# English - the Weight of the Germanic Component



## Arrius

_Split from here._

Greetings again, my dear* Whodunit*, there are other points in your post that I find dubious, but I shall concentrate on the following:

*It depends on the native language. If it is English, he won't understand anything except for some parts of other Germanic languages.*

A few times I have out of curiosity tried a private experiment on British monoglots with written texts in French (Romance like Portuguese) and German and always found they could, for instance, work out many bits of Rousseau's "Le Contrat Social", whereas a page from Nietzsche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" was quite incomprehensible to them.
The words Vater, Mutter, Brot, gut, See, Hand (of which only the last is easily recognisable out of context) are often cited to lull the would-be anglophone germanist into thinking he is going to be on familiar territory, but this is a cruel deception.
Tschüß, A*.*
P.S. I have also tried a page of Swahili on a British Army dentist of Maltese extraction, both languages being chock full of Arabic lexemes.
Guess what - he couldn't understand a bloody word! I shall not bother to try Maltese on a Swahili-speaker.


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## Whodunit

Arrius said:


> Greetings again, my dear* Whodunit*, there are other points in your post that I find dubious, but I shall concentrate on the following:



Please tell me what you are questioning, if it is not off-topic. 



> A few times I have out of curiosity tried a private experiment on British monoglots with written texts in French (Romance like Portuguese) and German and always found they could, for instance, work out many bits of Rousseau's "Le Contrat Social", whereas a page from Nietzsche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" was quite incomprehensible to them.



Are you sure that they have never learned any French before? I have never read Nietzsche's, but I wouldn't take a work of such a philosopher who is known for complex grammar and weird choice of words.  The result of your test is quite interesting, since there are more similar words between German and English than between French and English.



> The words Vater, Mutter, Brot, gut, See, Hand (of which only the last is easily recognisable out of context) are often cited to lull the would-be anglophone germanist into thinking he is going to be on familiar territory, but this is a cruel deception.



Sorry, but I don't seem to understand that.  Would you like to elaborate upon this topic, if it belongs in this thread?


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## stooge1970

Whodunit said:


> there are more similar words between German and English than between French and English.



I disagree. Fewer than 1% of Modern English words are derived from Old English, even if they do account for over 60% of the words used. I know that other Germanic words have entered English through other languages (especially Old Norse), but English has the largest vocabulary of any language in the world, and there are just so many words that come from Latin. Historically this has occurred in at least 3 ways: from England's time as a Roman colony, the Norman invasion (the invaders spoke a dialect of early French, so this is one reason why the vocabularies of English and French are especially close), and direct borrowings from Classical Latin. And of course English has borrowed many other words directly from Romance languages in modern times (such as "vista", "rodeo", etc).

I've never studied French but I can often get the gists of articles because I speak English and Spanish and have also studied Latin (only for a bit). With German I'm completely lost.

However, I would like to add that a scholarly text will be easier for an English speaker to understand than a more mundane one because traditionally the Latin-derived words in English are more formal or scientific, so to speak. There is also a large Greek influence here but that influence is also felt in Latin. Also, I think that it would be significantly harder for a monoglot to understand much of a Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian text (although not impossible) because, although Romance languages, their vocabularies are not as close to English as French's is.


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## Whodunit

stooge1970 said:


> I disagree. Fewer than 1% of Modern English words are derived from Old English, even if they do account for over 60% of the words used.



What do you mean? Are you saying that only 1% of all English words today used have cognates in Old English?



> And of course English has borrowed many other words directly from Romance languages in modern times (such as "vista", "rodeo", etc).



Of course, you can always easily recognize _Rodeo_ in German, too. Most people know what is meant by that word, but you cannot count that. Please compare these two sentences:

I have not seen them.
_Ich habe sie nicht gesehen.
Je ne les vu pas._

Why is this cat so shy?
_Warum ist diese Katze so scheu?
Pourquoi est-ce que ce chat est tant timide?_

Regardless different word order (which you would already recognize in Shakespearean English), isn't it easier to understand the German sentences than the French ones? I cannot take the test, since I can understand all of the three above, but it would be interesting to find it out with persons who don't know both German and French.

Of course, it is easy to understand _intéressant, surprise, surpasser_ etc. by a native English speaker who has never touched French, but these are just cognates from Latin and not original English. German has _interessant_, too, so, if you want to make them understand a French or German sentence, you'd choose the proper words to help them. 



> I've never studied French but I can often get the gists of articles *because I speak* English and *Spanish and have also studied Latin* (only for a bit). With German I'm completely lost.



If you read the text in bold again, you'll know why you can understand some French. I have never really taken a course on Spanish, but I can understand most of it (written), whereas I'm sometimes lost with Norwegian (North Germanic) or Gothic (East Germanic). This is just, because it is easier to read between Romance than between Germanic languages. By the way, it would be even easier between Slavic languages, whereas Semitic languages are hardly ever mutually understandable! 



> However, I would like to add that a scholarly text will be easier for an English speaker to understand than a more mundane one because traditionally the Latin-derived words in English are more formal or scientific, so to speak.



You could get a forensic text in German, if you want, and I bet you'll get the same of it than of a French one. The problem is just that you already speak Spanish, which makes you understand French more easily. 



> Also, I think that it would be significantly harder for a monoglot to understand much of a Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian text (although not impossible) because, although Romance languages, their vocabularies are not as close to English as French's is.



I would like to test it! No German could understand a text in a Romance language, if he/she doesn't already speak one.



konungursvia said:


> They are related as they are both Indo-European, but having said that, looking for "relations" by noting a couple of similar words is very unscientific. No serious linguist would take that method seriously, because languages borrow words.  Turkish is not related to Indonesian, but both share many American computer words ("internet") and some Latin words too. So what?



I see your point, but it always depends on the words. Everyday (an "pan-Germanic") words like _Haus/house_ would seem strange in a Romance language like Portuguese, though not impossible. If it is the case for Portuguese, but no cognate can be found in any other Romance language, then it must most likely have been a borrowing. On the other hand, if a word similar to _house_ can be found in other Indo-European languages, Latin could have lost it, which would result in the absence of it in the Romance languages.


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## Outsider

I don't think it's very illuminating to compare languages based on their written forms. In some languages (like English) loanwords usually preserve their original spelling, while in others it's usually adapted. And compare the mostly phonetic spelling of Old English with that of modern English.


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## stooge1970

Whodunit said:


> What do you mean? Are you saying that only 1% of all English words today used have cognates in Old English?



I'm going to back off from specific numbers because I think that figure I gave just came from a memory of what my Old English professor said to me, but I meant that a very small number of words in Modern English come from Old English. (By the way, I wouldn't call them cognates because they have simply evolved). However, these words are generally used all of the time ("I" "us" "help"). Still, many more words in Modern English come from Latin or Latin-based languages.





Whodunit said:


> Of course, you can always easily recognize _Rodeo_ in German, too. Most people know what is meant by that word, but you cannot count that.



I don't see why you have decided that we can't _count _that. Anyway the point of that word was to give yet another example of how words from Latin and Romance languages have crept into English vocabulary.



Whodunit said:


> Please compare these two sentences:
> 
> I have not seen them.
> _Ich habe sie nicht gesehen.
> Je ne les vu pas._
> 
> Why is this cat so shy?
> _Warum ist diese Katze so scheu?
> Pourquoi est-ce que ce chat est tant timide?_
> 
> Regardless different word order (which you would already recognize in Shakespearean English), isn't it easier to understand the German sentences than the French ones? I cannot take the test, since I can understand all of the three above, but it would be interesting to find it out with persons who don't know both German and French.



The German is totally incomprehensible to me, unless I know the English translation, and can then see where they are related. However, it might be more clear to me if I heard the German spoken. I'd just like to say that "timide" is a lot clearer to me than "scheu" because it resembles "timid" more than "scheu" resembles "shy". And that's the thing with Latin-based words in English, they are often more formal synonyms for more common Germanic words. Keep in mind that your examples include some very common English words (i.e. "I" "have" "is" "not") and I have already conceded that most of these words are of Germanic origin and thus should be somewhat related to modern German.



Whodunit said:


> Of course, it is easy to understand _intéressant, surprise, surpasser_ etc. by a native English speaker who has never touched French, but these are just cognates from Latin and not original English.



I don't understand your point. Are you claiming that most of Modern English (which doesn't come from Old English) is not as "real" as the Modern English that has Germanic roots? These Latin-based words are absolutely integral to Modern English, and is the reason why French and English share a lot of the same vocabulary. Also, those words are NOT cognates from Latin, but instead are cognates from French. There is a difference. Compare: _surprise_ (Eng), _surprise_ (Fr), _sorpresa_ (Sp). Clearly "surprise" comes directly from the French word and not from Classical Latin.




Whodunit said:


> It is easier to read between Romance than between Germanic languages.



I agree. However, I think this might have to do with the fact that Proto-Germanic is older than Latin (unless I'm wrong) and thus the languages have had more time to evolve. Also, Classical Latin has always been a very prestigious language with a great body of literature, and I think this might have helped keep the Romance languages more similar. The well-educated in the Roman Empire always learned and used Classical Latin.



Whodunit said:


> By the way, it would be even easier between Slavic languages, whereas Semitic languages are hardly ever mutually understandable!



Correct. Slavic languages are all basically dialects of the same language. Political boundaries are not the same as linguistic boundaries. On the other hand, the many different "dialects" of spoken Arabic have been evolving on their own in different areas for quite some time.





Whodunit said:


> You could get a forensic text in German, if you want, and I bet you'll get the same of it than of a French one. The problem is just that you already speak Spanish, which makes you understand French more easily.



Trust me. I've tried, and the German is much, much harder. While I admit that Spanish certainly helps with French, I know pretty much all of the vocabulary because of English (the scientific or even just the more "formal" vocabulary is actually closer to English than to Spanish in many cases). Spanish helps with things like the definite articles and some very simple verbs, and it's a lot easier for me to decipher those words in French than it is with those words in German, even though they share a common ancestry with their English counterparts.





Whodunit said:


> I would like to test it! No German could understand a text in a Romance language, if he/she doesn't already speak one.



I was referring to an English speaker. 


I just think your original statement 



Whodunit said:


> there are more similar words between German and English than between French and English.



is incorrect. Furthermore, the similar words in French are generally much more recognizable than those in German.

I would like to concede that I don't speak German like you, but I am aware that a lot of German words do come from Latin or other Romance languages. Still, more than half of the words in Modern English are Latin or Romance-based. I doubt it's the same with German.

Also, I'd like to point out that the English grammar is much closer to French grammar than to German grammar, despite the fact that English and German or Germanic based. English just has such a unique history and it has changed so much from its inception. I can understand 12th century Spanish a lot better than 15th century English, and I'm not a native Spanish speaker.

Regards.


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## Arrius

On the matter of the Germanic content of English, I have just heard some interesting statistics today. I don't know how much of an English dictionary is from Romance as opposed to Germanic, and vast quantities of the words therein that are Romance we never or seldom use.  But a certain computer program has been developed that automatically analyses the words it scans or records and identifies their derivation.  It was found that an average novel uses about 62% words of Germanic origin i.e. derived from Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon. Whilst everyday speech reaches as high as 86% Germanic,(which also happened to be the figure for Harold Pinter's play "The Caretaker"). Even the legal speech of lawyers approaches 60%. So the core of written and spoken English is still very much Germanic, though as I have said, this does not help very much in understanding German.
  By the way I have found that a German can far more easily learn to read Old English, than an Englishman can.


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## Whodunit

stooge1970 said:


> but I meant that a very small number of words in Modern English come from Old English.



I highly doubt that is true. Sorry, but I'd like to see some evidence to prove that thesis.



> (By the way, I wouldn't call them cognates because they have simply evolved).


Yes, I should have used "derivatives".



> However, these words are generally used all of the time ("I" "us" "help"). Still, many more words in Modern English come from Latin or Latin-based languages.


That may be your impression, but that would be a surprising for me.



> I don't see why you have decided that we can't _count _that. Anyway the point of that word was to give yet another example of how words from Latin and Romance languages have crept into English vocabulary.


I have decided that because _Rodeo_ also appears in German. According to you, German should thus be as easily, since you immediately know what _Rodeo_ means. 



> The German is totally incomprehensible to me, unless I know the English translation, and can then see where they are related.


This is maybe because you are not bothered to retrace the German words:

ich [iç] - appears in Latin, so we can forget this one
habe ['ha:bə] - b-v are very similar and typical exponents of the first consonant shift
sie [si:] - the German and English pronouns differ too much, except for "wir/we"
nicht [niçt] - looks like nought/naught and not
gesehen [gə'se:hən] - looks like yseen, which could be the Old English participle meaning "seen" (I haven't checked this)

warum [va:'ʁʊm] - not necessarily recognizable for an English speaker
ist [ɪst] - of IE origin (same as "ich")
diese ['di:zə] - "d" and "th" are also common exponents of the first sound shift; so "diese" and "these" sound more than similar. 
Katze ['katsə] - German "tz" and English "t" are counterparts according to the first sound shift
so [zo:] - pan-Germanic particle that should be understand by most speakers of a Germanic language
scheu [ʃoʏ] - except for the diphthong, "shy" and "scheu" sound quite similar

If you do the same with French, I would be highly surprised if you could find more similarities. If you like, you can provide another English sentence in which you can declare most of the words to be of French/Latin origin. 



