Hacker News Reader

Comment by jajag | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that's surprised me from learning both Spanish and German is that whilst for a small, basic set of vocabulary, German and English are very similar (e.g. Haus, Schuh, Hund vs. Casa, Zapato or Pero in Spanish), the two languages diverge massively for higher level vocabularies whilst Spanish seems to converge (for example, importante, diferente, imposible vs. wichtig, anders, unmöglich). The net effect is that my Spanish comprehension is considerable better than my German - I can read a news article in Spanish and get a reasonably good gist of what it says; but I still find myself all at sea when reading even relatively simple phrases in German - typically wondering to myself what the hell verb is that?

View on HN

I use English, German and French every day and in my head they feel almost like a blend, with the three languages forming the vertices of a triangle. They share so much common history thanks to propinquity and invasion.

You can see that directly in English where we use Germanic words for animals in the field (Cow/Kuh, Swine/Schweine usw), while on the table we use the romance words (Beef/Boef, Mutton/Mouton etc). This is commonly believed to reflect that after the Norman invasion the aristocracy used French words in their homes while the conquered peasants retained their old language among themselves. And indeed in both German and French (and pretty much everywhere else) the same word is used in both contexts.

You can see how this can lead to the higher level words (law, religion etc) being in the non-peasant's language, even as the peasant language leaks into the creole (e.g. earl/carl vs compte).

Finally different languages use different approaches (at various times) to clone new words, hence the German Fernsehe ("distance see") in English is a Frankenmelange of greek and latin television (gk "far" + lt "see")

Don't forget that Spanish also had a strong admixture of arabic, hence words like algodon (lost the article to become 'cotton' in English).

English is a Germanic language, except it greatly simplified its grammatical inflection, and then had its vocabulary infused with Romance stock first from the long-term use of Norman French as the prestige language of England and then from the proclivity for Latin (and Greek, but that's not a Romance language) roots in scientific coinage during the Renaissance and Modern periods. In terms of modern vocabulary, more words have a Romance root than a Germanic root. As a random factoid, the third-person plural pronouns in English actually come from Old Norse (courtesy of the Viking invasions, which resulted in a large portion of England being dominated by Danes instead of Anglo-Saxons until around the Norman invasion).

I think you're right about many words coming to English directly from Latin during the renaissance and following periods, but it raises another interesting question - why did English take many technical words and terms from Latin, whilst German speakers - who presumably during the renaissance were consulting the same source material - coined their own Germanic words and terms instead?

My naive, first-order understanding is that English = German + French. But since the Renaissance, French became the dominate influence due to its use by elites/scientific community.

So it's not Spanish influence, per se, but its similarity to French as a Romance language.

That's part of it certainly, but I wonder whether a lot of technical terms and words were taken directly from Latin - which up until a few hundred years ago was the dominant language for education, law, diplomacy etc.

You can thank the Normans and the Renaissance :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com