# Word origins in German language



## Jeraru

Hello,

As far as I know there is a significative number of German words originating from Greek, Latin (and other Romance laguages), English, etc.  Does anyone know which are the percentrages for the different kinds of word origins in German?

I thank you in advance


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## Glockenblume

Jeraru said:


> Hello,
> 
> As far as I know there is a significative number of German words originating from Greek, Latin (and other Romance laguages), English, etc.  Does anyone know which are the percentrages for the different kinds of word origins in German?
> 
> I thank you in advance



I don't know the answer but independant of that, your question should be more precise:
Do you speak of the normal vocabulary - or of all the technical terms?
(In normal vocabulary, the percentage of Latin and Greek words is much lower than in the technical fields - think for example of all chemical terms.)


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## Jeraru

Glockenblume said:


> I don't know the answer but independant of that, your question should be more precise:
> Do you speak of the normal vocabulary - or of all the technical terms?
> (In normal vocabulary, the percentage of Latin and Greek words is much lower than in the technical fields - think for example of all chemical terms.)



It would be great if someone could bring to the table the numbers of both types of vocabulary, but I should say that I'm more interested in the regular vocabulary.


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## Frank78

Glockenblume said:


> (In normal vocabulary, the percentage of Latin and Greek words is much lower than in the technical fields - think for example of all chemical terms.)



I think more words than one might think are of non-Germanic origin. Even such everyday words as Fenster, Pille, Schule, Wein, Küche, Kreuz, etc.

I haven't found exact numbers yet...


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## manfy

Jeraru said:


> As far as I know there is a significative number of German words originating from Greek, Latin (and other Romance laguages), English, etc. Does anyone know which are the percentrages for the different kinds of word origins in German?



This makes me wonder, even if semi-accurate numbers would exist, what would be the actual usefulness of this knowledge??

I'm sure of one thing, since German is a living language, the percentage of foreign words or German words with foreign origin is in constant flux.
If you were to create a statistics for the last 2000 years in 50 or 100 year steps, you'd probably see initially a high percentage of Greek, then a rise in Latin combined with a drop in Greek, in the middle ages fluctuating influences from French, English and other surrounding language families and then towards end of 20th century, i.e. the beginning of the information age, a significant increase in English terminology.

The latter also throws up the problem of how do you define 'origin of a word'? Do you consider our current germanized English words of English origin or do you consider the the origin of that English word? (which could be Celtic, Latin, Nordic, or, of course, Germanic! among others)

Bottom line: Even though it seems like a simple, straightforward question, I doubt that an accurate number exists. You may be able to find some numbers on the internet, but at best they have to be treated purely as a rough guesstimate (probably for the purpose of roughly characterizing language development trends).


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## Yankee_inCA

A linguist would know exactly. I know that almost exactly half of all English words are Latin via the French conquest of 1066, which makes German vocabulary so difficult for us to retain. For example, the word for "science" seems nearly universal among European languages, but German isn't anywhere near as promiscuous with loanwords and has stuck with "Wissenschaft." It's a word that's hard to remember because the cognate is buried in (and this is a guess) "wise" or "wisdom." English prefers a fancy Latin word to one of its own. When I was growing up we called _public address systems_ "loudspeakers." I'm quite sure German would have retained "loudspeaker" rather than garnish its own language with show-off terminology. Our friendliness to loanwords has given English the largest vocabulary in the world -- Shakespeare used twice the vocabulary of any French writer, for example -- thanks to all those extra words from France! -- but in everyday speech we don't use a greater variety of words than folks in any other tongue.  

By the way, it took me forever to notice "acorn" in the German word for squirrel, "Eichhörnchen"! So many long centuries since we went separate ways!


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## Glockenblume

manfy said:


> The latter also throws up the problem of how do you define 'origin of a word'? Do you consider our current germanized English words of English origin or do you consider the the origin of that English word? (which could be Celtic, Latin, Nordic, or, of course, Germanic! among others)




You can regard a bit words in the DWDS - on the right side of the page, there are the different steps of the origin of the word.

I read a book  with the title "Ochsenschenkel und Mausgesäss. Ortsnamen in Nordbayern". 
It was interesting how many names were of celtic origin: the names of the rivers like _Donau, Main, Pegnitz_ and a lot of city names. 
All with _-ach-_, - that's water: _Bach, Lache, ..._
Other names were of slavic origin: city/village names with the suffix _-wind_ (<Wenden) and _-itz_.
But we* feel* those words like pure German words ...


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## ger4

These two words are of Slavic origin, even though they sound like typical German words:
Grenze = borderline (compare Polish "granica")
Gurke = gherkin, cucumber (compare Polish "ogórek")

Town and place names in north-eastern regions of Germany are often of Slavic origin:
Rostock (on the Baltic Sea coast): similar names appear in Poland and in the Czech Republic
Leipzig: "lipa" in Polish means Limetree or Linden, and the Czech name of Leipzig is actually "Lipsko" (sounding like a typical Czech name)
... and many more


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## berndf

Yankee_inCA said:


> A linguist would know exactly.


You'd be surprised! There is no agreement on what would be a separate word is such statistics. Do you count compound words or not? Do you count words produced by productive suffixes (like _understand_ and _understandable_) as separate or not. And so on. Then, should words be frequency weighted or not, i.e. should words that occur only a handful of times in the attested history of a language count the same as household words? Where do you draw the line in time what is _Erbwort_ and what is a _Lehnwort_? 500 years ago (Neuhochdeusch), 1000 years ago (Mittelhochdeutsch), 1500 years ago (Althochdeutsch), 2000 years ago (Gemeingermanisch) or even longer ago?

Percentages you read in studies can at best be taken as ballpark figures and the definitions used in these studies are often specific to the precise questions they try to answer.