> However, it might be more clear to me if I heard the German spoken.


Not at all, but I gave you the IPA transcription.



> Keep in mind that your examples include some very common English words (i.e. "I" "have" "is" "not") and I have already conceded that most of these words are of Germanic origin and thus should be somewhat related to modern German.


To be honest, that was my point! What language do you speak? I mean _what_, not _which_. You usually speak everyday English, and more rarely the formal or judicial language, right? I used everyday phrases to show the similarity between German and English. Actually, I can also choose a judicial text in English and translate it into very formal German. Both languages would make use of many Latin (or Greek) words.



> I don't understand your point.


What I meant was that French can be as easily understood as German by a native English speaker, if they use the same words (which could be derived from Latin or borrowed from Greek):

I find him interesting.
Ich finde ihn interessant.
Je le trouve intéressant.

The only word you should understand from the German and French sentence are _interessant_ and _intéressant_, respectively. The rest (except maybe _finde_) should be incomprehensible for a native English monoglot. Therefore, you cannot compare the above sentences. You have to find sentence with different words for German and French, at best with no borrowings.



> I agree. However, I think this might have to do with the fact that Proto-Germanic is older than Latin (unless I'm wrong) and thus the languages have had more time to evolve. Also, Classical Latin has always been a very prestigious language with a great body of literature, and I think this might have helped keep the Romance languages more similar. The well-educated in the Roman Empire always learned and used Classical Latin.


I'm not sure about that. Well, I mean I know that Proto-Germanic is older than Early Latin, but not that that could be the reason for the deviant modern Germanic languages.



> I know pretty much all of the vocabulary because of English (the scientific or even just the more "formal" vocabulary is actually closer to English than to Spanish in many cases).


Trust me that your Spanish background has MUCH more influence on the understanding of French than you think.  I can understand much of Portuguese, and I think to be able to recognize some English or German words in it, although I only know them through Spanish or Latin.  Of course, _coração _looks like _core_, but I guess I would not have recognize _coração _without Spanish. 



> Spanish helps with things like the definite articles and some very simple verbs, and it's a lot easier for me to decipher those words in French than it is with those words in German, even though they share a common ancestry with their English counterparts.


As I mentioned before, you will not understand the difference between _Den Fisch aß der Hund_ and _der Hund aß den Fisch_. You should be able to understand the latter sentence, because all words occur in English: _the dog (think of: hound) ate the fish_. That the former sentence means the same, is something you cannot be aware of if you have never studied German. 



> I was referring to an English speaker.


I know, and I was comparing with Germans. Why should German be so much different from English in understanding French?



> I just think your original statement is incorrect. Furthermore, the similar words in French are generally much more recognizable than those in German.


That might be the point! There are more Germanic than Romance words in Modern English, but the Romance ones are more easily recognizable, since they still look the original words. Compare _timide/timid_ and _shy/scheu_.



> I would like to concede that I don't speak German like you, but I am aware that a lot of German words do come from Latin or other Romance languages. Still, more than half of the words in Modern English are Latin or Romance-based. I doubt it's the same with German.


I don't have any statistics, but it depends on the register. Latin is usually used in formal or "prestigious" German, whereas only very few words of Latin are present in the colloquial language. Here the English words would prevail.



> Also, I'd like to point out that the English grammar is much closer to French grammar than to German grammar,


It depends. Pronouns are usually placed before the verb, while they are after the verb in English and German. However, I agree that the German verb has always to be in second position, which is not a rule for English.



Arrius said:


> It was found that an average novel uses about 62% words of Germanic origin i.e. derived from Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon. Whilst everyday speech reaches as high as 86% Germanic,(which also happened to be the figure for Harold Pinter's play "The Caretaker"). Even the legal speech of lawyers approaches 60%. So the core of written and spoken English is still very much Germanic, though as I have said, this does not help very much in understanding German.
> By the way I have found that a German can far more easily learn to read Old English, than an Englishman can.



Cool! That was exactly what I thought.  But I couldn't come up with statistics. Thanks!


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## Arrius

Dear *Whodunit*, I obtained the statistics given above from a recorded programme on BBC Radio 4, which may be accessed through the following link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/
Click on the loudspeaker icon of the title (in green), "Do you know what you are saying?", (in the second column from the left), and sit back comfortably pencil in hand. The programme is chaired by Melvin Bragg, a popularist of history and assorted intellectual ideas, and an authority on Education, very well known in Britain, and writing for various newspapers. This is not the usual kind of programme on language in which the radio presenter knows next to nothing about the subject and is just looking for amusing or sensational phenomena.


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## iaf

Just for fun... two German examples based on some Spanish phrases. 

La _*influencia constante*_ sobre la _*audiencia produce** transformaciones*__ *sociales* _que no se pueden _*ignorar*._
Los _*resultados primarios *se *diferencian esencialmente *de _la *hipótesis tradicional *que se ha *estudiado *hasta el _*momento*_. 

Die _*konstante Influenz*_ auf die *Audienz produziert soziale Transformationen*, die man nicht *ignorieren *kann.
Die *primären Resultate differenzieren* sich *essentiell *von der *traditionellen Hypothese*, die bis zu diesem *Moment studiert *wurde.

Der *regelmässige Einfluss* auf die *Zuschauer erzeugt gesellschaftliche Wandlungen*  die man nicht *verkennen *kann.
Die *ersten Ergebnisse unterscheiden* sich _*wesentlich *_von der *herkömmlichen Annahme*, die bis zu diesem *Zeitpunkt untersucht *wurde.

I know, they are not perfect translations and they don't sound very natural, but it seemed interesting to me how in German, even when you have the Latin words, you find quite easily a Germanic one to replace it. 

I wonder if this would be possible in English too...?


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## Arrius

I wonder if this would be possible in English too...? iaf
It certainly would but I prefer to try it the other way round: first everyday Germanic words then more learned Latinate or Romance ones:

When I was one-and-twenty I heard a wise man say, "Give pounds and crowns and guineas, but not your heart away. Give pearls away and diamonds, but keep your fancy free". But I was one-and-twenty, no use to talk to me. (A.E.Housman)

Highfalutin' paraphrase:
On the occasion of attaining my majority, I received a certain piece of advice from a sagacious ancient: "Surrender your liquid assets but preserve the integrity of your coronary region. Liberally distribute precious gems, but retain the liberty to act as you determine". But I had recently attained my majority, and remained totally impervious to such counsel.

(_Housman would have shot me. A_.)


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## Whodunit

Iaf, that's a good idea. Let's try to count the non-Germanic words in your translation:

_regelmäßig_ - from _regula_
_Einfluss_ - loan translation of _influxus_
_...punkt_ - from _punctus

_By the way: I'd use _vordergründig_ instead of _erste_.

Here's my attempt at an English translation:

The *regular sway* on the *bystanders bring forth social transformation* that one cannot *shrug off*.
*First findings *are *significantly winnowed *by the *handed-down guesswork* that was *taken stock* up to this *time*/up to *nowadays*/up to *today*.

Some words are not translatable into Germanic counterparts, and the English translation might not sound very good anymore.


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## iaf

Whodunit said:


> Iaf, that's a good idea. Let's try to count the non-Germanic words in your translation:   _3 of 15 in the first version..._
> 
> _regelmäßig_ - from _regula     Ok, let's take "andauernd/ständig"_
> _Einfluss_ - loan translation of _influxus     Perhaps "Einwirkung" might do it?_
> _...punkt_ - from _punctus__     Here I don't find any alternative_
> By the way: I'd use _vordergründig_ instead of _erste_.     _You're right, I agree_
> 
> Here's my attempt at an English translation:
> 
> The *regular sway* on the *bystanders bring forth social transformation* that one cannot *shrug off*.
> *First findings *are *significantly winnowed *by the *handed-down guesswork* that was *taken stock* up to this *time*/up to *nowadays*/up to *today*.
> 
> Some words are not translatable into Germanic counterparts, and the English translation might not sound very good anymore.



Exactly, that's what I meant! But my English is not that good to assure it. 
It's as if German kept alive (even in everyday language) more Germanic words, though there might be well comprehensible Latin alternatives.
But we are still talking about vocabulary. The structures of grammar are the other important point.


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## nightlone

I think the average monolingual English speaker would definitely understand more written Spanish (or any Romance language) than written German. I used to go on holidays to Spain and France before I started to learn Spanish or French and could often make some sense of notices, instructions on products, etc. On the other hand, when I've been to Holland I usually haven't been able to understand a single thing of the written language, unless it's something very obvious, and as far as I know Dutch is the closest Germanic language to English, apart from Frisian.
What I've said above applies to all of the English speakers (monolingual ones) who I've travelled to the mentioned countries with.


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## nightlone

Whodunit said:


> ich [iç] - appears in Latin, so we can forget this one
> habe ['ha:bə] - b-v are very similar and typical exponents of the first consonant shift
> sie [si:] - the German and English pronouns differ too much, except for "wir/we"
> nicht [niçt] - looks like nought/naught and not
> gesehen [gə'se:hən] - looks like yseen, which could be the Old English participle meaning "seen" (I haven't checked this)
> 
> warum [va:'ʁʊm] - not necessarily recognizable for an English speaker
> ist [ɪst] - of IE origin (same as "ich")
> diese ['di:zə] - "d" and "th" are also common exponents of the first sound shift; so "diese" and "these" sound more than similar.
> Katze ['katsə] - German "tz" and English "t" are counterparts according to the first sound shift
> so [zo:] - pan-Germanic particle that should be understand by most speakers of a Germanic language
> scheu [ʃoʏ] - except for the diphthong, "shy" and "scheu" sound quite similar


The average monolingual English speaker who has no idea about other languages would not recognise any of those words.
Many of the words of Latin origin in English are written almost (or) exactly the same in Romance languages and so are instantly recognisable to the English monoglot.
That is why he would be able to make some sense of the instructions on a shampoo bottle written in French, Spanish or Portuguese... but not in German! I promise you that is true.
As for grammar similarities, I think they are almost irrelevant when you are not able to recognise any vocabulary at all (again I'm talking about for the average English monoglot, not someone who has studied linguistics and can analyze the text to make sense of it).


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## Erutuon

On iaf's question - there's a page (search "old english computer glossary" on Google) that a man put together of various computer terms he constructed in Old English. (Now all we need to do is take them through the regular sound changes of actual Old English words and then put them into general use.) It would be interesting to find out if these bear any similarity to the terms in German and Icelandic. Icelandic, at least, has constructed Germanic terms instead of adopting Latin ones.


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## Bléros

England has always had closer relations with the Romance world than the Germanic one. This is because the world of the Romance languages is larger. In mainland Europe, there's Spain, Portugal, France and Italy where as the Germanic countries (besides England) only have, well, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. Yet, words dealing with everyday life are Germanic like "sky", "wind", "mother", "foot". While, less frequent words are derived from French like "control", "appear" and "carpet". Then, there's the Latin and Greek derived words that make you look like a know-it-all like "longitude", "platitudinous" and "omniscient". Just for reference, I highlighted the Germanic-derived words in black, French derived words in blue and Latin derived words in burgundy. Ironically, Germany is Latin-based word. So, you can see that are vocabulary, for the most part sticks to its roots.


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## sound shift

We cannot limit this to a discussion of vocabulary, as the Germanic origins of English show up in other aspects of the language, such as grammar and pronunciation.


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## Arrius

If a Germanic cognate of a word in English does not occur in either German or Dutch then it is very likely to turn up in Scandinavian, the word_ sky_ mentioned above being an example of this, and the verb to _cast_ meaning "to throw" (Norwegian _kaste_). The grammar and word order of Norwegian is so similar to that of English that it is no onerous task for an Englishman to learn the language. In most respects, it has gone even farther than English in shedding its Germanic inflections, and has reduced all verbs to the same form for each personal pronoun, as compared to the two in English for the present simple tense (see/sees), which are sometimes also reduced to the one form without s too, for example in the dialect of Jamaica.


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## charlerina ballerina

iaf said:


> I know, they are not perfect translations and they don't sound very natural, but it seemed interesting to me how in German, even when you have the Latin words, you find quite easily a Germanic one to replace it.
> 
> I wonder if this would be possible in English too...?


 
I am finding this topic fascinating, thank you guys for all your interesting contributions.

I am English, have studied French to A level.
My boyfriend of three months is Spanish and speaks only spanish.

