QuoteReplyTopic: Latin vs. Germanic influences on English Posted: 09-Dec-2004 at 03:12
I was reading a book by Bill Bryson, I think it was
called Mother Tongue. He wrote that the great
majority of words in English are derived from Latin,
yes, but the most common hundred or so (or three
hundred or so? out of hundreds of thousands) are of
Germanic origins; so in actual usage, most of the
words we use are Germanic.
Latin has very flexible word order. Much of the
meaning we convey in English through word
order--who the subject is, what the object is--is
conveyed in Latin through case endings.
"To become" in German is "werden." The English
verb "to become" is very hard for German natives to
deal with, because it looks and sounds almost
exactly like "bekommen," which means "to get." An
English student of mine in Austria produced one of
my all-time favorite ESL sentences: "On Valentine's
Day my friends and I will go to the shopping center
and we will become chocolate."
Wasn't Roman Latin (as opposed to Catholic Church Latin) written without spaces between words? Also, aren't many German words connected? I wonder if there is a connection?
English is definitely a Germanic languages since it is derived from the Angles and the Saxsons.
Also, I would think there are more French words in English than Latin since the Norman influence is stronger (re more recent) than the Roman influence.
Very few words that aren't so much used, like claymore (corrupted from claidheamh mr), slogan (sluagh-ghairm (pronounced slogorm),
also banshee, bard, coracle, corgi, crowd, galore, gunnies. Those are
the ones that I know of. Someone else can enlighten more about it .
"To become" in German is "werden." The English verb "to become" is very hard for German natives to deal with, because it looks and sounds almost exactly like "bekommen," which means "to get." An English student of mine in Austria produced one of my all-time favorite ESL sentences: "On Valentine's Day my friends and I will go to the shopping center and we will become chocolate."
Pax vobiscum,
Wpkr
English 'get' can also mean 'become' - 'Things got worse', 'Things became worse'.
I wonder what the etymology of 'get' is. I don't think there's a similar word in either modern German or Latin, yet it sounds like a Germanic word. Using modern German is a bit tricky in classifying English, because English is a 'Low German' variant, coming from the German spoken near the North Sea, whereas modern accepted German is essentially 'High German' from further up the Rhine.
And in modern English it is usually possible to use both Germanic and Latinesque usages, as in "'Time' magazine founder Henry Luce' and "Henry Luce, the founder of the magazine 'Time'".
Moreover both modern French and modern English, unlike modern German and Latin, are virtually caseless and conjugationless. English in particular with its tendency to use the same word as, e.g., noun, adjective and/or verb, has some similarity to Chinese, though of course no historical relationship.
'You should hedge your investments'
'He bought future contracts as a hedge against....'
'Hedge funds were particularly active yesterday...'
c.1200, from O.N. geta "to obtain, reach" (p.t. gatum, pp. getenn), from P.Gmc. *getan (cf. O.E. begietan "to beget," O.Swed. gissa "to guess," lit. "to try to get"), from PIE base *ghe(n)d- "seize" (cf. Gk. khandanein "to hold, contain," Lith. godetis "be eager," second element in L. prehendere "to grasp, seize," Welsh gannu "to hold, contain," O.C.S. gadati "to guess, suppose"). Meaning "to seize mentally, grasp" is from 1892. O.E., as well as Du. and Fris., had the root only in compounds (cf. beget, forget). Vestiges of O.E. cognate *gietan remain obliquely in pp. gotten and original pt. gat. The word and phrases built on it take up 29 columns in the OED 2nd edition. Slang get over "recover, rebound" is from 1687. Getaway "escape" is from 1852. Get-up "equipment or costume" is from 1847. Get-rich-quick (adj.) is from 1902. Get wind of "become acquainted with" is from 1840, from earlier to get wind "to get out, become known" (1722).
c.1200, from O.N. geta "to obtain, reach" (p.t. gatum, pp. getenn), from P.Gmc. *getan (cf. O.E. begietan "to beget," O.Swed. gissa "to guess," lit. "to try to get"), from PIE base *ghe(n)d- "seize" (cf. Gk. khandanein "to hold, contain," Lith. godetis "be eager," second element in L. prehendere "to grasp, seize," Welsh gannu "to hold, contain," O.C.S. gadati "to guess, suppose"). Meaning "to seize mentally, grasp" is from 1892. O.E., as well as Du. and Fris., had the root only in compounds (cf. beget, forget). Vestiges of O.E. cognate *gietan remain obliquely in pp. gotten and original pt. gat. The word and phrases built on it take up 29 columns in the OED 2nd edition. Slang get over "recover, rebound" is from 1687. Getaway "escape" is from 1852. Get-up "equipment or costume" is from 1847. Get-rich-quick (adj.) is from 1902. Get wind of "become acquainted with" is from 1840, from earlier to get wind "to get out, become known" (1722).
Very few words that aren't so much used, like claymore (corrupted from claidheamh mr), slogan (sluagh-ghairm (pronounced slogorm), also banshee, bard, coracle, corgi, crowd, galore, gunnies. Those are the ones that I know of. Someone else can enlighten more about it .
