I’m learning German, and have been curious about several things I have noticed about said language, and my mother tongue. I know that English had its start in archaic High German, and indeed, Old English looks more like German than English to me.
I know that English has had great influence imposed upon it by Old Norse and French, as well.
Why and when did we give up noun gender?
Why and when did we give up the formal/informal versions of words like “you” and “your”? (I know, “thee” and “thine” were the English equivalents, but when and why did we stop using these words?)
Why and when did we give up the subject/object/verb sentence structure (“I to the store go”)?
Why and when did we stop capitalizing nouns?
I would be much appreciative of this little shining-of-spotlights into the pool of my ignorance.
According to Pei (and my copy of The Story of English is not available at this moment) English dropped gender around the time of the Danelaw. When the Danes had settlements next door to the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes their vocabularies were very similar except in how genders were inflected. As people talked to each other they found the biggest impediments to trade and understanding was gender inflections, and they discovered that meaning could be easily conveyed using just the uninflected root-words.
English is more closely related to Low German. The dialects in German fall into two main groups. The line dividing them is east-west running through the middle of the country. Those north of the line are the Low German dialects, those south are High German.
During the Middle English period (1100-1500). It’s impossible to narrow it down further than that, because that kind of change takes time.
We only did this for a limited time, about 100 years or so, I think. It ended somewhere towards the end of the 18th century.
After reading that sentance a couple times the main interpretation I get is that you are saying that German uses a subject/object/verb structure and that English does not and you would like to know why and when it happened.
Well the answer to that question is that it never did happen because German does not use a subject/object/verb structure for the present tense.
Examples:
Ich gehe nach Hause.
I (subject) go (verb) to home (object).
Wie gehts es Ihnen?
How goes (verb) it with you Sir (object)?
Er lauft zu Schule.
He (subject) runs (verb) to school (object).
Ich lese das Buch.
I (subject) read (verb) the book (object). (I might have gotten the gender wrong. I could never remember those.)
The only time that a verb went to the end of a sentance was if you were using past tense or future tense. I also believe that there are a couple more times when the verb gets shifted (ex: dative?) but I can’t remember for sure. But in general German does not use a subject/object/verb structure, it is only used in these circumstances and when used with modifying verbs.
Examples:
Ich habe nach Hause geht.
I (subject) have (?) to home (object) gone (verb)
Ich werde zu Schule gehen.
I (subject) will (?) to school (object) go (verb).
If I understood you wrong then I apologize and could you please explain exactly what you are talking about. Also, have fun learning german. After 3 years of regular german and 1 year of advanced placment german, the above sentances are just about all I can remember. Eventually I would LOVE to go and live in Germany for a while so I could learn the language and culture better but I am lacking the funds to do so. So goes life.
Yeah, I do think I goofed a bit on what I said about the sentence structure. I’m not learning it in any structured way; it’s all on my own, since my high school does not offer any courses on German.
What I meant was that the sentence structure, if literally translated, word-for-word, looked a great deal like the older forms of English to me (at least in the present tense).
I blame my error on that (several minutes of sustained swearing) Daylight Saving’s Time, and the hour of sleep I lost out on…
dtilque:
Yeah, you’re right. I mixed up my High and Low German. I realized my error just as I pressed the ‘Submit Reply’ button…
What I meant was that the sentence structure, if literally translated, word-for-word, looked a great deal like the older forms of English to me (at least in the PAST AND FUTURE tenses).
Doh! I knew I would screw it up somewhere. Damn dative case, it always screwed me up. I was fine with accusitive and genetive and nominative (sp?) but dative always was the bastard that messd me up. That and learning genders. What the heck is with Madchen (umlaut left out because I don’t know how to make it) being neuter??? Makes no sense to me.
Jman: are you from Southern Germany or do you just know a lot of the german language?
Brainlego: Well, regardless of being self taught, you have some very intellegent questions about the language. I am also trying to learn a language on my own, Latin, and I understand exactly how difficult it is to learn it right and remember all the little things. Pronunciation and idiomatic phrases are probably the worst deal with at first.