I have had to develop an 'emergancy espanglish' where by I studied basic Spanish grammar and a small amount of vocab. 
I have no knowledge at all about the English language, and where the words came from.
I have found, that I have instinctively been able to find Latin based words to replace words/sentences (I assume are Germanic) in order to adapt (say them with a Spanish accent!) them for communication with my boyfriend. 
My brain on a daily basis is scanning the English language for Latin derived words to replace words which I cant easily translate in to Spanish.

So I think yes, it must be possible in English too... which further adds to the comments early in the post... regarding the high volume of vocab in the English language.... if there is a Germanic and Latin based word for many things!!!!


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## kelt

Isn't it as simple as that monoglot Brits are more likely to comprehend latin-based words that are written almost always in the same way as their English cognates used formally (which must have been heard). Whereas in any Germanic language the words deriving from Germanic roots are always written differently according to ortography of the language, which is not, by far, recognizable by monoglots?


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## cynicmystic

That is quite a valid point, I think.



kelt said:


> Isn't it as simple as that monoglot Brits are more likely to comprehend latin-based words that are written almost always in the same way as their English cognates used formally (which must have been heard). Whereas in any Germanic language the words deriving from Germanic roots are always written differently according to ortography of the language, which is not, by far, recognizable by monoglots?


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## cynicmystic

It is true that English is essentially a Germanic tongue with a Latin syntax rather arbitrarily imposed on it, but this doesn't, by itself, clarify why an Englishman may find it easy or difficult to get the gist from a text written in German or French.  

A significant portion of Modern English vocabulary derives from Latin via French, however, majority of those Norman French words mean different things today in Modern English than what they used to mean in French. Hence, although the Germanic words are the ones that are used the most often, it is actually the Latin based words that are used the most for expression, particularly for abstract concepts.

To complicate things further, the English language has gone through some kind of a 'modernization' (in the sense of getting rid of case, gender, noun declensions etc), just as the Dutch language or Modern Farsi, whereas German has not gone through a similar modernization as of yet. German language still retains some of the archaic forms that used to be part of Old English. Hence, a German sentence, despite many hidden cognates may still look alien to an English speaker, and yet, French may look a lot more recognizable due to shared vocabulary.

Another mental block that may hinder the Englishman's efforts to recognize cognates is the arbitrary and completely illogical spelling & pronunciation of the English language. Just to give you an example, the f sound in fish is written with an f, but the f sound in philosophy has the ph. As a direct result, children in English-speaking countries try to learn how to spell through memorization, and their memo skills are tested in weird competitions, such as the spelling-bee-competition, whereas children, who speak phonetically written languages do not only learn how to read at a much younger age, but also spell better. Had the German text been written phonetically, maybe the cognates would have been more visible.

My mother tongue is Turkish, and aside from English, I have some knowledge of Italian, Spanish, and Indonesian. When I attempt to read an English text written in the 1500s, although with difficulty, I get the general picture. Shakepeare, for instance, is quite understandable with minimal assistance, whereas Beowulf is virtually incomprehensible - almost a foreign tongue in comparison to Modern English. On the other hand, when I read something written in Old Turkic from the same time period as Old English, I can understand quite a bit of it. (This is not because I am too clever for my own good The reason why this is possible in Turkish is because of something called vowel harmony, which, in the long-run, assures that the roots keep their morph without much change. As a result, although Old Turkic may use completely different suffixes, the roots are still the same, and perfectly recognizable. Most IE languages, on the other hand, change the morphology of the root quite a bit through declensions, conjugation, case endings etc. This factor makes it harder for speakers of related langauges to recognize cognates in each other's tongues.

Think about the root word 'hap' in English. It means 'luck' in Old Norse. In Old English, the concept of happiness was expressed with 'blide' (blithe of Modern English), but eventually the Norse 'hap' replaced it in the form of 'happy'. The same 'hap' also appears in the word 'to happen'. In addition to that, we have the word 'hope', which sounds as if it may also have derived from 'hap', though I am not so sure of this one. Either way, it is a lot harder to see Germanic cognates in English.

Thank you for this thread by the way. I think it is very interesting.


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## Grosvenor1

At school, I was struck by some similarities of Shakespeare's English to German. More recently I noticed that Chaucer's English resembled German in many ways.  

Latin-derived words in English are often of a higher register, so a heavily Latinate English tends to sound rather pompous. The Germanic example of Housman poetry is clear and well-crafted, with words of one syllable. However, you do not get far in English with Germanic words alone, and even just using those would not make the language clear to speakers of other Germanic languages. 

I am inclined to think English would be more like Dutch if it was not for the Norman Conquest, but it still might not have been intelligible. Certainly Flemish merchants in Chaucer's time in London were perceived as being quite foreign, and Chaucer alludes to riots against them in one of the _Canterbury Tales_.


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## Txiri

cynicmystic said:


> Think about the root word 'hap' in English. It means 'luck' in Old Norse. In Old English, the concept of happiness was expressed with 'blide' (blithe of Modern English), but eventually the Norse 'hap' replaced it in the form of 'happy'. The same 'hap' also appears in the word 'to happen'.
> Thank you for this thread by the way. I think it is very interesting.


 
Very interesting thread, I agree.  

As soon as I saw you post "hap" and "luck" together ... it clicked.  Hapless, a happenstance ...


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## Arrius

Another derivative of *hap* is *haphazard *which has the possibly unique distinction of having its first component derived from Old Norse and its second (ultimately) from Arabic!


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## Grosvenor1

_ Shakespeare, for instance, is quite understandable with minimal assistance, whereas Beowulf is virtually incomprehensible - almost a foreign tongue in comparison to Modern English._ 

In the case of Shakespeare, for native English speakers it can depend on which text is used, and the plays and poetry can be hard to fully understand without looking at accompanying glossaries or notes. I have some sympathy with a character in the American film _Get Over It_,  who is trying to read _A Midsummer Night's Dream_*.  *He comments, "I'm understanding about every other word of this s**t." 

Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_ are often easier for me to understand on the printed page than Shakespeare, without looking at the notes. A TV animation of several of the tales made in the late 1990s involved actors reciting in Middle English pronunciation - I found it just about comprehensible, and I was perhaps helped by knowing German. Old English is completely a foreign language compared to modern English, as foreign as German.


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## Arrius

As I have said in an earlier post, I have found that Germans can learn to read Old English otherwise called Anglo-Saxon much faster that the English can.


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## granca

Come on now most english speakers would understand the following I´m prepard to bet:
Die Katze hat die Milch nicht getrunken.
Der Hund will mir folgen.
Oft kommt mein Mann nicht nach Hause.


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## Grosvenor1

granca said:


> Come on now most english speakers would understand the following I´m prepard to bet:
> Die Katze hat die Milch nicht getrunken.
> Der Hund will mir folgen.
> Oft kommt mein Mann nicht nach Hause.


 
Very simple German, yes, though even here the _will _might not be understood as "wants to". I have my doubts about the last sentence, as _nach _might throw someone who knows no German at all.


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## granca

Hola Grosvenor1, as a scotsman you have a natural advantage with phrases like braw bricht munelicht nicht the nicht pointing to draw nigh and behold, in your blood. Still I say no more apart from that what you write indicates that you were at school before they stopped teaching english. I´ll bow out now before I prattle on . Which is a good phrase to practise translating in to spanish.
Ciao for now


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## JGreco

> Come on now most english speakers would understand the following I´m prepard to bet:
> Die Katze hat die Milch nicht getrunken.
> Der Hund will mir folgen.
> Oft kommt mein Mann nicht nach Hause.


1st phrase: The cat had the milk ??? Drank...??

2nd Phrase: The dog will ???? (don't know the rest)

3rd Phrase: ........ man??......house??? (No comment)

I'm sorry I am a native English speaker and I could not understand the majority of this. If this was in Dutch I would probably understand more of the written words but German is further away then Dutch from English. Also, I think there is the matter of the spoken language which the average English speaker would find spoken German incomprehensible. Though I have to admit I can understand a little more spoken Dutch....not that much more. I personally think English's situation in the Germanic family of languages is similar to Romanian's situation. Enough oddities occur within the language to make it distant from its other Germanic cousins. English might be still Germanic in character but yet otherwise distant in any other aspect.


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## Outsider

Die Katze hat die Milch nicht getrunken.
The cat had the milk not ge-drunken.


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## Athaulf

JGreco said:


> I personally think English's situation in the Germanic family of languages is similar to Romanian's situation. Enough oddities occur within the language to make it distant from its other Germanic cousins. English might be still Germanic in character but yet otherwise distant in any other aspect.



I don't think that the mutual intelligibility between other distant pairs of Germanic languages is any greater than between English and German. For example, my German (which used to be in a pretty good shape at one time) never helped me much in decoding the lyrics of songs by the Norwegian bands I listened to. In fact, out of those few words that I could recognize in those Norwegian texts, there were approximately as many that had obvious English cognates as those that had obvious German cognates. (And most of the ones I managed to recognize had both.)

Thus, I wouldn't say that English is any less "Germanic in character" than any other modern Germanic language. It's just that this particular IE subfamily has diverged much more than the Slavic and Romance languages, for whatever reason.


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## Ayazid

Athaulf said:


> I don't think that the mutual intelligibility between other distant pairs of Germanic languages is any greater than between English and German. For example, my German (which used to be in a pretty good shape at one time) never helped me much in decoding the lyrics of songs by the Norwegian bands I listened to. In fact, out of those few words that I could recognize in those Norwegian texts, there were approximately as many that had obvious English cognates as those that had obvious German cognates. (And most of the ones I managed to recognize had both.)
> 
> Thus, I wouldn't say that English is any less "Germanic in character" than any other modern Germanic language. It's just that this particular IE subfamily has diverged much more than the Slavic and Romance languages, for whatever reason.



The fact is that English has diverged a lot even even from its closest linguistic relatives (excluding Scots it´s Frisian and Dutch) in the same branch of Germanic languages (West Germanic). English and Dutch/Frisian are just as similar and intelligible as French and Romanian, no matter that the geographic distance between them is much smaller


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## Athaulf

Ayazid said:


> The fact is that English has diverged a lot even even from its closest linguistic relatives (excluding Scots it´s Frisian and Dutch) in the same branch of Germanic languages (West Germanic).



Actually, I don't think that Dutch is a closer relative of English than German (although Frisian certainly is). The greater similarities between English and Dutch are due to an accident of parallel evolution in a similar, more analytic direction, not due to a closer common ancestor (the same goes for English vs. Scandinavian languages).



> English and Dutch/Frisian are just as similar and intelligible as French and Romanian, no matter that the geographic distance between them is much smaller


I don't think this is a special case among Germanic languages. There is a similar difference between e.g. Low German and Danish, despite a zero geographic distance, and Dutch and Frisian aren't much more similar either, despite both being West Germanic. (Native speakers might want to correct these perhaps mistaken impressions of mine.)

In my opinion, things are best considered if we observe the largest Germanic dialect continuums: the British Isles, continental Scandinavia, and  Central/Western Europe. There is a more or less equal difference (and zero intelligibility) between any two languages picked from different zones. However, by an accident of history, the first zone ended up having a single standard language (unless we count Scots), which now doesn't have any very close relatives because of that. But suppose that the history took a different course, and Britain ended up divided among several states, each with a different standard language descended from Old English, while Norway, Sweden, and Denmark ended up united under a single state, with a single standard national language. Then this unified Scandinavian would probably seem just as peculiar as English does for us.


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## Athaulf

kelt said:


> Isn't it as simple as that monoglot Brits are more likely to comprehend latin-based words that are written almost always in the same way as their English cognates used formally (which must have been heard). Whereas in any Germanic language the words deriving from Germanic roots are always written differently according to ortography of the language, which is not, by far, recognizable by monoglots?



Yes, the orthography is definitely an extremely important factor here. Most (all?) Germanic languages except English have spellings that closely reflect their present pronunciation. Since all these languages have passed through severe sound shifts since splitting off from their common ancestors, the cognates are heavily obscured in the vast majority of cases. On the other hand, both English and the Romance languages have strong traditions of archaizing spellings and artificial Latinization, which has had the opposite effect of increasing the similarities in their written forms.

At the end of the day, there is no doubt which languages are more understandable for an English speaker in practice. Just observe the beginning of the top article in Swedish Google News from a few minutes ago (I took the first one to avoid any chance of cherry-picking):

*Regeringen fortsätter på den inslagna vägen*
Tre miljarder i miljöskatter, mål om full sysselsättning, löften om satsningar på vården, och inbjudan till brett samförstånd om energipolitiken. Det är mycket som låter som företrädaren Göran Persson när Fredrik Reinfeldt läser upp regeringsförklaringen. Men ändå är det upplagt för konfrontation. 

Just about the only words that I clearly recognize here based on English are the Latin and Greek ones -- _miljarder_, _energipolitiken_, and _konfrontation_ (well, and _tre_, as a cognate straight from Proto-IE ). I can also make a guess that _full_, _till_, and _för _might mean the same as in English, but I'm unable to extract any useful information from these.  I would bet that even a German speaker wouldn't be able to understand much more from this sample (my rusty German certainly isn't helping me). 

