# How many words (percentage) do English and German share?



## m1517luther

I'm not talking about how many English words have German origin, but how many words (or percentage of words) do they share, e.g. sun <-> sonne.

Is there an agreed number among the scholars?


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## Frank78

Well, if you leave the non-Germanic words in English aside it must be over 90%. Some words may have died out in German or English, others have changed their meaning (e.g. "town" and "Zaun" are cognates but "Zaun" means "fence" in German). Would include or exclude the latter group?

So the initial question must be: How many Germanic words are used in English which is highly dependant on the type of text, register of language, etc. And what about the Latin words which are present in our languages? They may be the same as well.


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## Hutschi

http://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Verzeichnis:Englisch/Ähnliche_Wörter_Englisch–Deutsch
Here you have a list, it may be incomplete (I suppose, it is incomplete) but is shows you a kind of lower limit, and also which kind of words they are.
I do not know if it helps, but hope so.

Of course it also depends on your definition of "word".


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## Resa Reader

From what I remember from my days at university I think we were told that only about a third of the words in the English language are of Germanic origin. 

This link here seems to back that up:

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English

*The percentage of words of Germanic origin used in everyday conversations is of course much higher.


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## Hutschi

I learned the same, but this means same origin, not same current meaning.

An one question: It depends on the definition of "word", so do you count a word twice, do you consider homophones as one word, and some others. 

Another example 
to work - werken - the meaning is overlapping but more restricted in German. Is it a valid combination?

Note also "das Werk" = the working plant - the plant.


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## bearded

I think that one must differentiate: one thing are the words of _Germanic_ origin, another thing the words German and English have in common (OP's question). From the total amount of words of Germanic origin, a significant number are derived from old Scandinavian languages, and English does *not* share them with German (e.g. tree, ill, sky...). So if you take away words of Latin/Norman origin and those of Scandinavian origin (among these, only the ones  you do not find in German), then the percentage of common words will be substantially reduced.


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## berndf

bearded man said:


> From the total amount of words of Germanic origin, a significant number are derived from old Scandinavian languages...


While this is true in principle, the influence of Old Norse on vocabulary is routinely over-emphasized. If you compare the inherited* Germanic words in modern English and continental West-Germanic languages, the major source for discrepances are extinctions in one/some of these languages and change of meaning. As West and North Germanic are themselves closely related groups, there is also a grey area of words in English that could be either West or North Germanic, e.g. Late OE _cyng _(Modern spelling _king_) could either be regarded as a Old Nose loan (cf. Danish _konge, _from ON_ kongR_, itself a shortening of _konungR_) or as an internal evolution from earlier _cyning_ (cf. German _König,_ from OHG _kuning_).
______________
_*Believe it of not, there are also Germanic words loaned from French. And there is also the reverse: some inherited words of Latin origin that were loaned before Germanic languages split, e.g. wine/Wein/vin... which you find throughout the Germanic language family._


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## ahvalj

bearded man said:


> From the total amount of words of Germanic origin, a significant number are derived from old Scandinavian languages, and English does *not* share them with German (e.g. tree, ill, sky...)


_Tree_ is inherited — http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=tree


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## Frank78

bearded man said:


> From the total amount of words of Germanic origin, a significant number are derived from old Scandinavian languages, and English does *not* share them with German (e.g. tree, ill, sky...). So if you take away words of Latin/Norman origin and those of Scandinavian origin (among these, only the ones  you do not find in German), then the percentage of common words will be substantially reduced.



But English often preserved doublets West Germanic - North Germanic (heaven - sky, sick - ill, beam - tree, head - skull, craft - skill, etc.) as well as Germanic - Romance (pig - pork, ask - enquire, fight - combat).

English is not by chance one of the languages with the most vocabularly.


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## jakowo

Frank78 said:


> "town" and "Zaun" are cognates but "Zaun" means "fence" in German).




Minor objection:

a borrowing from Celtic *dunon (probably from PIE)


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## berndf

There is nothing to object to. Your and Frank's statements are not in conflict. It is a loan into common Germanic from where both German and English inherited it.


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## bearded

jakowo said:


> Minor objection:
> 
> a borrowing from Celtic *dunon (probably from PIE)


Are you sure it is a borrowing and not a parallel/common  derivation from PIE ?


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## ahvalj

bearded man said:


> Are you sure it is a borrowing and not a parallel/common  derivation from PIE ?


