), this helps me a lot to memorize the meaning of words: I just have to squint long enough at it until I can recognize the Germanic root and its English descendant :-)
henderson101 13y ago
Frisian is even closer to English than Dutch. I always liked the rhyme : "bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Fries", which in Frisian is "Brea, bûter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk". There's a hilarious video on Youtube where the comedian Eddie Izzard attempts to talk to a Frisian Farmer in Old English and gets surprisingly far. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34

mokkol 13y ago

Interesting! I think Dutch (Mix between french, german and english) is even closer to English. I am not an expert, just thinking out loud. de -> the drie -> three (ie and ee got the same pronunciation) donder -> thunder ding -> ding daarvoor -> therefore dit -> this dat -> that donderdag -> thursday vader -> father moeder -> mother and a lot more similarities: school -> school week -> week weekend -> weekend maand -> month vrijdag -> friday maandag -> monday uit -> out goed -> good voor -> for je -> you mij -> my (pronounced the same) wij -> we auto -> auto wagen -> wagen kar -> car And the p to f (I guess also in german) slaap -> sleep schip -> ship

vidarh 13y ago
I mentioned the similarly of Dutch in a different reply. You'll actually also find quite a few places where Dutch is more similar to Scandinavian languages than to English as well. Norway has two official languages, for the most part my examples are from Bokmål ("book language") which basically started out as a formalisation of Danish as used in Norway. I've prepended the Norwegian: tre -> drie -> three (ie and ee got the same pronunciation) torden -> donder -> thunder ting -> ding -> ding derfor -> daarvoor -> therefore dette -> dit -> this det -> dat -> that But, we also have the term "ditt og datt" -> this and that... torsdag -> donderdag -> thursday far, but also the informal/slang "fatter" and the old-fashioned "fader" -> vader -> father mor, and the older/slang form "moder" (mødre, transliterated "moedre" is the plural form of both versions) -> moeder -> mother and a lot more similarities: skole -> school -> school uke in bokmål, but "veke" in Nynorsk (based on spoken Norwegian dialects) -> week -> week weekend (though that is a modern import from English) -> weekend -> weekend måned (maaned) -> maand -> month fredag -> vrijdag -> friday mandag -> maandag -> monday ut -> uit -> out god -> goed -> good for -> voor -> for du -> je -> you min -> mij -> my (pronounced the same) vi -> wij -> we auto -> auto -> auto vogn -> wagen -> wagen bil (we got our word from the end of automobil; English got its from old French, I assume that's where yours come from too) -> kar -> car And the p to f (I guess also in german) søvn / sove (but we also have "slappe av" -> relax, rest) -> slaap -> sleep skip -> schip -> ship
- 13y ago

nicholas73 13y ago

Any Danish speakers here? It should be even closer to English as that's where the Angles and Saxons are from.

vidarh 13y ago
Look at my lists of Norwegian translations. Most either apply directly for Danish too, or with minor changes ("Bokmål", the written language used by a majority of Norwegians, was largely derived from Danish, and hasn't diverged all that much)
eitland 13y ago
I'm pretty sure there are, at least I think I see Norwegians all the time : ) When you know Norwegian or Danish you can see a lot of similarities. The explanation I got was that around year 1000 Norway/Denmark was pretty much a naval superpower.
- vidarh 13y ago
  It's actually more recent. From the mid 1300's the Norwegian and Danish monarchy merged through marriage, and Denmark became by far the dominant party in the union. (Schelswig-Holsten was also for some time part of The union lasted until 1814, when Denmark (and by extension Norway) had supported Napoleon, and Sweden had joined the other side. Sweden got Norway as a "price". But during that period, a lot of people had started preparing for an attempt at Norwegian independence. And while we entered into a looser union with Sweden, there was a long ongoing debate about creating a new, formalised Norwegian language. We ended up with two, but one of them - bokmål - was basically Danish + Norwegian pronunciation + various spelling reforms, as this was effectively what was spoken amongst the upper classes in the cities, and this (with further spelling reforms) is the dominant written language today (the other was based on spoken dialects, and is further from Danish but not that much) . So we've "only" had about 200 years for the languages to diverge again.
jmadsen 13y ago
true - many people assume small, common words come from German, until they see how much closer the (especially spoken) Danish words are. Place with the google translate pronunciation button for some simple sentences for a while - you'll be surprised how much you understand

lupatus 13y ago

Part of the explanation is the convoluted history of the people who lived in the British isles. Originally, it was inhabited by gaelic-speaking Celts. Some of their words that are still used today (): plaide -> plaid tàrmachan -> ptarmigan triubhas -> trousers peata -> pet Then, it was conquered by the Romans. Latin words that found their way into English (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_words_with_English_derivatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_words_with_Engli...): honor -> honor imbecillus -> imbecile inferus -> inferior vulgus -> vulgar Then, after the fall of the Romans, Britain was conquered by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who brought the old German words mentioned below. After this, the area was Christianized, and the priests and proselytizers brought even more latin with them because that was the language of the Church. After this, large portions of England were conquered by the Vikings, who introduced more Scandinavian-origin words that others have mentioned here. In fact, King Canute was once simultaneously king of England, Denmark, and Norway. After the Vikings, England was conquered by the Normans by William the Conqueror in the Battle of Hastings. The Normans were Viking raiders who settled in northwestern France and who had turned in francophones. They introduce french-origin words like: boef -> beef mouton -> mutton veal -> veal porc -> pork After which, all these language influences congealed, vaguely, into the English we know and love today. For this graphed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Origins_of_English_PieChart.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Origins_of_English_PieCha... Edited for formatting.

aetherson 13y ago
Somebody once pointed out to me that you can see class distinctions written into the language this way. The words for farm animals tend to be Germanic (the conquered Germanic people were the farmers). So German kuh -> English cow. German schwein -> English swine. German huhn -> English hen. But the words for prepared foods tend to be French in origin (the French conquerers were the ones who needed fancy terms for their food). So, as you pointed out, beef, mutton, veal, and pork are all French words.
henderson101 13y ago
I think you'll find that the majority of the British isles, including some of what is now Scotland, was populated by one of two peoples - pre Celts (Picts traditionally being named as one of those peoples) and P-Celtic speakers. The P-Celtic languages are the forefathers of Welsh, Breton and Cornish. Gaelic is not directly related to these languages[1], and indeed the Gaelic speakers in Scotland mostly migrated from Ireland - Scottish and Irish Gaelic being extremely closely related. Your list of "loan words" is therefore pretty late in acquisition. You can probably list the amount of actual P-Celtic loan words in regular use on 10 fingers. There's a massive body of evidence that the P-Celtic languages took a while to die out. A Celtic language was spoken in Cumbria (Cumbria itself coming from the same Celtic root word as Cymru, the Welsh name for the country "Wales"), and the traditional Shepherd counting systems[2] based on the P-Celtic counting system are still used even today to a certain extent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_languages [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_tan_tethera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_tan_tethera