As for the Romance languages, I can't really be the judge, since my ability to decode those has been boosted by learning some Spanish in recent years, but I'm sure that even at the time when I spoke only Croatian, English, and German, I could get more even out of Romanian than out of the above Swedish.

As the bottom line, the divergences between the major branches of Germanic languages -- one of which is nowadays comprised only of English and Scots -- are much too large to enable any sort of mutual intelligibility, to the point where an English speaker can extract more information from common Greek and Romance loanwords than out of cognates when decoding an unknown foreign Germanic language.


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## loladamore

I found an answer to the question "What is the proportion of English words of French, Latin, or Germanic origin?" here.
The numbers are not conclusive, in many cases quite hard to prove, and I am sure that others have reached different percentages, but I thought these figures were interesting nonethless:





> Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%
> French, including Old French and early Anglo-French: 28.3%
> Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Dutch: 25%
> Greek: 5.32%
> No etymology given: 4.03%
> Derived from proper names: 3.28%
> All other languages contributed less than 1%


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## Athaulf

loladamore said:


> I found an answer to the question "What is the proportion of English words of French, Latin, or Germanic origin?" here.



The problem is that this answer critically depends on what exactly one considers as the entire corpus of English vocabulary. In a small dictionary that is mostly limited to everyday vocabulary, the Germanic words will probably prevail, followed by the ancient Old French borrowings. In a very large dictionary that lists all sorts of abstruse high-register words, various Latin and Greek borrowings will probably swamp everything else.


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## Sepia

loladamore said:


> I found an answer to the question "What is the proportion of English words of French, Latin, or Germanic origin?" here.
> The numbers are not conclusive, in many cases quite hard to prove, and I am sure that others have reached different percentages, but I thought these figures were interesting nonethless:




Are these statistics based on all the roughly 500,000 to 1,000,000 words that could be considered English words?

If it were based ont the approx 10,000 to 15,000 words that the average person actually uses, would it look any differently?


Just because there are lots of similarities between the languages they are probably very difficult to recognize for someone who has never learned a foreign language, or only one. Once you know a few languages one ought to be better at comparing and figuring out the meaning of words or sentences in similar languages that one has not (yet?) learned.


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## Arrius

As regards the statistical breakdown of the words in spoken English, I would refer you to my posts#7 and #9 on this thread, which you may have overlooked. In the latter post I gave a link (which still works) to a BBC programme dealing with the statistical breakdown of English according to origin, arrived at by a computer that automatically analyzes spoken English etymologically. It was found that even in legal and scientific language the vast majority of words used are of Germanic origin. Happy listening (and do not be put off by a bit of Anglo-Saxon at the beginning)!


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## Grosvenor1

The Norman Conquest probably exaggerated the difference between English and continental Germanic. I wonder if, without it, at least Frisian would still be intelligible to English speakers, if not Dutch? I notice that in Anglo-Saxon times, "English and Frisians" were often lumped together in chronicle references. Being on an island might have increased linguistic differences, however. Whereas there is a Netherlandic-German dialect continuum with neighbouring dialects having no sharp breaks, that is not really possible when a large body of water gets in the way.


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## Grosvenor1

granca said:


> Hola Grosvenor1, as a scotsman you have a natural advantage with phrases like braw bricht munelicht nicht the nicht pointing to draw nigh and behold, in your blood. Still I say no more apart from that what you write indicates that you were at school before they stopped teaching english. I´ll bow out now before I prattle on . Which is a good phrase to practise translating in to spanish.
> Ciao for now


 
Anthony Burgess praised the Scottish education system of his day in his autobiography, or some other book of his I read. He taught basic literacy to British soldiers who were illiterate, and noted that the Scottish system did not seem to produce illiterates, while the English education system often seemed to. Mind you, that was the 1930s and 1940s. Things may well have deteriorated since then. 

I think Scots is marginally closer to continental Germanic than English is - certainly phonetically and also to an extent in vocabulary.


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## Arrius

*I think Scots is marginally closer to continental Germanic than English is* 
*Grosvenor*
Teachers of German to British students usually refer to the _ch_ in _Loch _to explain the German ach-Laut, which is also in the Scots word for night, _nicht,_ (not to be confused,however with the German word for not,_ nicht,_ which has the ich-Laut). Also the phrase He's _a bonny fechter_ (He's a good fighter contains a word spelt the same as German Fechter (fencer) with a similar meaning, though once more with the _ch _pronounced differently. A _wee bairn_ (a small child) is like Scandinavian_ barn_, also a child, and hus (house) is the same in Scots and Norwegian.


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## MarX

Grosvenor1 said:


> I am inclined to think English would be more like Dutch if it was not for the Norman Conquest.


I think even without the Norman Conquest, English would still be rather like a "middle-thing" between Dutch and Scandinavian because of the heavy Scandinavian influence English has.


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## Sepia

Arrius said:


> As regards the statistical breakdown of the words in spoken English, I would refer you to my posts#7 and #9 on this thread, which you may have overlooked. In the latter post I gave a link (which still works) to a BBC programme dealing with the statistical breakdown of English according to origin, arrived at by a computer that automatically analyzes spoken English etymologically. It was found that even in legal and scientific language the vast majority of words used are of Germanic origin. Happy listening (and do not be put off by a bit of Anglo-Saxon at the beginning)!




I've seen it all right, but it did not quite cover what I was after.


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## se16teddy

If I ever wanted to measure the weight of an ancient component in a modern language, I don't think I would try to study the whole dictionary, firstly because that would cost a lot of effort, but also because the dictionary contains lots of words that most speakers don't use or understand. I think a good starting point is the list of the commonest words. 

There are lots of different lists of the commonest words in English on the web. This is one example. http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/common2000words.htm In this one, as far as I can see the 100 commonest words are all of Germanic origin. Words of Romance origin start at 104 (just), 106 (people) and 107 (Mr). 

Clearly it is a more difficult job to try to measure the sources of different grammatical (as opposed to lexical) elements.


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## loladamore

David Crystal reckons that 80% of English vocab is Romance, Latin or Greek, and not Germanic (on page 9 of this document - p42 of the actual article). There are some more numbers here.

I agree, however, that this is all pretty much "informed guesswork". Don't shoot the messenger, please. I'm just sharing numbers as this was what the thread-starter asked for.


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## Frank06

Hi,

I don't really have an answer, only a few comments and two further questions.

Maybe it's not bad to have a look at "the Germanic component"-part of the question. As far as I understand, "Germanic" is mainly used in historical, (diachronic) linguistics and it refers to a group of languages spoken in the second half of 1st millennium BC. That's a mighty long time ago.
Although the Germanic languages share a lot with the other IE languages, one can discern seven distinct features which set them apart from those other IE languages, and concerns about the lexicon is only one of those seven, an indication that the weight given to the lexicon in this kind of research is not overwhelmingly big. 
[*Question 1: *Is it?]

[*Question 2*:]
In this thread we are applying this term 'Germanic' (from diachronic) to contempory, Modern English (to synchronic). 
Isn't that a bit anachronistic (or ana-chronic, a-chronic, dis-chronic, if those words exist)?


So, you're basically asking what's left of the seven Germanic features after 2500 years...

The seven features (see link):
1. The verbal system: applies to modern English;
2. Preterites: applies to modern English;
3. Weak and strong adjectives: applies to Old English, not to modern English anymore;
4. accent (or stress) is mainly on the root of the word: applies to 'Germanic words' in Modern English (I wonder in how far it applies to English words with non-Latin, non-Romance, non-Greek roots or to words which didn't enter English via any of those).
5. Modified vowels in the Germanic languages: applies partially, but, erm, 'blurred' by further developments in Old, Middle and Modern English (Great Vowel Shift, etc.).
6. First Consonant Shift: idem;
7. "Germanic has a number of unique vocabulary items, words which have no known cognates in other Indo-European languages": applies to Modern English.


Groetjes,

Frank


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## Athaulf

Hm... that page says about strong/weak verbs: "The weak form is the living method of inflection, and many originally strong verbs have become weak." While the overall trends have certainly been in that direction, there are also important exceptions showing that the strong conjugations are alive and productive in English even nowadays. The most famous examples of weak verbs recently becoming strong are probably _sneak_/_snuck_ and _dive_/_dove_ (or, for a less recent example, _plead_/_pled_), but many others have also been emerging throughout the English-speaking world, even though they have little chance of wider acceptance because they are perceived as uneducated, rustic speech, like for example _bring_/_brang_ or _drag_/_drug_.


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## Grosvenor1

se16teddy said:


> If I ever wanted to measure the weight of an ancient component in a modern language, I don't think I would try to study the whole dictionary, firstly because that would cost a lot of effort, but also because the dictionary contains lots of words that most speakers don't use or understand. I think a good starting point is the list of the commonest words.
> 
> There are lots of different lists of the commonest words in English on the web. This is one example. http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/common2000words.htm In this one, as far as I can see the 100 commonest words are all of Germanic origin. Words of Romance origin start at 104 (just), 106 (people) and 107 (Mr).
> 
> Clearly it is a more difficult job to try to measure the sources of different grammatical (as opposed to lexical) elements.


 
You can get different results in frequency lists (useful for language learning, by the way) depending on the type of sampling and what vocabulary is being used (technical, literary, colloquial or all of them?), but I would accept that most if not all of the commonest words in English are of Germanic origin.


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## sevener

granca said:


> Come on now most english speakers would understand the following I´m prepard to bet:
> Die Katze hat die Milch nicht getrunken.
> Der Hund will mir folgen.
> Oft kommt mein Mann nicht nach Hause.


I bet the average English speaker who doesn't have an interest in languages (unlike most people in this forum) would look at those sentences and think "".

Non-native English speakers: Believe what you like, but the fact is that the average English-speaking monoglot will understand more French, Spanish or Italian than German *any day of the week*.


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## Grosvenor1

sevener said:


> I bet the average English speaker who doesn't have an interest in languages (unlike most people in this forum) would look at those sentences and think "".
> 
> Non-native English speakers: Believe what you like, but the fact is that the average English-speaking monoglot will understand more French, Spanish or Italian than German *any day of the week*.


 
I'm inclined to agree. Very basic English and German are often similar, but enlarge the vocabulary a bit more and Romance languages do start to be more familiar to English-speaking monoglots. A good example is "information". _Information _in French, but what English monoglot would recognise the native German equivalent _Bescheid? Information _does exist in German, but as a French or Latin loanword.


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## badgrammar

Well, I skimmed through the whole thread and have just a couple things to add based on my own learning experiences in French and German.  I learned French at school, and definitely had no clues about the core words of vocabulary until I learned them.  Sure, nouns, adjectives, adverbs sharing a common latin history were simple.  But the rest, and the syntax, was not.

I learned German just to communicate.  I had no idea at first just how similar the two languages were.  But trying to understand and compose some very simple sentences, the similarities were just TOO obvious to not see.  

Once you start looking for the cognates in German, and understand even a little bit about the spelling changes you will encounter (ex: Mein=mine, kann = can, muss = must, nicht = not, sehen = seeing, gehen = going, erlern = learn, sprache = speak, sagan = saying,  horen = hearing, halb = half, hilfe= help...and the list is endless), it's very easy to get by in a very minimalist fashion in German. 

So I'd say that once you have understood a few basic changes in spelling patterns, German is still very, very close to English.


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## JGreco

> Well, I skimmed through the whole thread and have just a couple things to add based on my own learning experiences in French and German. I learned French at school, and definitely had no clues about the core words of vocabulary until I learned them. Sure, nouns, adjectives, adverbs sharing a common latin history were simple. But the rest, and the syntax, was not.
> 
> I learned German just to communicate. I had no idea at first just how similar the two languages were. But trying to understand and compose some very simple sentences, the similarities were just TOO obvious to not see.
> 
> Once you start looking for the cognates in German, and understand even a little bit about the spelling changes you will encounter (ex: Mein=mine, kann = can, muss = must, nicht = not, sehen = seeing, gehen = going, erlern = learn, sprache = speak, sagan = saying, horen = hearing, halb = half, hilfe= help...and the list is endless), it's very easy to get by in a very minimalist fashion in German.
> 
> So I'd say that once you have understood a few basic changes in spelling patterns, German is still very, very close to English.




I disagree completely. I was in Germany as a youngster when my parents were stationed there and my dad had the idea of all of us learning German because as English speakers we would easily be able to learn the language. So everybody but my mother (who is Brazilian) proceeded to take classes and the learn the language. Unfortunately it was much harder than we thought because even the most simple words that might look like English there is a sound change attach to them and completely do not sound like English. We only turned out to learn a very mediocre amount of German after 5 years stationed there. What is sad is that we learned more Italian from vacationing there every year than are basic level of German and we lived in Germany.


