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Comment by moskie | Hacker News Reader

This relates well to one of the fascinating things I realized while learning German: the fact that so many English and German words and sounds have phonetic connections, coming from their common Germanic ancestry.

For example, the letter "d" in German corresponding to "th" in English:

  die/der/das -> the
  drei -> three
  Donner -> thunder
  Ding -> thing
  daher -> therefore

and, most relevant to this discussion:

  du -> thou

I'm sure this connection can be better explained than I'm able to, but it was a mini-epiphany for me while studying the language.

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Part of the explanation is the convoluted history of the people who lived in the British isles.

Originally, it was inhabited by gaelic-speaking Celts. Some of their words that are still used today ():

plaide -> plaid

tàrmachan -> ptarmigan

triubhas -> trousers

peata -> pet

Then, it was conquered by the Romans. Latin words that found their way into English (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_words_with_Engli...):

honor -> honor

imbecillus -> imbecile

inferus -> inferior

vulgus -> vulgar

Then, after the fall of the Romans, Britain was conquered by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who brought the old German words mentioned below.

After this, the area was Christianized, and the priests and proselytizers brought even more latin with them because that was the language of the Church.

After this, large portions of England were conquered by the Vikings, who introduced more Scandinavian-origin words that others have mentioned here. In fact, King Canute was once simultaneously king of England, Denmark, and Norway.

After the Vikings, England was conquered by the Normans by William the Conqueror in the Battle of Hastings. The Normans were Viking raiders who settled in northwestern France and who had turned in francophones. They introduce french-origin words like:

boef -> beef

mouton -> mutton

veal -> veal

porc -> pork

After which, all these language influences congealed, vaguely, into the English we know and love today.

For this graphed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Origins_of_English_PieCha...

Edited for formatting.

Somebody once pointed out to me that you can see class distinctions written into the language this way. The words for farm animals tend to be Germanic (the conquered Germanic people were the farmers). So German kuh -> English cow. German schwein -> English swine. German huhn -> English hen.

But the words for prepared foods tend to be French in origin (the French conquerers were the ones who needed fancy terms for their food). So, as you pointed out, beef, mutton, veal, and pork are all French words.

I think you'll find that the majority of the British isles, including some of what is now Scotland, was populated by one of two peoples - pre Celts (Picts traditionally being named as one of those peoples) and P-Celtic speakers. The P-Celtic languages are the forefathers of Welsh, Breton and Cornish. Gaelic is not directly related to these languages[1], and indeed the Gaelic speakers in Scotland mostly migrated from Ireland - Scottish and Irish Gaelic being extremely closely related. Your list of "loan words" is therefore pretty late in acquisition. You can probably list the amount of actual P-Celtic loan words in regular use on 10 fingers. There's a massive body of evidence that the P-Celtic languages took a while to die out. A Celtic language was spoken in Cumbria (Cumbria itself coming from the same Celtic root word as Cymru, the Welsh name for the country "Wales"), and the traditional Shepherd counting systems[2] based on the P-Celtic counting system are still used even today to a certain extent.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_languages [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_tan_tethera

This is the result of the High German Consonant Shift [1]. English - many accents, at least - retain the dental fricatives (th-sounds) that were shifted to alveolar stops (d and t sounds) in High German. Dental fricatives are relatively rare sounds among the world's languages. Icelandic and European Spanish are the only languages I can think of that have dental fricative phonemes.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift

There are a few other languages with dental fricatives, including Arabic, Danish and Greek.

Shibboleth. (Hebrew, apparently).

Interesting! I think Dutch (Mix between french, german and english) is even closer to English. I am not an expert, just thinking out loud.

  de -> the
  drie -> three (ie and ee got the same pronunciation)
  donder -> thunder
  ding -> ding
  daarvoor -> therefore
  dit -> this
  dat -> that
  donderdag -> thursday
  vader -> father
  moeder -> mother

and a lot more similarities:

  school -> school
  week -> week
  weekend -> weekend
  maand -> month
  vrijdag -> friday
  maandag -> monday
  uit -> out
  goed -> good
  voor -> for
  je -> you
  mij -> my (pronounced the same)
  wij -> we
  auto -> auto
  wagen -> wagen
  kar -> car

And the p to f (I guess also in german)

  slaap -> sleep
  schip -> ship

I mentioned the similarly of Dutch in a different reply. You'll actually also find quite a few places where Dutch is more similar to Scandinavian languages than to English as well. Norway has two official languages, for the most part my examples are from Bokmål ("book language") which basically started out as a formalisation of Danish as used in Norway. I've prepended the Norwegian:

  tre -> drie -> three (ie and ee got the same pronunciation)
  torden -> donder -> thunder
  ting -> ding -> ding
  derfor -> daarvoor -> therefore

  dette -> dit -> this
  det -> dat -> that

But, we also have the term "ditt og datt" -> this and that...

