rocking chair and wastelands, you are talking about a different set of words. Yes, English is a Germanic language and shares many cognates with German and Dutch because of that.
But in addition, many German and Dutch words have been borrowed in more recent times (almost entirely in the last 500 years, long after the Anglo-Saxons expanded their lebensraum[sup]1[/sup]). That’s the kind of words that Tom has in his list and that I saw in my scanning of the dictionary. In etymologies, the cognates are shown as being from Old English, while recent borrowings have the specific language borrowed from.
[sup]1[/sup] Another WWII borrowing from German.
Yup. I knew that. Sorry about the lack of clarity. Let’s just say the Netherlands and England were strongly affiliated.
Reminds of my tour guide at Edinbugh Castle talking about James VII of Scotland become James I of England and Scotland. “This is when we like to say England became part of Scotland.”
Dont forget about the whole group of German words that were borrowed by annoyingly pretentious people.
Angst
Schadenfreude
Lebensraum
gestalt(actually that may be from a name, not a stolen word, I don’t know)
and many others
Most people who spoke German made an effort to stop using German completly in WWII, so there would be less of those words leaking into the language from that period onward. In addition, Many Yiddish words that have become well known lately have an obvious strong German component.
You got the question the wrong way around. English came from German. The Angles and Saxons were Germans who pushed out the Celts and pretty much colonized the island which is England/Scotland/Wales. The roots of the English language is German, the grammar, language structure etc.
The reason why there are so many French words in the English language is that in 1066 the Normans came from France and beat the then English King Harold. After that, a lot of French noblemen came over and took over the aristocracy. French was spoken at first but then the languages kind of merged into today’s English.
When I studied German my instructor told me it’d be easier than learning French because the structures were similar. I’ve studied both. But it’s easier to guess read French because so many words are similar. I could hardly guess read German at all. That makes sense because when you are guessing a foreign language tenses like past perfect, future perfect etc, mean nothing. You just need to know enough to guess what they’re saying.
Linguists agree on no such thing. Sorry, but that’s nonsense.
English and German both belong to the Germanic group of languages, part of the Indo-European family. That group also includes Frisian, Dutch/Flemish, Afrikaans, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Frisian, and Icelandic. All of these languages are close enough to one another that their relationship is fairly obvious even to the untrained eye. Linguists differ on how they subdivide this group, but no one puts English and German closer than any other pair within this group (let alone among all the thousands of languages of the world).
The closest living relative to English is, in fact, Frisian - a small language spoken in some coastal areas in NW Germany and the Netherlands.
Earlier than that. Up until the First World War, German was the second most common language in the US, behind of course English. (There are in fact a number of parallels between the position of German at that time and the position of Spanish today.) But once the US entered WWI, anti-German feeling became so intense that the language suffered a remarkable decline. A few towns actually passed laws making it illegal to speak German in public. Even when the law wasn’t against them, German speakers found it safer to hide their language, and in many cases rejected it totally in favor of English so there could be no doubts about their loyalties.
So there was little need for any action against Americans of German heritage during WWII… they’d already “learned their lesson”.
(Incidentally, “Gestalt” is indeed a German word. And anybody using the term “Lebensraum” today outside of its historical contest needs a boot to the head.)
The “Old English” spoken by the inhabitants of England was apparently mutually intelligible with the “Danish” spoken by Canute in the mid-11th century. The differentiation of various Germanic dialects into separate languages was a very gradual process and only began to have any real significance in a political context with the rise of nationalism.
And I will note that really the words “dialect” and “language” have little precise meaning anyway and are more political than anything else. It has been observed that some of the various “dialects” of Chinese have considerably less similarity than some of the different “languages” of Europe.
I don’t have the book to hand right now, but I think he made the point that native German speakers could not see what was funny about this. It’s only funny for English-speakers.
keeper0, the personal union between Britain and the Netherlands was very brief and indeed did not survive the reign of William III. After he fell off his horse and they imported some German royals, it was back to business as usual, including serious rivalry for control of the seas.
Final nitpick: it was James VI, not VII, who became first Stuart king of England.
This is the abbreviated high school version of the influence of French on English. The reality is more complex, almost as complex as the history of the relationship between England and France. There were some French words borrowed into English before the Norman Invasion and some were borrowed as recently as the 20th century.
As far as what languages were spoken after the Norman Invasion, the vast majority of the people still spoke English. But the new aristocracy and their scribes spoke and wrote only French and Latin. So for a couple hundred years (roughly 1100 to 1300), there are virtually no English-language records. But this did not mean that no one was speaking English.
Quote: “As far as what languages were spoken after the Norman Invasion, the vast majority of the people still spoke English.”
Oops, yes, that’s what I meant. The aristocrats spoke French but the commoners continued to speak English, and they didn’t like each other that much. Over several generations the aristocrats became “English”. And that is an abbreviated version.
Bill Bryson, in his book Made in America (about the development of American English), says that many of the words we usually think of as coming into English via Yiddish may actually have come in from German (or Dutch) instead. He mentions nosh, schlemiel, and phooey as three words that could have come from any of three directions…in his phrase, “are as likely to have entered American English from German sources as Yiddish.” (quote on p. 142 of my copy, in the footnote) I think most people would say that Yiddish has had a strong influence on English, American English anyway; if Bryson is to be believed, some of those borrowings might better be attributed to German instead, thus expanding the pool.
“IIRC, Bryson said something to the effect that there were only two common English words (kindergarten and hinterland, I believe) that are borrowed from German. I have no idea what he based this on, but it’s easily the most ridiculous statement in that book.”
Odd, because in Made in America Bryson states that German “prospered on American soil.” (p. 140) The contrast is with Gaelic (“gave us only a handful of words”), the various Scandinavian languages (“imparted even less”), and Italian (“slightly more productive, though…only with food words”). He then has a couple of paragraphs listing what he makes clear are only a few of the terms borrowed from German, most of them from the wave of immigration that took place during the middle and end of the nineteenth century. While he doesn’t give figures, it’s clear that he sees German as one of the most productive sources of current English borrowings.
OK, I dug out my copy of The Mother Tongue and found the text in question:
Well, besides the fact that we have borrowed lots of words from German, he’s mistaken about how many we’ve borrowed from other European languages. For instance, we’ve only borrowed one word from Finnish (sauna), maybe three or four words from Serbo-Croatian and none at all from Bulgarian, Slovenian or Latvian (among others). And less than 10 from Inuit. Compare these numbers with the 3 dozen or so that Tom gave earlier in this thread. (That list is hardly a complete one; with a little bit of work, I could come up with 3 dozen more and still not exhaust the category.)
Bryson is a journalist, not an expert on languages. He didn’t make up any of the facts he gives, but he doesn’t check them out thoroughly, either. I’d still like to know where he got this “fact” about German.
As far as him contradicting this in another book, well, he must have used a different reference. Or maybe someone sent him a letter telling him how off-base he was.
If that is the case (I really should know, but I don’t) the Finns have most probably borrowed it from Swedish. We did have some exchange of words when present day Sweden and Finland were just the Western and Eastern halves of the realm.
STOLE from the French??!? Yeah, sure, in the same way the goose whose liver is destined for the kitchen steals the food that is forced down her unwilling throat.