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## Athaulf

badgrammar said:


> Well, I skimmed through the whole thread and have just a couple things to add based on my own learning experiences in French and German.  I learned French at school, and definitely had no clues about the core words of vocabulary until I learned them.  Sure, nouns, adjectives, adverbs sharing a common latin history were simple.  But the rest, and the syntax, was not.
> 
> I learned German just to communicate.  I had no idea at first just how similar the two languages were.  But trying to understand and compose some very simple sentences, the similarities were just TOO obvious to not see.
> 
> Once you start looking for the cognates in German, and understand even a little bit about the spelling changes you will encounter (ex: Mein=mine, kann = can, muss = must, nicht = not, sehen = seeing, gehen = going, erlern = learn, sprache = speak, sagan = saying,  horen = hearing, halb = half, hilfe= help...and the list is endless), it's very easy to get by in a very minimalist fashion in German.
> 
> So I'd say that once you have understood a few basic changes in spelling patterns, German is still very, very close to English.



I don't speak any French, but I would be surprised to find out that German syntax is less distant from English than French is. Does French really have things that look more exotic to an English speaker than, for example, separable verb prefixes that move to the end of the sentence when the verb is conjugated, placing the verb at the very end of dependent clauses, or subject-verb inversion in senteces that start with certain adverbs (_mom's coming back today_ = _heute *kommt Mutti* zurück_)? This sort of stuff sounded really weird to me when I learned German, even though my native language has unusually free word order.  

As for the word list you provide, let's see how a typical Romance language would compare (I'll use Spanish because that's the only one I know to any reasonable degree ):

_mein - mine - mi_  -->  Indo-European cognate;
_kann - can - poder_ --> not a cognate, but shares the root with e.g. _power _or _potent_;
_muss - must - deber_ --> not a cognate, but shares the root with  e.g. _debt_; 
_nicht - not - no_ --> IE cognate;
_sehen - seeing - ver_ --> not a cognate, but shares the root with _vision_;
_gehen - going - ir_ --> no similarity with English here, except in some forms like _voy_/_voyage_, but the German verb isn't too similar either (cf. past tense: _ging_ - _went_);
_ lernen - learn - aprender_ --> not a cognate, but shares the root with _apprehend_;
_Sprache - speak - hablar_ --> no similarity here, and the shared root with _fable_ is too obscure to be of practical use;
_sagen - saying - decir_ --> not a cognate, but shares the root with e.g. _diction_; 
_horen - hearing - oír_ --> no similarity here, and the shared root with _audio _is too obscure; 
_halb - half - media_ --> _media_ is an IE cognate with _middle_, and shares the Latin root with _medium_;
_Hilfe - help - ayuda_ --> no similarity, and the shared root with _adjutant_ is probably too obscure.

Thus, Spanish isn't doing too bad even when it comes to the basic everyday vocabulary, which is the most thoroughly Germanic part of English. Note that some cognates of every single one of these Spanish words have found their way into English one way or another.

And once you step into slightly more abstract terminology, any Romance language wins hands down. Just think of triples like _solution_/_solución_/_Lösung_, _opportunity_/_oportunidad_/_Gelegenheit_, _permission_/_permiso_/_Erlaubnis_... and tens of thousands of similar examples.


----------



## badgrammar

Athaulf said:


> As for the word list you provide, let's see how a typical Romance language would compare (I'll use Spanish because that's the only one I know to any reasonable degree ):
> I've added French, and I still don't see any hands-down increased similarity with romance languages in terms of basic vocabulary.
> 
> _mein - mine - mi_  - ma/mon -->  Indo-European cognate;
> _kann - can - poder_ - pouvoir --> not a cognate, but shares the root with e.g. _power _or _potent_;still, in a basic construction, it's can/cannot, not "I  have/don't have the power/potency to"...
> _muss - must - deber_ - devoir/falloir --> not a cognate, but shares the root with  e.g. _debt_;
> _nicht - not - no_ - ne...pas--> IE cognate;(careful, here my comparison is with "not", and not with "no", which is "nein" in German)
> _sehen - seeing - ver_ - voir--> not a cognate, but shares the root with _vision_;(are you sure about the root?)
> _gehen - going - ir_ - aller --> no similarity with English here, except in some forms like _voy_/_voyage_, but the German verb isn't too similar either (cf. past tense: _ging_ - _went_);
> _ lernen - learn - aprender_ - apprendre --> not a cognate, but shares the root with _apprehend_;
> _Sprache - speak - hablar_ - parler --> no similarity here, and the shared root with _fable_ is too obscure to be of practical use;
> _sagen - saying - decir_ - dire --> not a cognate, but shares the root with e.g. _diction_; not sure about that latin root.
> _horen - hearing - oír_ - entendre --> no similarity here, and the shared root with _audio _is too obscure;
> _halb - half - media_ - moitié --> _media_ is an IE cognate with _middle_, and shares the Latin root with _medium_ (what about "mittel"?);
> _Hilfe - help - ayuda_ - aide --> no similarity, and the shared root with _adjutant_ is probably too obscure.
> 
> Thus, Spanish isn't doing too bad even when it comes to the basic everyday vocabulary, which is the most thoroughly Germanic part of English. Note that some cognates of every single one of these Spanish words have found their way into English one way or another.
> I don't see the similarities with Spanish, except in media, decir (like "decipher"), and aprendre.
> 
> And once you step into slightly more abstract terminology, any Romance language wins hands down. Just think of triples like _solution_/_solución_/_Lösung_, _opportunity_/_oportunidad_/_Gelegenheit_, _permission_/_permiso_/_Erlaubnis_... and tens of thousands of similar examples.


 Of course, and my point is not about advanced, abstract terminology, or even about speaking the language without error.  My point is about basic communication, and that, atleast in my own, personal experience, there were more than enough similarities between English and German to make it possible for me to quickly learn enough to understand and be understood with requests, questions and answers about basic, everyday subjects, like: Where should I go, what are you doing, what is that, this is a..., I'd like to..., how can I, let's see, I saw, did you eat, I'm hungry, who are they, do you have, where are you from, I'm from, etc...).

To me, words like solution, opportunity, permission, and many others are not part of basic, everyday "survival" vocabulary.  They are  add-ons and I am sure they entered the English language at a much later date than "basic" vocabulary. 

But all this is is just my humble opinion, and if others think English is more like a romance language than a Germanic language, I totally disagree, but so be it .


----------



## Athaulf

badgrammar said:


> _kann - can - poder_ - pouvoir --> not a cognate, but shares the root with e.g. _power _or _potent_;still, in a basic construction, it's can/cannot, not "I  have/don't have the power/potency to"...


Yes, but it's still very easy to remember once you connect it with Latin and/or French words that have related meanings. I  find that _power _and _potent _help with the job of memorizing _poder _or_ pouvoir_ about as much as _can_ helps with memorizing _können_. 

I think that you slightly misunderstood my point about harnessing English for learning Romance vocabulary. There are indeed very few examples where a common Romance word is a recognizable cognate of its exact English translation -- such correspondences are indeed much more common with German. However, for any given Romance word, you are likely to find some more abstract or high-brow English words with a similar or related meaning. These correspondences can be used equally effectively as the more straightforward Germanic cognates, at least in my experience -- and there is a far greater number of them overall. 



> _sehen - seeing - ver_ - voir--> not a cognate, but shares the root with _vision_;(are you sure about the root?)


Yes, it all comes from various forms of the Latin verb _videre_. Some other words with the same Latin root are e.g. _view_, _video_, or _vista_.  




> _sagen - saying - decir_ - dire --> not a cognate, but shares the root with e.g. _diction_; not sure about that latin root.


It all comes from the Latin verb _dicere._



> _halb - half - media_ - moitié --> _media_ is an IE cognate with _middle_, and shares the Latin root with _medium_ (what about "mittel"?);


Yes, it is a Germanic cognate with _middle_. 



> Thus, Spanish isn't doing too bad even when it comes to the basic everyday vocabulary, which is the most thoroughly Germanic part of English. Note that some cognates of every single one of these Spanish words have found their way into English one way or another.
> I don't see the similarities with Spanish, except in media, decir (like "decipher"), and aprendre.


Actually, _decipher_ came from Sanskrit via Arabic.


----------



## Ayazid

Athaulf said:


> _Hilfe - help - ayuda_ --> no similarity, and the shared root with _adjutant_ is probably too obscure.



By the way, isn´t the english word *aid* a cognate of both ayuda and aide?


----------



## Athaulf

Ayazid said:


> By the way, isn´t the english word *aid* a cognate of both ayuda and aide?



Yes, it is.  It just didn't occur to me when I was writing the post above.


----------



## Ayazid

Athaulf said:


> _muss - must - deber_ --> not a cognate, but shares the root with  e.g. _debt_;



I have found out that deber/devoir is also cognate of *due*


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## badgrammar

Ok, I broke out the Bg Dictionary, and you are effectively right about all the Latin terminology !

Still, in my own little world, I have found English helped me learn simple German far more than it helped me to learn French...  I have no proof that for anywone else it would be so, but that is/was my personal experience... 



Athaulf said:


> Yes, but it's still very easy to remember once you connect it with Latin and/or French words that have related meanings. I  find that _power _and _potent _help with the job of memorizing _poder _or_ pouvoir_ about as much as _can_ helps with memorizing _können_.
> 
> I think that you slightly misunderstood my point about harnessing English for learning Romance vocabulary. There are indeed very few examples where a common Romance word is a recognizable cognate of its exact English translation -- such correspondences are indeed much more common with German. However, for any given Romance word, you are likely to find some more abstract or high-brow English words with a similar or related meaning. These correspondences can be used equally effectively as the more straightforward Germanic cognates, at least in my experience -- and there is a far greater number of them overall.
> 
> Yes, it all comes from various forms of the Latin verb _videre_. Some other words with the same Latin root are e.g. _view_, _video_, or _vista_.
> 
> It all comes from the Latin verb _dicere._
> 
> Yes, it is a Germanic cognate with _middle_.
> 
> Actually, _decipher_ came from Sanskrit via Arabic.


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## Arrius

_dû,_ feminine form _due (_which loses its circumflex accent_),_ is the past participle of the French verb _devoir _(to owe/ to have to/ must), and is an example of how English uses a Germanic word for the basic idea, _owe _or _must,_ but a Norman French word for a slightly less common idea (_union dues/ due on the 5th May_), and a Latin one, in this case from which the previous French one is derived, for a specialised use,_ debit_ (as opposed to _credit_). The word _owe_ is connected with the word _own,_ which we can see in the somewhat rare use, _I own that,_ with the meaning _I admit that/_I_ have to agree that_. German cognates are _eigen_ (_own_, adj.)
and _Eigentümer_ (_owner_), the English form coming from the similar Anglo-Saxon _agan_ which gave us _to owe, own and ought_ (originally past participle of _owe_).
All this is very interesting, at least to me, but I am no longer sure where this thread is going or what we are trying to prove.


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## Frank06

*Hi,*


Arrius said:


> All this is very interesting, at least to me, but I am no longer sure where this thread is going or what we are trying to prove.


 
*Indeed... From the "weight of the Germanic component" we shifted to a comparison between English and French and German vocabulary -- and with a bit of fantasy one could call that on topic -- to... well, to something else.*

*My, erm, suggestion: It's been interesting, it's been nice, but if nobody has anyhting to say anymore about the topic of this thread, viz. "the weight of the Germanic component in English", we simply close this one.*

*Groetjes,*

*Frank*
*Moderator EHL*


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## HUMBERT0

Athaulf said:


> As for the word list you provide, let's see how a typical Romance language would compare (I'll use Spanish because that's the only one I know to any reasonable degree ):
> 
> Thus, Spanish isn't doing too bad even when it comes to the basic everyday vocabulary, which is the most thoroughly Germanic part of English. Note that some cognates of every single one of these Spanish words have found their way into English one way or another.


 Since it has been implied that English is closer to Spanish, I can expect them to understand what I have to say in Spanish.

Para empezar, se habla del francés como si fuera una lengua libre de germanismos. Del francés se dice que es la más germanizada de las hijas del latín, no os hagáis… Y del Ingles se dice que es la más latinizada de las lenguas teutonas, debido y sin temor a equivocarme, al francés – que de por si ya viene con una influencia germánica y creo que para nadie es noticia.

Es una tergiversación, que si hablo ingles, entonces entiendo español o al revés. Lo sé por qué vivo a tiro de piedra de un país de habla Inglesa, y con mi español NO me doy a entender en el país de a lado, NI ellos en el mío con su Ingles, a menos de que alguno de los que hablen conozca ambos. 

Es mucho más cercano el Ingles a las lenguas germánicas, me ayudó bastante el Ingles cuando me di a la tarea de saber un poco de alemán, las semejanzas saltan desde el principio. Y sin saber los Idiomas escandinavos, he mirado películas suecas, danesas, me sorprende que me de cuenta de mucho de lo que dicen, y no es por mi español, sino por mi Ingles. Mi español resulta útil cuando escucho italiano o portugués.