The IE proto-form is usually reconstructed as *_dhuHno_- (Matasović R · 2009 · Etymological dictionary of Proto-Celtic: 108 — https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJRlVOVHlzSWRZUm8/edit?usp=sharing), hence the inherited Germanic form should have been *_đūnan_ with the English *_down_ and German *_Taun_. The English _t_ and German _z_ suggest this form was borrowed (from Celtic) before the Germanic consonant shift. The modern English _down_ is either an inherited continuation of the same IE word or a newer borrowing from Celtic (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=down).

By the way, the common Celtic form should have been *_dūnom_, since -m is preserved in Celtiberian and partly in Gaulish.


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## ahvalj

ahvalj said:


> The English _t_ and German _z_ suggest this form was borrowed (from Celtic) _before the Germanic consonant shift_.


Actually, there are two possible explanations, all discussed in the literature since the 19th century: either, indeed, before the Germanic consonant shift, as I had written here, or after that shift but before the despirantization of the initial _đ<dh _in Germanic: in the absence of _d,_ the foreign voiced stops could have been perceived as variants of the voiceless stops (i. e. _t_) rather that voiced spirants (i. e. _đ_), so the Celtic *_dūnom _was heard as _t__ūnam _rather that _đ__ūnam._


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## Hutschi

m1517luther said:


> I'm not talking about how many English words have German origin, but how many words (or percentage of words) do they share, e.g. sun <-> sonne.
> 
> Is there an agreed number among the scholars?



Hi, Luther,
what exactly do you mean?
Did our discussion until now help you? (Some of it went over to etymology, rather than present status. I understood you want to have the present status, excluding obsolete words.)

We have lots of Anglicisms now, borrowed currently. But I do not think they exceed even a promille of the used words. But in the streets you see them everywhere.

Examples:
Shop
Sale
Meeting Point
Handy (with changed meaning = mobile phone - does your question include such words?)
E-Mail
Computer
Hallo (spoken English, the German form was older.)
Team
Song
...


Anglicisms are used frequently.

I do not know many Germanisms in English.

One is Cooky = Keks (compare Kuchen)
Kuchen=Cake (compare Keks) - Do you include such Words?

In computer language cooky=Cooky.


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## Frank78

Hutschi said:


> I do not know many Germanisms in English.
> 
> One is Cook*ie* = Keks (compare Kuchen)
> Kuchen=Cake (compare Keks) - Do you include such Words?
> 
> In computer language cook*ie*=Cook*ie*.



Isn't it vice versa? The German "Keks" is loaned from the English "cakes"?

There are at least some: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_expressions_in_English

I guess most of term are special terminology and are hardly used in everyday English. Common German words are kindergarten, angst, fest, kaffeeklatsch, kaput, noodle, zeitgeist, blitz, flak, hinterland, *u*ber (in compounds meaning mega-, super-)


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## Hutschi

Frank78 said:


> Isn't it vice versa? The German "Keks" is loaned from the English "cakes"?
> 
> There are at least some:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_expressions_in_English
> 
> I guess most of term are special terminology and are hardly used in everyday English. Common German words are kindergarten, angst, fest, kaffeeklatsch, kaput, noodle, zeitgeist, blitz, flak, hinterland, *u*ber (in compounds meaning mega-, super-)



Kuchen is a German word, cooky is a Germanism - as far as I know.

But later, in computer language, Cooky became an Anglicism.


Keks is an Anglicism.


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## Hutschi

Frank78 said:


> Isn't it vice versa? The German "Keks" is loaned from the English "cakes"?
> 
> There are at least some:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_expressions_in_English
> 
> I guess most of term are special terminology and are hardly used in everyday English. Common German words are kindergarten, angst, fest, kaffeeklatsch, kaput, noodle, zeitgeist, blitz, flak, hinterland, *u*ber (in compounds meaning mega-, super-)



Kuchen is a German word, cookie is a Germanism - as far as I know.

But later, in computer language, Cookie became an Anglicism.
Thanks for correcting spelling.

Keks is an Anglicism.


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## berndf

Hutschi said:


> Kuchen is a German word, cookie is a Germanism - as far as I know.


_Cookie _is a loan from Dutch (_koek _[ku:k]~[kuk]), not from German.


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## Hutschi

Thank you. Do Koek and Kuchen have the same root? (In this case they might fulfill the condition of the original poster.)


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## Ben Jamin

Hello,
Luther asked: "I'm not talking about how many English words have German origin ..."
So far nobody has attempted to give an answer to his question.

