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Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> Fenster /ˈfɛnstɐ/ -- a German word for "window".

Same in Afrikaans as well - "venster"[1] means window.

That's not surprising as Afrikaans is highly related to Dutch which is in turn highly related to German. In this case it all comes from the Latin fenestra.

> Latin fenestra.

Hence defenestrate, to throw out the window.

Fenêtre in French.

Funny, English words often come from either German or French. Here where German and French agree, English is different.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/window#Etymology (missing sources as of right now)

Ah - you are conflating Germanic for German. Germanic is not equivalent to German. German (deutsch) is a national language, Germanic is a language family. German belongs to this family, but it is not the root of all Germanic languages. English and German sit in the West Germanic branch, the East Germanic was mostly Gothic (dead) and the North Germanic languages are Swedish/Danish/Norwegian/Icelandic/Faroese and various other non national languages. English is a West Germanic language, but it was massively influenced by Old Norse (North Germanic) and various Frenches (and Latin/Greek in technical terms) as well as probably the native British languages somewhat in grammar (the present continuous tense in English also happens in Welsh, and is not very Germanic.)

So - Window is Germanic. It comes from Old Norse 'vindauga', and the modern Norwegian Bokmal version is 'vindu'[1].

The German word for Window comes from Latin [2].

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vindu

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fenster

yeah, ok, my picture of these things was a bit simplistic, thanks for the correction and the details!

Finestra in Catalan, and Langas in Lithuanian.

Fönster in Swedish.

Okno in Slovak

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