Thank you and goodbye.
Weird, don't forget Weird. Derived from Wyrd, look it up, has something to do with future and fortune tellers (norns) if i recall correctly..
English is a Germanic language, yes, and like most (i think) Germanic languages it has an SVO order. As said earlier on, English doesn't always support VSO for questions anymore, but there are some possible phrases (Have you any examples? ). Sentences like "Do you like it?" have the agreeing verb in first place it seems, but this is merely a dummy, the main verb is still in it's declarative place, so it's still SVO.
So, the lack of VSO is a bit of a difference, but what i really find striking is that Dutch, which is also pretty related to English (words look alike, at least), is SOV. SOV! Now, most sentences end up looking SVO'ish, but at least the core principle in Dutch is SOV. This is partly why English natives consider Dutch one of the hardest languages in the world to learn (yes, alot harder than Spanish)! Even though it's so much related! I really have no idea why this is so, and why and how Dutch ended up SOV. How can this be when the countries are so near each other and so related?
Dutch isn't SOV, it SVO: De bakker (S) bakt (V) een taart (O).
No, it's SOV, but it has some SVO-ish appearance.
[Ik] [weet] dat [ [de bakker] [een taart] [bakt] ]
[know] that [ [the baker] [a pie] [bakes] ]
S V   ; ( S   ; O   ; V )
so, main clause SVO, with an embedded SOV. Dutch is by de fault SOV, but because it's a V2 language, which means it has to meet the 'verb in 1st or 2nd place' requirement, the main verb moves up. So embedded clauses are SOV, main clauses appear SVO on the surface but they are fundamentally different, the resemblance to English is coincidence here (this is also shown in experiments on how Dutch people process sentences: the verb is active in the mind after the object is processed, so Dutch people read SOV, regardless of applied movements).
I was reading a book by Bill Bryson, I think it was
called Mother Tongue. He wrote that the great
majority of words in English are derived from Latin,
yes, but the most common hundred or so (or three
hundred or so? out of hundreds of thousands) are of
Germanic origins; so in actual usage, most of the
words we use are Germanic.
Latin has very flexible word order. Much of the
meaning we convey in English through word
order--who the subject is, what the object is--is
conveyed in Latin through case endings.
"To become" in German is "werden." The English
verb "to become" is very hard for German natives to
deal with, because it looks and sounds almost
exactly like "bekommen," which means "to get." An
English student of mine in Austria produced one of
my all-time favorite ESL sentences: "On Valentine's
Day my friends and I will go to the shopping center
and we will become chocolate."
Pax vobiscum,
Wpkr
Woodpecker, if you still have that book, promptly throw it away, burn it, mix the ashes with sacramental kerosine, light the kerosine on fire, and shoot at the smoke with a double-barreled shotgun. The Mother Tongue is full of so much sh*t that it's frequently the subject of jokes and ridicule by the folks at my linguistics forum'n'chatroom.
It is atleast partially true? The most common words are indeed germanic. I believe about a sixth of the words in use are old english, and many others are germanic. As the english language has been influenced by so many different peoples over the years, it has many words with similar meaning, but that originates from different languages. As norse and old english you have anger - wrath, nay - no and skin - hide, and in french and o.e. you have close - shut and odour - smell.
And so english has a vast vocabulary
Loke, Attila, the grete conqueror,
Deyde in his sleep, with shame and dishonour,
Bleedinge ay at the nose in dronkenesse,
A captayin shoulde live in sobrenesse
Not exactly true, yeah there are words derived from different languages (like 'difficult' (rom.) vs 'hard' (ger.)), but what really puzzles me is why English has such a huge amount of loanwords. Really, if it gets only a little bit complicated, they start borrowing words from Latin. And the more academic you get, the less "English" remains.
For even a simple word like "possibility", English doesn't seem to have a native word, they instead pick a Latin word and add a suffix. In fact, all words ending on -ity are loanwords, along with many others. Now that happens in other Germanic languages at well, but to a far lesser extend, and those have their own native words. I bet Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Froese, Icelandic (that one for sure ) and Frisian all have a native word for "possibility" or "opportunity" like German and Dutch have (and Flemish and Afrikaans for nitpickers )
The English Grammar, sentence structure - all that
stuff - is Germanic - based in Old English. The traditional
reference dates for Old English usage run from 449 - 1066. 1066
saw - of course - the Norman invasion of England and for many years
thereafter - French was the court language. In addition, English
borrowed heavily from Latin - the official language of the church, and
in modern times has also borrowed from Spanish, Italian - from all the
Romance languages.......
Notice how English has many redundant words....
As French (or whatever you called it back in the 11th and 12th
centuries) was the langauge of the nobility, many words have similar
meanings
Start vs Commence
- former from Germanic orgins, whereas the commence is from latin.
Another example, the word Poulty is obviously from the then French word that now is Poulet. But we still use "Chicken"
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