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## HUMBERT0

Athaulf said:


> As for the word list you provide, let's see how a typical Romance language would compare (I'll use Spanish because that's the only one I know to any reasonable degree ):
> 
> _mein - mine - __mi_-->  Indo-European cognate;
> _kann - can - poder_ --> not a cognate, but shares the root with e.g. _power _or _potent_;
> _muss - must - deber_ --> not a cognate, but shares the root with  e.g. _debt_;
> _nicht - not - no_ --> IE cognate;
> _sehen - seeing - ver_ --> not a cognate, but shares the root with _vision_;
> _gehen - going - ir_ --> no similarity with English here, except in some forms like _voy_/_voyage_, but the German verb isn't too similar either (cf. past tense: _ging_ - _went_);
> _ lernen - learn - aprender_ --> not a cognate, but shares the root with _apprehend_;
> _Sprache - speak - hablar_ --> no similarity here, and the shared root with _fable_ is too obscure to be of practical use;
> _sagen - saying - decir_ --> not a cognate, but shares the root with e.g. _diction_;
> _horen - hearing - oír_ --> no similarity here, and the shared root with _audio _is too obscure;
> _halb - half - media_ --> _media_ is an IE cognate with _middle_, and shares the Latin root with _medium_;
> _Hilfe - help - ayuda_ --> no similarity, and the shared root with _adjutant_ is probably too obscure.



I corrected the Spanish part:
_mein - mine – _mi_ *MIO*_--> Indo-European cognate;
_kann - can - __poder_ - *PUEDO*--> not a cognate, but shares the root with e.g. _power _or _potent_;
_muss - must – _deber_ - *DEBO*_ --> not a cognate, but shares the root with e.g. _debt_; 
_nicht - not - no_ --> IE cognate;
_sehen - seeing - _ver - *VIENDO*--> not a cognate, but shares the root with _vision_;
_gehen - going _ir_ -*VOY*_ --> no similarity with English here, except in some forms like _voy_/_voyage_, but the German verb isn't too similar either (cf. past tense: _ging_ - _went_);
_lernen - learn - aprender_ --> not a cognate, but shares the root with _apprehend_;
_Sprache - speak – _hablar_- *HABLA*_ --> no similarity here, and the shared root with _fable_ is too obscure to be of practical use;
_sagen - saying - __decir_ - *DICIENDO*--> not a cognate, but shares the root with e.g. _diction_; 
_horen - hearing - _oír -*OYENDO*--> no similarity here, and the shared root with _audio _is too obscure; 
_halb - half - __media_ -*MITAD*--> _media_ is an IE cognate with _middle_, and shares the Latin root with _medium_;
_Hilfe - help - ayuda_ --> no similarity, and the shared root with _adjutant_ is probably too obscure.


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## Athaulf

HUMBERT0 said:


> I corrected the Spanish part:
> _mein - mine – _mi_ *MIO*_--> Indo-European cognate;
> _kann - can - __poder_ - *PUEDO*--> not a cognate, but shares the root with e.g. _power _or _potent_;
> _muss - must – _deber_ - *DEBO*_ --> not a cognate, but shares the root with e.g. _debt_;
> _nicht - not - no_ --> IE cognate;
> _sehen - seeing - _ver - *VIENDO*--> not a cognate, but shares the root with _vision_;
> _gehen - going _ir_ -*VOY*_ --> no similarity with English here, except in some forms like _voy_/_voyage_, but the German verb isn't too similar either (cf. past tense: _ging_ - _went_);
> _lernen - learn - aprender_ --> not a cognate, but shares the root with _apprehend_;
> _Sprache - speak – _hablar_- *HABLA*_ --> no similarity here, and the shared root with _fable_ is too obscure to be of practical use;
> _sagen - saying - __decir_ - *DICIENDO*--> not a cognate, but shares the root with e.g. _diction_;
> _horen - hearing - _oír -*OYENDO*--> no similarity here, and the shared root with _audio _is too obscure;
> _halb - half - __media_ -*MITAD*--> _media_ is an IE cognate with _middle_, and shares the Latin root with _medium_;
> _Hilfe - help - ayuda_ --> no similarity, and the shared root with _adjutant_ is probably too obscure.



Actually, the original list didn't list the exact corresponding morphological forms in English and German to begin with, so the German words should be corrected too if you want to have exact correspondences. Furthermore, in some cases, it's inherently unclear which Spanish form corresponds to the given English and German ones. For example, the English gerund serves as both the present participle and a noun derived from the verb, but in Spanish, these forms are different. Thus, for example, _seeing_ can correspond to both _viendo_ and _ver_. Also, I don't see the logic behind some of the corrections above (how does e.g. the gerund _going_ correspond to the first person present tense _voy_?).


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## HUMBERT0

Athaulf said:


> Also, I don't see the logic behind some of the corrections above (how does e.g. the gerund _going_ correspond to the first person present tense _voy_?).



_mein - mine – _mi_ *MIO*_--> It's *mine* = Es *mio*
_kann - can - __poder_ - *PUEDO*--> *Can* I go? = ¿*Puedo* ir?
_muss - must – _deber_ - *DEBO*_ --> I *must* cook = *Debo* cocinar;
_sehen - seeing - _ver - *VIENDO*--> I'm *seeing* you = Te estoy *viendo*.
_gehen - going _ir_ -*VOY*_ --> I'm *going *to the store = *Voy* a la tienda
_Sprache - speak – _hablar_- *HABLA*_ --> You *speak*! = ¡Tú* habla*!_
sagen - saying - __decir_ - *DICIENDO*--> I'm *saying* the truth = Estoy *diciendo *la verdad.
_horen - hearing - _oír -*OYENDO*--> Are you *hearing* me? = ¿Me estás *oyendo*? 
_halb - half - __media_ -*MITAD*--> You give me *half *= Tú dame la *mitad

*I wrote the corrections based on the English text, and how they would most probably translate into Spanish.


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## Ayazid

HUMBERT0 said:


> Since it has been implied that English is closer to Spanish, I can expect them to understand what I have to say in Spanish.



Humberto
Who has implied in this thread that English is closer to Spanish than to German or other Germanic language?  What has been implied here is just the fact that for native English speakers a text (most probably of technical nature) written in some Romance language would be generally more understandable than the same text written in some Germanic tongue, that´s all.


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## Athaulf

HUMBERT0 said:


> I wrote the corrections based on the English text, and how they would most probably translate into Spanish.



Yes, but in most of these cases, these "corrections" consist in arbitrary picking of alternatives that are equally valid and reasonable as my original choice, and some of them less so. There are, for example, dozens of different forms of verbs _poder _and _deber_ that translate into the plain _can_ and _must_ in English. I might as well go and correct your _puedo_ and _debo_ into, say, _puedes_ and _debes_ and claim that I "improved" something. Or, the English _half_ can translate as either _medio_/_media_ or _mitad_, depending on the context; you corrected it as if my choice was impossible.
I'm pointing this out because for readers that don't know any Spanish, your "corrections" make it seem as if I was utterly clueless when I wrote my above post.


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## JGreco

I love all the talk of specific morphological similarities, structural similarities being the key of what makes English Germanic when every person knows that the basic English  monolingual speaker would understand not even a word of German even with all of those structural similarities. Even me a polyglot would say that I have a hard time understand even written German. As I mentioned before there are more similarities in spoken form with all the other spoken forms of the Germanic languages (except for maybe Icelandic) than English speakers comprehension of all other Germanic languages.


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## HUMBERT0

Athaulf said:


> Yes, but in most of these cases, these "corrections" consist in arbitrary picking of alternatives that are equally valid and reasonable as my original choice, and some of them less so. There are, for example, dozens of different forms of verbs _poder _and _deber_ that translate into the plain _can_ and _must_ in English. I might as well go and correct your _puedo_ and _debo_ into, say, _puedes_ and _debes_ and claim that I "improved" something. Or, the English _half_ can translate as either _medio_/_media_ or _mitad_, depending on the context; you corrected it as if my choice was impossible.
> I'm pointing this out because for readers that don't know any Spanish, your "corrections" make it seem as if I was utterly clueless when I wrote my above post.


 You are right, I apologize, and since the words had no context I shouldn’t have assumed a more familiar translation “subjective” was needed. 

  Still, _mein - mine – _mi_ *MIO*_--> Mine, I would translate as mío, mía, míos, mías and not “mi”. On the other hand, “My” I would translate as “Mi”.


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## elpoderoso

_Each word I'm speaking now is from Old English, and I think it would be a long time before you thought of something not right about what I've been saying. I could go on for days, weeks, months, even years... You could leave, go home, have a rest, come back tonight -- and I'd still be here speaking Old English words. Old English is at the heart of everything we say and do._
I feel this passage would sound slightly odd if read out, it seems this person had to think long and hard before writing this speech and also as they had to deliberately avoid using Romance derived words it would be strange to describe it as ''natural'' and ''uncontrived''.


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## zpoludnia swiata

Both Old English (Germanic/Anglo-Saxon) words and Romance words are pretty much necessary to maintain (keep up?) a conversation in standard English.  If you looked at the top 5,000 or even 2,000 words in use in spoken English, you'd also find Romance words.  I don't think you could normally do what the previous poster posted, though it's interesting.
Also, you can't completely divorce one element from the other.  Take a look at phrasal verbs such as _turn on_ or _move over_-- a perfect blend of Germanic with Romance.  Pretty much what English is.


----------



## Forero

Just a few snide observations:

Seeing French is very different from hearing French.  German, however, is about equally incomprehensible either way.

Grimm's law and related phonetic principles allow an English speaker to find lots of cognates.  There is no law for French.

German vocabulary is not much use if you don't know German word order.  It's not hard to learn of course.  Then all you have to worry about is word endings and how to divide long words into shorter ones ...

French is full of stumbling blocks that make it difficult to tell a positive from a negative, or an insult from a compliment.  Half the language seems to be one big false friend.

Sure, scheu sounds like shy if you ignore the vowels (half the word), but getting past that you are still no closer to understanding Schi, Scheuche, Scheuer/Scheune, scheuern, or scheußlich.


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## tkekte

A challenge to anyone that thinks Modern English is more Germanic than Romance: try to prove your position using only Germanic words.


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## Frank06

tkekte said:


> A challenge to anyone that thinks Modern English is more Germanic than Romance: try to prove your position using only Germanic words.


Three challenges to anyone that thinks the lexicon is _thee_ determing factor in language classification: 
1. Try to explain why _every single linguist_ on this planet classifies English as a Germanic language.
2. Convince us of the weight of the lexicon (and the lexicon only) in determing the classification of English as a non-Germanic language.
3. _maybe this is off topic, but the same rationale is used_ -- try to explain why Turkish and Persian are _not_ Semitic languages, without referring to anything else but the lexicon. This question #3 may be answered in this related thread.


Good luck.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## tkekte

Frank06 said:


> Three challenges to anyone that thinks the lexicon is _thee_ determing factor in language classification:
> 1. Try to explain why _every single linguist_ on this planet classifies English as a Germanic language.


See your own response. The question is emotionally charged.  I doubt it's really every single linguist on the planet... but anyway, linguistics have always been heavily interweaved with politics and personal sentiments. That's nothing new.  English doesn't belong to any single language family, IMO.


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## Frank06

Hi,


tkekte said:


> See your own response. The question is emotionally charged.  I doubt it's really every single linguist on the planet...


Every linguist who is to be taken seriously. My mistake for being incomplete.


> but anyway, linguistics have always been heavily interweaved with politics and personal sentiments. That's nothing new.


This is new to me. Can you please explain me what's 'political' or 'emotional' about the classification of English as a Germanic language (on the basis of these criteria)?

Groetjes,

Frank


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## robbie_SWE

_



			Each word I'm speaking now is from Old English, and I think it would be a *long* *time* before you thought of something not *right* about what I've been saying. I could go on for days, weeks, months, even years... You could leave, go home, have a *rest*, come back tonight and I'd still be here speaking Old English words. Old English is at the heart of everything we say and do.
		
Click to expand...

_ 
*Long* = doesn't it also seem to be related to Latin _longus_? Compare it to French (_long_, _longue_), Romanian (_lung_), Italian (_lungo_, _lunga_) and Portuguese (_longo_).

_*Time*_ = I know it's a Germanic word, but I seem to see a resemblance between "time" and the French _temps_, Romanian _timp_, Italian _tempo_, Spanish _tiempo_, Portuguese _tempo_ and Latin _tempus_. 

*Right* = isn't it akin to Latin _rectus_?

*Rest* = this is undoubtedly from French _rester_ < Latin _restāre_.

I chose not to take up _*each*_ (influenced by the Latin _quisque_) since it is Germanic, but “each” is a word with ambiguous origin. 