BTW, one of my first memories of German class was when our teacher told us the literal definition of Madchen, which means girl. Madchen = “little maid” All the girls in the class started whining while all the guys were saying that German wasn’t that bad of a language after all. heehee
Maedchen is neuter bacause of the ending. It does indeed mean “little maid”, being a diminutive of the (obsolete?) word die Magd (the maid - in the sense of maiden, not the hired help). Any diminutive with the -chen ending is automatically neuter, despite the obvious absurdity (to an English speaker).
What I could never figure out is why is das Kind neuter?
Another verb-last construction in German is the relative clause:
As i was walking home, I saw my friend John
Als ich nach Hause ging, sah ich meinen Freund Hans.
Simplification is the usual result when you’ve got several different language groups trying to communicate. This is how creole languages are formed. With OE being a low-status language after 1066, it’s not surprising it underwent such rapid change (no self-appointed language mavens to tut-tut about how the young folk don’t even know how to use the dative case these days).
Strider - I’m just a plain old American. I’ve taken about 6 years of German spread out over the last 9 years of school (4 years in HS, 2 college classes). I really should know more than I do. My vocabulary is pathetic. I screw up with genders quite a lot too. The last class I took (about a year and a half ago), I finally got to the point where I could speak without worrying about word order and stuff…it just all came out right. It sounds wrong to me any other way. I’ll be in the Army in 6 months, so maybe I’ll get stationed in Germany and can get a ton better.
I have a few corrections on Striders -otherwise clear and well put- examples:
Er lauft zu Schule.
He (subject) runs (verb) to school (object).
Actually, laufen means “to walk” rather than “to run”.
Also, the conjugation would be Er laüft. Third person present tense of a strong verb gets an Umlaut, I believe the rule is (how’s THAT for a Germanic sentence structure :D).
Ich habe nach Hause geht.
I (subject) have (?) to home (object) gone (verb)
The correct conjugation would be: Ich bin nach Hause gegangen. Present continuous of a weak verb - you gotta love those Germanic languages! Of which Dutch is one, so it’s easy for me to spot - hardly an achievement
Coldfire - Laufen mean either “to walk” OR “to run.” It can be used either way. So strider’s use of laufen for running is correct. When I learned it, we used “laufen” for ‘run’ and “wandern” for ‘walk.’ Probably a regional thing.
Coldfire - As Jman said, laufen means to run, at least as I learned it from my german teacher, who lived in Stuttgart for 25 years before coming to America and becoming my German teacher. (I am not trying to be argumentative, I am just trying to establish his credentials since I know this place loves evidence =) ) Also, the umlaut was left out of “lauft” because I have absolutely no idea how to do an umlaut on my keyboard. On my mac it used to be Control-U then the vowel you wanted but on this NT machine I have absolutely no idea how to do it. I also don’t know how to do the esset (sp?) (the ss sound that is represented by a capital B with a tail).
As far as my the other sentance, well I screwed that one up on my own. After a while it all kind of mixes together. Live and learn I suppose. But thanks for the correction.
Obviously you know German. Being Dutch, did you find it hard to study a language so similar to your own? When I was much more fluent in German than I am today, I tried to learn Dutch. While the vocabulary was easy, obviously, I found myself constantly mixing the two languages. Of course, being a native speaker of a third language might have made them both seem more like each other than they would have to you.
I noticed the laufen=walk phenomenon when I was in G+ottingen. This made sense because I already knew the Dutch verb lopen which means the same thing. Of course in English we have lope, meaning to run in a slow easy manner. Anyway, it was interesting that there could be so much variation in the usage of common words. I don’t know of any place in the English speaking world where walk and run don’t mean the same things.
In Metamagical Themas, Douglas Hofstadter examined the oddities of mapping one set of symbols onto another. Some remarkable weirdness occurs when the two sets are quite similar in many respects although different. As an example, he cited English/German dialectal humor — it’s possible for this stuff to be funny because the two languages are so similar, but not quite …