An other thing is, how one should define a "common word". Luther himself gives an example "sun" and "sonne", so I suppose that he will accept all words that with a little effort and some knowledge of sound shifts can be recognized.

We can start the list with the most common cognates (not always the same meaning, marked with an *):

Mother Mutter
Father Vater
Sister Schwester
Brother Bruder 
Child Kind (Approved?)
Hound Hund
Butter Butter
Earth  Erde
Sea See
Water Wasser
House Haus
Night Nacht
Day Tag
Man mann
Wife Weib*

Knight Knecht*
Fire Feuer
Spray Sprühen
Eat Essen
Die toten*
Say sagen
See sehen
Begin beginnen
Give geben
Bite beissen
Know kennen
Can können
Stand stay*

Stand stehen
Sit sitzen
Seat setzen
Leap laufen*
Winter Winter

Now I give up, but I guess that the total count will be somewhere between 1500 and 5000 in the standard language, not counting dialects. I don't know if early Europeisms like "wine") will count.


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## berndf

Ben Jamin said:


> Child Kind (Approved?)


No, but _kin _and _kind _are cognates to German _Kind_.


Ben Jamin said:


> Die toten*


I am afraid, we don't have such a word, only _töten_. _Die_ and _töten _are surely related but not quite cognates.


Ben Jamin said:


> Seat setzen


The English cognate to _setzen _is _set_, not _seat_.


Ben Jamin said:


> Stand stay*


_Stay _is a French loan.


Ben Jamin said:


> Now I give up, but I guess that the total count will be somewhere between 1500 and 5000 in the standard language, not counting dialects.


I would guess a few more. If you assume that about 15000 words have survived from OE and the majority have German cognates, I would guess at least 7000.





Ben Jamin said:


> I don't know if early Europeisms like "wine") will count.


Yes, it is inherited from common Germanic.


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## Ben Jamin

berndf said:


> I am afraid, we don't have such a word, only _töten_. _Die_ and _töten _are surely related but not quite cognates.


My bad. I forgot the umlaut.




berndf said:


> The English cognate to _setzen _is _set_, not _seat_.


But both come ultimately from the same PIE root *sed /*sod (the latter a variant of *sed acc. to Online Etymology Dictionary). Or do you count only a common Germanic root?




berndf said:


> I would guess a few more. If you assume that about 15000 words have survived from OE and the majority have German cognates, I would guess at least 7000.Yes, it is inherited from common Germanic.


It will be interesting to see if somebody does the actual counting job.


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## berndf

Since "seat" is a loan that occurred long after the split of English and German they can't count as cognate.


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## Frank78

berndf said:


> I would guess a few more. If you assume that about *15000 words have survived from OE *and the majority have German cognates, I would guess at least 7000.Yes, it is inherited from common Germanic.



How is it possible that the OED has 500,000 entries but a quarter of the English words come from Germanic languages? Is the big rest newly created words which count as Germanic?


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## Ben Jamin

I would like to clarify the meaning of the word *cognate*:
According to many definitions two words are «cognates» if they have a common ancestor in the same, or a preceding language, and both have developed “organically” in a process from the oldest to the newest form, without involving a borrowing from another language.
Thus for example, the Greek words “κίνημα” (movement) and “σινεμά” ("the art of film"/ "movie theater") are not cognates, even if they have a common origin, because “σινεμά” was developed in the French language and reborrowed to Greek.

There is, however, no requirement that two cognate words must have the same meaning, or a recognizable phonetic or graphic similarity.
For example while the Hebrew word "חוצפה" chutzpah means "impudence," its Classical Arabic cognate " حصافة" ḥaṣāfah means "sound judgment;"

The Web is full of lists of “cognates” consisting of pairs of words in two languages with phonetic or graphic resemblance, being mostly loans from a common source, or from each other, like these German/English “cognates”: “kindergarten”, “check/scheck”, “kimono”, or “permanent”.


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## Walshie79

Ben Jamin said:


> My bad. I forgot the umlaut.
> 
> 
> But both come ultimately from the same PIE root *sed /*sod (the latter a variant of *sed acc. to Online Etymology Dictionary). Or do you count only a common Germanic root?
> 
> 
> It will be interesting to see if somebody does the actual counting job.



"Die" is actually a Norse word, but "death" and "dead" are native, and have German cognates. Also starve/sterben: the former meant "die" in Old English.


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