My point is that ALL Indo-European languages are more or less influenced by each other. English seems to be extremely influenced by Latin and composing a text without any Latin words is utterly impossible. 

 robbie


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## Athaulf

robbie_SWE said:


> *Long* = doesn't it also seem to be related to Latin _longus_? Compare it to French (_long_, _longue_), Romanian (_lung_), Italian (_lungo_, _lunga_) and Portuguese (_longo_).
> *
> Right* = isn't it akin to Latin _rectus_?
> 
> *Rest* = this is undoubtedly from French _rester_ < Latin _restāre_.



These words are indeed related to the similar sounding Latin and Romance words, but this is because they are Indo-European cognates with these Latin words, not because of borrowing. All of them have a continuous history of usage all the way to Proto-IE, via Old English and Proto-Germanic, and they also have cognates in other Germanic languages. You can see the details of their etymologies, for example, in this dictionary. 

In particular, you are wrong about _rest_ being a French borrowing. It's a pure Germanic word with cognates in Old Norse and Gothic (and more distant IE cognates in Latin and Romance, of course). 



> _*Time*_ = I know it's a Germanic word, but I seem to see a resemblance between "time" and the French _temps_, Romanian _timp_, Italian _tempo_, Spanish _tiempo_, Portuguese _tempo_ and Latin _tempus_.



I'm not sure if _time_/_tempus_ are real or false cognates, but either way, _time_ also comes straight from Proto-Germanic. 



> I chose not to take up _*each*_ (influenced by the Latin _quisque_) since it is Germanic, but “each” is a word with ambiguous origin.


Its _usage_ was influenced by the Latin word, but its root is still Germanic. Semantic drift isn't relevant for determining word origins.
 


> My point is that ALL Indo-European languages are more or less influenced by each other. English seems to be extremely influenced by Latin and composing a text without any Latin words is utterly impossible.


Well, the above text is apparently a counterexample.  But yes, obviously, it's impossible to communicate in English meaningfully using only Germanic words. The point of the above example was to show that the core of the language is still Germanic to such a large degree that it's possible to assemble a few meaningful purely Germanic sentences, which would be absolutely impossible with only Romance words.


----------



## Athaulf

tkekte said:


> See your own response. The question is emotionally charged.  I doubt it's really every single linguist on the planet... but anyway, linguistics have always been heavily interweaved with politics and personal sentiments. That's nothing new.  English doesn't belong to any single language family, IMO.



This might be true if you use your own arbitrary definition of a "language family". However, in linguistics, this notion is defined in a precise, scientific way, and there are well-defined criteria for classifying languages into families. According to these criteria, English is uncontroversially a Germanic language. Coming up with your own definition of "language family" and insisting that it makes more sense than the standard one is akin to, say, coming up with your own definition of mammals and then insisting that biologists shouldn't  classify the dolphin as a mammal any more.


----------



## Hulalessar

Carrots and parsnips look alike, but are not only separate species but in different genera. Cabbages, cauliflowers, brussels sprouts, kale, broccoli and kohlrabi all look different, but are varieties of the same species.


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## Sepia

Hulalessar said:


> Carrots and parsnips look alike, but are not only separate species but in different genera. Cabbages, cauliflowers, brussels sprouts, kale, broccoli and kohlrabi all look different, but are varieties of the same species.



Whatever you say, the structure of the English language is Germanic - no matter how many words of Latin origin you use in your vocabulary, your grammar is still the same, and it is of Germanic origin. The conjugation of verbs based on Latin words is still the same as with all other verbs, adjectives are still before the nouns, articles are stil the same etc. Mention one example where the grammar of Romance languages has been adopted into the English language. (I could find examples, though, where English language has influenced Danish grammar within the past 50 years.)

The basic character of the language is no less Germanic than that of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian + a few more.


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## berndf

Sepia said:


> Whatever you say, the structure of the English language is Germanic - no matter how many words of Latin origin you use in your vocabulary, your grammar is still the same, and it is of Germanic origin. The conjugation of verbs based on Latin words is still the same as with all other verbs, adjectives are still before the nouns, articles are stil the same etc. Mention one example where the grammar of Romance languages has been adopted into the English language. (I could find examples, though, where English language has influenced Danish grammar within the past 50 years.)
> 
> The basic character of the language is no less Germanic than that of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian + a few more.


 

The English grammer has been influenced by Latin quite a lot. But this is no counter argument to what you said because Latin grammer has influenced that of other Germanic languages to the same extend, in the case of German maybe even more.

The biggest single Latin influence on Germanic languages is certainly the tempus system. Germanic languages had originally only present and past tenses.


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## Outsider

berndf said:


> The biggest single Latin influence on Germanic languages is certainly the tempus system. Germanic languages had originally only present and past tenses.


I thought they still did. What has changed?


----------



## berndf

Outsider said:


> I thought they still did. What has changed?


 
As in Vulgar Latin and in modern Romance languages the other tenses have composite forms but not to regard future and present and past perfects as tenses in their own rights just because the use composite forms is splitting hairs.


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## Outsider

It seems you are talking about names. Surely that proves very little...


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## berndf

Outsider said:


> It seems you are talking about names. Surely that proves very little...


 
My point is that modern Germanic languages *have* a tempus *system* with *syntatic* *rules* borrowed from Latin grammer.

You should not reduce grammer to morphology.

Or maybe I misunderstood you than explain me why you said English had still only two tenses (this is how we started to talk about definition of terms)


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## Outsider

berndf said:


> My point is that modern Germanic languages *have* a tempus *system* with *syntatic* *rules* borrowed from Latin grammer.


Syntactic rules, or just terminology...?



berndf said:


> You should not reduce grammer to morphology.


Certainly.



berndf said:


> Or maybe I misunderstood you than explain me why you said English had still only two tenses (this is how we started to talk about definition of terms)


Because the number of basic tenses in modern English is the same as the number of basic tenses in Old English, before the Latin influences had become significant.


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## Frank06

Hi,


berndf said:


> Or maybe I misunderstood you than explain me why you said English had still only two tenses


Simply because English _does_ have two tenses (idem dito for _all_ the other Germanic languages). At least, *if* you take the strict, narrow meaning of the term 'tense'. You meant something else, you used 'tense' in the broad meaning of the word.

I don't think that trying to understand, trying to explain and trying to agree upon the particular usage of a technical term in a discussion is the same as splitting hairs. Especially not if that term can have quite different meanings.

Now, I think the misunderstanding has been solved. 

Shall we go on with the main topic of this thread?

Groetjes,

Frank


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## Loob

berndf said:


> The English grammer has been influenced by Latin quite a lot.


That's interesting, berndf.

Can you give some examples?

Loob


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## berndf

Outsider said:


> Syntactic rules, or just terminology...?


 
I am talking about the Syntax of English:
English has a verb form expressing future (whether basic or not)
English has a verb form expressing chronological sequence in the past (past perfect).

These things Old English did not have. As an example in modern English you can express things like "I will do this" implying wou havn't done it yet. With the syntactic means of Old English you couldn't. You had to qualify the sentence to express this, e.g.: "At a later time I do that".

In my mind this is a material change in English syntax (under the influence of Latin grammer) and not just terminology.



Outsider said:


> Because the number of basic tenses in modern English is the same as the number of basic tenses in Old English, before the Latin influences had become significant.


 
I tried in my original post to make a point about tenses you are talking straight about "basic tenses". That is what I meant by reduction of grammer to morphology.


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## berndf

Frank06 said:


> Shall we go on with the main topic of this thread?


 
The point made before my intervention was that English in essence a Germanic language because of the strucuture of its grammer irrespective of the number of borrowed Romance words.

I posted to *agree with this* even though there has been Latin influence on English syntax (not so much on morphology) because these changes in English syntax are in line with "normal" Latin influence on the syntax of all Germanic languages.

I try to reiterate my point here irrespective of whether or not the tempus system is a suitable example (which side tracked us).


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## Outsider

berndf said:


> I am talking about the Syntax of English:
> English has a verb form expressing future (whether basic or not)
> English has a verb form expressing chronological sequence in the past (past perfect).
> 
> These things Old English did not have. As an example in modern English you can express things like "I will do this" implying wou havn't done it yet. With the syntactic means of Old English you couldn't. You had to qualify the sentence to express this, e.g.: "At a later time I do that".
> 
> In my mind this is a material change in English syntax (under the influence of Latin grammer) and not just terminology.


So you think the Germanic future tense was created through the influence of Latin? Which kind of influence are you referring to? This is not a trivial question: I suppose that there may have been some _Sprachbund_ phenomenon at work. But I'm asking how direct you think the influence of Latin was.


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## berndf

Outsider said:


> What makes you think that is due to the influence of Latin?


 
Yes, I think so.

Written language was in midieval times also exclusive domain of monks and their tendency to apply Latin syntactic constructs to their respective native language had significant impact on the development of standardized national languages. At least in the case of German this is very well documented.

Wouldn't you agree?


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## Outsider

I'm afraid I would not. The preferences of monks can have an impact on spelling, vocabulary, and sometimes a _small_ influence on the pronunciation of particular words -- but I have never heard of the syntax of a language being substantially changed because of a minute elite of prescriptivists.


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## berndf

Outsider said:


> I'm afraid I would not. The preferences of monks can have an impact on spelling, vocabulary, and sometimes a _small_ influence on the pronunciation of particular words -- but I have never heard of the syntax of a language being substantially changed because of a minute elite of prescriptivists.


 
Interesting. I thought this was common place, what of course doesn't means that it is correct. At least in the case of German I came accross this many times in text books. The lack of syntactic sophistication in many dialect compared to High German adds to the plausibility of this theory.

I would be extremely interested to get references if you had sources stating the opposite.


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## Frank06

Hi,


berndf said:


> Written language was in midieval times also exclusive domain of monks and their tendency to apply Latin syntactic constructs to their respective native language had significant impact on the development of standardized national languages. At least in the case of German this is very well documented.


But German isn't English. What about English? I mean, this thread is about the "weight of the Germanic component" in "*English*". 
You are kindly invited to open a new thread on the influence of Latin on German, and please do, because it is interesting.

But here, in this thread, we discuss English .
So, please, do give some examples involving the tenses (in English).

Groetjes,

Frank


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## berndf

Frank06 said:


> ...
> You are kindly invited to open a new thread on the influence of Latin on German, and please do, because it is interesting.
> ...


 
I extendet it to cover all Germanic languages. I intended German only as an example.

For those interested, see thread "Development of the Syntax of Germanic languages under the influence of Latin"

Cheers,
Bernd


*Link to new thread** added.*
*Frank
Moderator*


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## JGreco

O.K we all agree that in terms of syntax that English is by far a Germanic language but the argument in my opinion is not over syntax but is phonology and the spoken language which I believe at least most Monolingual English speakers would not understand a word of the spoken language in most Germanic tongues while other Germanic languages weather it be German to Dutch or Danish to Norwegian to  Swedish  can at least  understand some of the spoken language and phonetics while English and Germanic languages such as Icelandic , Faroes, or English are distant offshoots phonetically. But I think I pretty much have said this over and over again *Ad Nauseum. *


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## Outsider

But what does that prove? Even Scandinavians can't understand Icelandic. Would you question the "Germanicity" of Swedish or Icelandic because of that?


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## berndf

I should agree with Outsider.
The phonetic idiosyncrasies of English are considerable but they largely occurred in modern English. Late Middle English was still phonetically quite similar to other medieval descendents from (Anglo-) Saxon while most of the Romanization of the vocabulary and the grammatical simplifications had already occurred.
The phonetic deviation of English from other Germanic languages should therefore be regarded as an Evolution *from within* the Germanic language family. While the phonetic shifts of Modern English, especially the "Great Vowel Shift", are very interesting phenomena , they do not contribute any new insights to the current discussion.


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## Frank06

JGreco said:


> O.K we all agree that in terms of syntax that English is by far a Germanic language


In terms of *grammar*, which includes, among other things, syntax and phonology (and much more)!!



> but the argument in my opinion is not over syntax but is phonology and the spoken language which I believe at least most Monolingual English speakers would not understand a word of the spoken language in most Germanic tongues while other Germanic languages weather it be German to Dutch or Danish to Norwegian to Swedish can at least understand some of the spoken language and phonetics while English and Germanic languages such as Icelandic , Faroes, or English are distant offshoots phonetically. But I think I pretty much have said this over and over again *Ad Nauseum. *


I fully agree with Outsider and Berndf.
But I would even like to go further: By this kind of logic, the Indo-European language family would have at least as many sub-branches as there are languages. By this kind of logic, there would be at least as many language families as languages. By this kind of logic, genetic classification is pointless, since the notion 'language family/group' would lose its meaning... 
While the whole point of genetic language classification is grouping languages on the basis of *shared* features (through time, let's not forget the historical aspect here). 

Maybe I am exaggerating now, but if we find enough pertinent and useful features which are shared by a group of languages (in the first place grammatical features in the broadest sense of the word, but also the core lexicon), the features they do not share are irrelevant*, at least with regards to the genetic classification [edit] up to a certain level[/edit].
As for English as a Germanic language and as for the Germanic languages as a (sub) group: the features have been well described in the literature of the last 200 years...

