The German Language

[Alex K]

William the Conqueror introduced french as the language of nobility to the British isle. Much of it stuck, and modern English is now an amalgam of the two, plus Norse from the Viking conquest of northern Britain, plus old Gaelic stuff. Often, the words with germanic roots express low brow things, those with french roots the high brow things.

Stuhl -> stool : simple chair

chaise -> chair

or

Kuh -> Cow : farm animal

boef -> beef: an upper class dish

There are tons of connections between English and German words. I was just joking today that we were going to teach our daughter English because I said "des is a Finger, des is a Nos" which is a slightly regionally coloured way of saying "this is a finger, this is a nose" in German. Standard German would be "Dies ist ein Finger, dies ist eine Nase". Our southern German dialects are closer than standard German to the germanic parts of English in some respects because we missed some vowel shifts.