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## stevenvh

Yankee_inCA said:


> but German isn't anywhere near as promiscuous with loanwords and has stuck with "Wissenschaft."



Which is the same as in Dutch: "Wetenschap". Since the German "wissen" (and the Dutch "weten") means "to know" it seems likely that it has the same origin as the English "knowledge", even though science and knowledge are completely different things.


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## ger4

It is very difficult to answer the question. You might try to compare the proportion of loanwords in German to the proportion of loanwords in closely related languages.
Compared to Swedish, for example, German often seems to have a word of its own origin (often a very long compound word) where Swedish has a loanword; this might be the result of 'language purification' in the past.

Just a few examples:
Zum Beispiel = Swedish: till exempel = English: for example
Hauptbahnhof = Swedish: centralstation = English: central (train-/railway) station
Fremdenverkehrsauskunft = Swedish: turistinformation = English: tourist information (desk)
Autobahn = Swedish: motorväg = English: motorway
Geldautomat = Swedish: bankomat = English: cash machine (ATM)
Kreisverkehr = Swedish: rondell = English: roundabout (UK), traffic circle (US)
Bahnsteig = Swedish: plattform = English: platform 
Motorrad = Swedish: motorcykel = English: motorbike (motorcycle)
Fahrrad = Swedish: cykel = English: bicycle
Straßenverkehr = Swedish: trafik = English: traffic

However, the development seems to be moving towards more international terms now.

Until not so long ago, you could hear terms like:
Fernsprechzelle or even Münzfernsprecher = Swedish: telefonkiosk = English: (tele)phone box (UK)/ -kiosk (?) (US)
selbsttätig (used as an adverb) = Swedish: automatiskt = English: automatically

A comparison with Dutch or Danish would probably give you the same impression.

Some "counter-examples":
Wissenschaft = Swedish: vetenskap (veten=Wissen=knowledge | -skap = -schaft= -ship or -scape) = English: science
Computer = Swedish: dator = English: computer (obviously dator isn't of Swedish origin either...)

As for IT-terminology, on the other hand, German uses mainly English terms. 

My impression, anyway - no stastical evidence  - is that German has relatively few loanwords compared to Dutch and Scandinavian, but if you compare German to Polish or Czech, or even Hungarian, for instance, you might get a different picture...


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## Ben Jamin

Holger2014 said:


> Gurke = gherkin, cucumber (compare Polish "ogórek")



Actually the word comes from Greek *angourion *and that is, probably, from Persian *angarah*.


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## ger4

Ben Jamin said:


> Actually the word comes from Greek *angourion *and that is, probably, from Persian *angarah*.



re: Gurke
This is interesting: you often get different information from different sources, but that might not always be a contradiction: it is possible that the word for gherkin originated in Persian, made its way into Greek, moved further on into Slavic and finally ended up in the Germanic languages. Danish "agurke" still has the vowel in front of g, just as  in Slavic languages. 

re: Grenze
Would you say "Grenze" < "granica" is of Slavic origin or does it have roots elsewhere as well? Probably all Indo-European words have common origins, somehow.

re: Topic of this thread
I think these examples illustrate once again why it  is so difficult to distinguish between borrowed and native words...


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## berndf

Holger2014 said:


> ...it is possible that the word for gherkin originated in Persian, made its way into Greek, moved further on into Slavic and finally ended up in the Germanic languages.


According to the etymology in DWDS, this is exactly what happened.





Holger2014 said:


> Danish "agurke" still has the vowel in front of g, just as in Slavic languages.


So has the Greek etymon of the Slavic word. This in itself wouldn't prove the passage via Slavic.


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## Ben Jamin

Holger2014 said:


> @ Grenze
> Would you say "Grenze" < "granica" is of Slavic origin or does it have roots elsewhere as well? Probably all Indo-European words have common origins, somehow.


According to Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm (on line) this word came to Germanic from Slavic. The word is related to Polish "grań" which means "edge" (now only a mountain edge). I don't know the IE-root of this word.

And yes, if you equate "Indo-European words" with the words inherited from the PIE (proto IE) language, they all have a common origin. However, most IE languages acquired new words from other, non IE tribes shortly after they had migrated from the IE cradle. The Germanic languages have many such old words of "unknown non IE substrate", for example axe, calf, oak, knife, leather, but also from known sources like Finno-Ugric.


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## berndf

Ben Jamin said:


> And yes, if you equate "Indo-European words" with the words inherited from the PIE (proto IE) language, they all have a common origin.


You have to be careful here. A word isn't _inherited _just because it is ultimately of PIE origin. If a loan word, like _Gurke_, is ultimately derived from a PIE root in the language it is loaned from (in this case there is even a chain of loans) it still remains a loan word.

This distinction may at first sound pedenatic but it is quite important because words derived from the same PIE origin through inheritance and through loaning from other IE languages may produce radically different end results (in form and meaning) because they underwent different phonetic and semantic shifts, cf. eg. English _have_ (inherited) and _capture_ (loaned).


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## Ben Jamin

berndf said:


> You have to be careful here. A word isn't _inherited _just because it is ultimately of PIE origin. If a loan word, like _Gurke_, is ultimately derived from a PIE root in the language it is loaned from (in this case there is even a chain of loans) it still remains a loan word.
> 
> This distinction may at first sound pedenatic but it is quite important because words derived from the same PIE origin through inheritance and through loaning from other IE languages may produce radically different end results (in form and meaning) because they underwent different phonetic and semantic shifts, cf. eg. English _have_ (inherited) and _capture_ (loaned).


It is a good point! But I was focusing on "common origin", and this is true both for "directly inherited" words and for "loans, ultimately from PIE".


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