Groetjes,

Frank

PS: Of course they are relevant, since they allow people to make the classification more detailed, with more sub-levels.


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## Hulalessar

The point I made above about vegetables was to try and show the difference between scientific and informal classification. A non-botanist relying purely on what he sees at the greengrocers will be tempted to classify carrots with parsnips simply because they look similar, and conversely to assume that cabbages, cauliflowers, brussels sprouts, kale, broccoli and kohlrabi are less closely related to each other because of their widely differing appearance. However, a botanist using a scientific classification based on genetic relationship knows that carrots and parsnips belong to different genera, although to the same family, whilst cabbages, cauliflowers, brussels sprouts, kale, broccoli and kohlrabi are all varieties of the same species.

Let's imagine a visitor from outer space who, before setting out on a visit to Earth has learned German and French, and no other languages. If on arrival he is shown a page taken at random from _The Times_ and asked to decide whether English is more closely related to German or French, I think it is reasonable to assume that he will conclude that it is more closely related to French and he will conclude on the basis of what he sees.

In _The Power of Babel_ John McWhorter makes a very telling point when he says that a native English speaker who has studied Spanish and German for a year or two will more readily understand a newspaper in Spanish than in German. This is because there are many Spanish words he will know without having had to learn them simply because they exist in English, even though many of them may be in the high register of English.

I have opened my German dictionary at random and found "Arbeitsbescheinigung". In French this would be "certificat d'emploi" and in Spanish "certificado de empleo". I do not think that anyone can disagree that a monoglot Englishman is going to have a rather easier time working out the meaning of the French and hardly much more difficulty in deciphering the Spanish.

So, with all this a non-linguist would seem to be entirely justified in suggesting that English is more closely related to French than German, but, to use a perhaps not particularly apt culinary metaphor, that would be like insisting that chicken curry is like beef curry because they both have the same aroma, when what is more important is the meat that is in the dish.

Languages may be considered by looking at their morphology, syntax, phonology and vocabulary. In determining the degree of relatedness of two languages morphology and syntax are more important than phonology and vocabulary. We know for sure that both French and Spanish are descended from Latin, but they have quite different sound systems. Words are important, but have the potential to mislead. Words are the most readily borrowed feature of language and equally when not borrowed can appear in different guises in closely related languages. Let's go back to our alien who, remember, knows French. If we show him the French word "fille" and the Spanish word "hija" and tell him that they are the same word, he will probably laugh at us. But we can show him the pairs "higo/figue" and "paja/paille" (and lots of others) and point out (for those pairs) that in writing Spanish <h> and <j> = French <f> and <ill> (or phonetically Spanish /zero/ (since the "h" is not pronounced) and /x/ = French /f/ and /j/ ) It is of course partly by making comparisons of these kinds that it has been shown that English is related to a language like Hindi. But words can also change their meaning. German "sterben" means "to die" and is related to English "starve" which has come to have a narrower meaning and (going back to the point made above that knowing English is not a fantastic help in learning German) knowing the word "starve" is no help in guessing the meaning of "sterben", though once the connection is pointed out, it may help you remember.

English is undeniably a Germanic language, but is unusual in that its vocabulary matches that of the Romance languages to a high degree. Its meat is Germanic, but its sauce is French.


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## Hulalessar

berndf said:


> The lack of syntactic sophistication in many dialect compared to High German...


 
All dialects/languages are equally syntactically sophisticated.


----------



## cirrus

robbie_SWE said:


> My point is that ALL Indo-European languages are more or less influenced by each other. ...
> composing a text without any Latin words is utterly impossible.
> 
> robbie


Robbie I agree with your first statement. Your second is a massive generalisation which you will struggle to back up.  Every day English speech is much more likely to be Germanic in origin. 
I got up this morning and ate breakfast. I had meat and bread and a cup of water. Where's the Latin there?

What I notice is that people are confusing Germanic with German. The two overlap but are not identical. Germanic includes Frisian, Platt Deutsch, high, low and mid German, Dutch, as well as early English. 

English has had several waves of Latin inclusion. Some came about as a result of Norman French being the language of court.  Later Latin was the language of the church and education.  Grammarians in later centuries often tried to force Latinate forms onto English in an attempt to make it conform with what was perceived as Latin purety. This is one of the reasons why there people don't like splitting infinitives or prepositions at the end of sentences. To boldly go jars on their ears even though we hear it every day. There are any amount of linguistic uses they find it hard to put up with.


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## berndf

cirrus said:


> I got up this morning and ate breakfast. I had meat and bread and a cup of water. Where's the Latin there?


 
cup

But you made your point. Only 5% of Latin in quite normal English sentences is convincing.

Purely counting frequencies in dictionaries is probably rather pointless if you attach the same weight to e.g. _falsifiability_ than to _he_.


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## Sepia

I am still waiting for someone to explain what the English - or other Germanic future tense variations - have in common with the future tense in Latin and other Romance languages. 

I think I'll have to wait forever for that one. They don't even use similar auxiliary verbs or even put them in the same place in the sentence. Just because they develop tenses that Latin had before any of the Germanic languages is not necessarily a result of influence is it. At least there should be rational arguments supporting this thesis for us to believe it.


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## robbie_SWE

cirrus said:


> Robbie I agree with your first statement. Your second is a massive generalisation which you will struggle to back up. Every day English speech is much more likely to be Germanic in origin.
> I got up this morning and ate breakfast. I had meat and bread and a cup of water. Where's the Latin there?
> 
> What I notice is that people are confusing Germanic with German. The two overlap but are not identical. Germanic includes Frisian, Platt Deutsch, high, low and mid German, Dutch, as well as early English.
> 
> English has had several waves of Latin inclusion. Some came about as a result of Norman French being the language of court. Later Latin was the language of the church and education. Grammarians in later centuries often tried to force Latinate forms onto English in an attempt to make it conform with what was perceived as Latin purety. This is one of the reasons why there people don't like splitting infinitives or prepositions at the end of sentences. To boldly go jars on their ears even though we hear it every day. There are any amount of linguistic uses they find it hard to put up with.


 
Berndf just said it all.  "_*Cup*_" comes from the Latin _cuppa_. 



berndf said:


> cup
> 
> But you made your point. Only 5% of Latin in quite normal English sentences is convincing.
> 
> Purely counting frequencies in dictionaries is probably rather pointless if you attach the same weight to e.g. _falsifiability_ than to _he_.


 
I' sure Cirrus that loads of people can compose sentences and even paragraphs using only Germanic words. But who would want to read it? 

I believe that it would be a very mundane composition and a forced attempt to prove a thesis. The quality of the language would not be very good and the characteristic features that make English such a beautiful and special language would leave a terrible void if taken away. 

PS: (the underlined words all have a Romance origin)

 robbie


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## Frank06

Hi,


robbie_SWE said:


> PS: (the underlined words all have a Romance origin)


Ah, then maybe you are the one who can explain me what Romance words have to do with "the weight of the Germanic component" in English.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## robbie_SWE

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> Ah, then maybe you are the one who can explain me what Romance words have to do with "the weight of the Germanic component" in English.
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank


 
It's relevant in the sense that pointing out the Latin words makes it easier to see the ones with Germanic origin...or something like that!? 

Oh, I feel "a new thread" or "please check out this thread" coming! 

 robbie


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## Loob

It seems relevant to me too.

After all, if we're talking about "the weight of the Germanic component", we need to weigh that component *against* something

There are other options - Celtic, Nordic - but "Romance" (Latin and its derivatives) is the prime contender...

Loob


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## Frank06

Hi,


Loob said:


> It seems relevant to me too.
> After all, if we're talking about "the weight of the Germanic component", we need to weigh that component *against* something


But apparently the counterweight are a bunch of Romance words. That's as light as a feather...

I'll ask it another way: Is there something more substantial that can be linked to the Romance languages?

Groetjes,

Frank


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## Athaulf

One important point that nobody  (I think) has yet raised in this thread is that unlike most of the continental European languages, English has never been subjected to politically motivated campaigns of artificial purism and archaization. People often forget that if it wasn't for such campaigns, we would now have this exact same discussion about -- to name just one example -- Hungarian. 

(Try also this link, which is currently down for some reason. To whet your curiosity, the title of the article is _When Hungarian Was Almost Romance_. )


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## cirrus

robbie_SWE said:


> I' sure Cirrus that loads of people can compose sentences and even paragraphs using only Germanic words. But who would want to read it?
> ..
> robbie


Most people. It's called plain English and it is really clear.  It only needs a reading age of about 11.  The tabloid press here thrives on it. Imagine if lawyers used it, we'd understand what they said instead of wasting money on them messing things up for us and nobody being any the wiser. It'd avoid nonsense like this.


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## Loob

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> But apparently the counterweight are a bunch of Romance words. That's as light as a feather...
> 
> I'll ask it another way: Is there something more substantial that can be linked to the Romance languages?
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank


Important question, Frank.

What does "weight" mean?

The balance between Latinate/Germanic/other words in a dictionary?

The balance between tokens of Latinate/Germanic/other words in (1) conversation (2) newspapers (3) academic prose (4)other contexts?

I'm sorry, I think the OP question has led to a good deal of vagueness in the replies.

I'm not sure, even now, what the OP was after.

Loob


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## Frank06

Hi,


Loob said:


> What does "weight" mean?


Anything but words . 
The lexicon doesn't mean a lot when talking about language groups as 'Germanic', apart, obviously, from the core lexicon.

So, again, is their anything more substantial than lexical loans which connects English to the Romance languages to such a point that the status of English as a Germanic language can be doubted?

And oh ja... A few months ago I read an article about English having 1.000.000.000 words. In another text, I read that up to 60% of the English words are of Romance/Latin origin. 
I truly hope we're not going to discuss all 600.000.000 of them here. 

Thank you. 

Frank


----------



## Loob

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> Anything but words .
> The lexicon doesn't mean a lot when talking about language groups as 'Germanic'.
> 
> So, again, is their anything more substantial than lexical loans which connects English to the Romance languages to such a point that the status of English as a Germanic language can be doubted?


English is a Germanic language - no question.

But it's one which has been exposed to a considerable number of non-Germanic influences: notably (but not exclusively) the Norman Conquest.

So it's not surprising that English has diverged considerably from its Germanic roots.

If the OP question was about mutual intelligibility: there's no question (especially in writng): English and French are more mutually intelligible than English and German. This is - simply and straightforwardly - because English has adopted so many French or Latin words.

Loob


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## berndf

Loob said:


> If the OP question was about mutual intelligibility: there's no question (especially in writng): English and French are more mutually intelligible than English and German.


 
I am not so sure. No doubt from an English speaker's point of view. But this might have more to do with German than with English. German is simply too complicated. For a German speaker learning English is much, much easier than learning French. This is mainly because their are different ways to think, a different logic attached to different languages and the logic of English is so much closer and this has nothing to do with the number of shared word root. People amoung us who are polyglott in daily life can probably confirm my own perception: If you think in language A and than translate it to language B you come up with totally different ways of expressing yourself than if you had thought in language B in the first place. An other interesting observation: After many years living in French speaking countries, I need more concentration to follow a French film in French than an English or German film dubbed into French simply because the logic of what you say and how you say it is different if the original language was French.


----------



## Sepia

... and furthermore - even though 60% of the words might have similarity with French words, and even if 80% of a sentence consists of such words it is not going to do much good if the basic verbs in the sentence are not understood. And I'd say, the simpler the matter, the more verbs will be out of the basic substance of the language:

Wir trinken Wein
Nous buvons du Vin


Simple, right?

But:

Hier ist deine Arbeitsbescheinigung
Voici ton certificat d'emploi.

I am not sure which one is easier to understand here. I think the French one might be.


----------



## Hulalessar

cirrus said:


> I got up this morning and ate breakfast. I had meat and bread and a cup of water. Where's the Latin there?


Were you served nice beef and pork stew on toast? Did you use a fork as you sat on a large chair at the table?


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## Sepia

Hulalessar said:


> Were you served nice beef and pork stew on toast? Did you use a fork as you sat on a large chair at the table?



I am not sure what you want to indicate with the words in red.

Although I see some words that might have Latin origin or have the same origin as similar Latin words, I see no trace of Latin grammar.


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## Hulalessar

Sepia said:


> I am not sure what you want to indicate with the words in red.
> 
> Although I see some words that might have Latin origin or have the same origin as similar Latin words, I see no trace of Latin grammar.


 
Simply show that it is quite easy to make up a sentence with everyday words that come from French. Not all French words are high register. Some French words we cannot really do without.


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## Frank06

*Hi,*

*I have the impression that we reached the end of this discussion and that we're w**alking around in circles.*

*Anyway, it's been nice, it's not always been completely on topic, it's been interesting. *

*But now it's closed.*

*Groetjes,*

*Frank*
*Moderator EHL*


----------

