The German Language

[abaris]

"just" is a funny example, I wonder whether it falls in the same category

Guess so. It certainly can mean the same. Just as in "just as" and not in the lawful sense.

[Rhondazvous]

You're missing a cruial "vovel shift" there

@Yeaux

Right, saying that Engish came from German is a bit like saying that we came from monkeys. Well, it depends on what you still call German. So, the tribe called the Angeln, hinted at by the first half of the name Anglosaxon, allegedly came from the region that is now the German-Danish border and settled in Britain.

There’s no disagreement here. I’m not sure why it is called the German language family, but I did not take that to mean that English came from German.

[abaris]

There’s no disagreement here. I’m not sure why it is called the German language family, but I did not take that to mean that English came from German.

Both have Indo Germanic roots. And there's no doubt that Celts settled in both, what is now called Germany, Austria and Northern Italy and the british Isles. And France, for that matter. There were prehistoric trade routes all over Europe. Later on, all these territories, to a large degree, came under Roman influence and still later, Germanic tribes settled on the British Isles. William the Conqueror came from France, but he was a Norman - originally a member of a Scandinavian tribe. The languages are most certainly a result of all these influences.

[Rhondazvous]

Since we were talking about medieval German and english. There are also a lot of words, not being in common use anymore. You know their meaning, but virtually nobody would use them. And one of them is "Pein", which, of course, translates to "pain" in english.

If I learned German, it would probably be textbook German. So I’d probably not run into any archaic German.

Then again, as a writer, I like using archaic English words such as “fortnight.”

[abaris]

If I learned German, it would probably be textbook German.  So I’d probably not run into any archaic German.

Sure, everyone does with a foreign language. But it pays off to read books, listen to songs or to watch movies at the same time. That tells you much more on how people use their language than any textbook can offer.

[MTL]

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.

Same thing happens here in Canada, in Montreal.

We call it "Frenglish"

[abaris]

There's another old german word that is closely related to english. "Nit", which means "not". Later on it turned into "nicht", but up until the 17th century, nit was used in official documents. When I was a small child, visiting the One Horse Town where my grandfather was born, there were still old people around using the word. Along with "nimmermehr", which means "nevermore", as everyone having read Poe can remember. As far as I know, both words went out of fashion, somewhere in the last century.

[Alex K]

I didn't know that! Nicht is still pronounced "nit" in my palatinate home dialect.

[abaris]

I didn't know that! Nicht is still pronounced "nit" in my palatinate home dialect.

I don't doubt that. But that's dialect. Where I live, it's pronounced "net" when you don't try to keep up appearances. But "nit" was, at some very long time, the official version. At least in the South.

On another thought, proverbs arer basically the same in English as well as in German. Every German proverb has it's equivalent in the english language and vice versa.

[Red_Wind]

My home language also shares some similarities with German, probably because it's derived from Dutch (It's Afrikaans)