I find it fascinating that although English is in the German language family, it's lexicon seems to share a lot of terms with Spanish, which is in the Latin language family.

important
importante

information
informaccion

etc.
but I see few, if any, similarities between English and German words.

How did that come to be so?

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.

(January 16, 2016 at 6:50 pm)Alex K Wrote: William the Conqueror introduced french as the language of nobility to the english lands. Much of it stuck. Often, the words with germanic roots express low brow things, those with french roots the high brow things.

/thread? That was fast

See edit

...plus the things taken directly from greek and latin by the learned, plus the stuff Shakespeare just made up because he felt like it

(January 16, 2016 at 6:47 pm)Rhondazvous Wrote: but I see few, if any, similarities between English and German words.

How did that come to be so?

Information is literally the same word.

Bed - Bett

House - Haus

Murder - Mord

sleep - schlafen

go - gehen

learn - lernen

And many, many more. I found it pretty easy to learn English with German as my first language. It was much harder with French and I've already forgotten most of it over the years.

Also, maybe without you knowing it, you're using German words in America that have been kind of naturalized: Rucksack or Kindergarden (Kindergarten).

(January 16, 2016 at 7:03 pm)Alex K Wrote: ...plus the things taken directly from greek and latin by the learned, plus the stuff Shakespeare just made up because he felt like it

Medieval German is actually much more similar to medieval english than any contemporary comparison. Till the first vovel shift, which happend somewhere between 700 and the year 1000. Probably a very gradual process.

indeed...

Weg - Way

Strasse - Street

Vater - Father
Mutter - Mother

Werk - Work

Stern - Star

wach - (a)wake

Haar - Hair

Erde - Earth


One could go on for ages without even having to think about it.

A few more.

finden - find

fiend - Feind (only one of the translations of fiend, but anyway).

break - brechen

And so on, and so on.

The similarity is even better in vintage English

Thou thinkst - Du denkst

(January 16, 2016 at 7:21 pm)Alex K Wrote: Thou thinkst - Du denkst

Pretty much what I said above, when quoting you in my edit.

Scotsmen still have the phrase "do you ken?", which basically means "kennst du?" Took me a while (which, by the way is Weile in German) to understand that they don't mean can.