  torsdag -> donderdag -> thursday

  far, but also the informal/slang "fatter" and the old-fashioned "fader" ->  vader -> father
  mor, and the older/slang form "moder" (mødre, transliterated "moedre" is the plural form of
  both versions) -> moeder -> mother

and a lot more similarities:

  skole -> school -> school
  uke in bokmål, but "veke" in Nynorsk (based on spoken Norwegian dialects) -> week -> week
  weekend (though that is a modern import from English) -> weekend -> weekend
  måned (maaned) -> maand -> month
  fredag -> vrijdag -> friday
  mandag -> maandag -> monday
  ut -> uit -> out
  god -> goed -> good
  for -> voor -> for
  du -> je -> you
  min -> mij -> my (pronounced the same)
  vi -> wij -> we
  auto -> auto -> auto
  vogn -> wagen -> wagen
  bil (we got our word from the end of automobil; 
  English got its from old French, I assume that's where yours come from too) -> kar -> car

And the p to f (I guess also in german) søvn / sove (but we also have "slappe av" -> relax, rest) -> slaap -> sleep skip -> schip -> ship

Friesan is even more similar: Rye bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Friese.

Your observations of dutch being closer to English in some way than German, is correct. However, saying that Dutch is mix between German, English and French is quite wrong (disclaimer: I am not Dutch).

English, Dutch and German are all classified as western germanic languages, meaning they probably derived from a single ancestor language some time ago. Note that 'germanic' has nothing to do with German or Germany, a common misconception because the two words are similar in English.

Dutch is often more similar to English because German underwent the so called high german consonant shift (essentially changing t -> s or z, p -> pf and some others I think), in which Dutch and English didn't participate. There are some words that highlight this quite nicely:

  english   dutch    german

  appel     appel     apfel
  plough    ploeg     pflug
  better    beter     besser
  toth      tand      zahn

I was with you until appel and toth, which don't seem to be English words at all... *apple and tooth

hmm yeah, was too preoccupied with getting the layout right, so some typos crept in :)

The history of formal pronouns (du/sie) is also very interesting in German. As far as I remember, in the middle ages the third person singular ("er/sie", he/she) was used as a formal address for common people. Nobility used the majestic plural ("ihr", you/y'all). Now with the rise of the "Bürgertum"* in the 18th/19th century, people wanted to distinguish themselves from the peasants with their "er", but the distancing tone of the third person fitted well with their spirit. They also wanted to get rid of anything reminding them of nobility with the "ihr" address, but it seems they wanted their own bit of majestic plural and kept the plural form. So they basically invented using the third person plural "sie" (they) as a formal "you". The old forms now sound incredibly archaic, although they are still used in some dialects according to wikipedia. I also have to say that this story is very condensed and was probably more complicated in reality, as I am not a linguist.

               singular plural (majestic)
    2. person  du       ihr
    3. person  er       (sie)   
    (distancing)

(*"Bürgertum" means ~middle class, but I find it hard to translate accurately, "Bürger" means citizen or bourgeouis.)

In Spanish and French, hora or heure means hour, but it also means time. If you go north, to Germany, uhr means o'clock, and watch/clock. Further north, in Scandinavia, ur simply means watch/clock, whereas time means hour. It's quite fascinating and gives you a sense how information and knowledge spread in ancient times.

Be aware that Norwegians pronounce i something like a long 'ee' in English so tiem in Norwegian is pronounced very different from time in English.

Mix in another Germanic language, and it gets even more fun. Take Norwegian:

"the" doesn't have a direct equivalent in modern Norwegian - we add the article as a suffix instead (a car = en bil; the car = bilen), but for the rest:

drei -> three / tre Donner -> thunder / torden Ding -> thing / ting daher -> therefore / derfor

du -> thou / du

Older Danish is even more similar to German, though I don't remember it off hand. At school, when I wanted to get my German grade up, I got a copy of Faust, which was way above my German level, and then I got hold of an old Danish translation (1920's or so). The old Danish translation was much closer to the German, so it was reasonably easy to figure out how they corresponded, yet still close enough to modern Danish (and by extension Norwegian) that I could read it fairly quickly when I couldn't figure out the German.

And if you really want to see close relationship between German and English, read some Dutch. Dutch to me reads like German and English lightly mixed, with some other random letters thrown in.

I'm currently learning Norwegian (for fun!) and I didn't expect to see so many lexical similarities between English and Norwegian. As a French (who is already fluent in English), this helps me a lot to memorize the meaning of words: I just have to squint long enough at it until I can recognize the Germanic root and its English descendant :-)

Frisian is even closer to English than Dutch. I always liked the rhyme : "bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Fries", which in Frisian is "Brea, bûter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk". There's a hilarious video on Youtube where the comedian Eddie Izzard attempts to talk to a Frisian Farmer in Old English and gets surprisingly far. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34

It was a whatthehell moment for me too. I started learning German a bit later than English (we had to learn 2 foreign languages at school). Pronunciation exercises brought the epiphany here, haha. Was strange at first but then we thought - hell, after all, these languages have much in common going back some centuries.

God but I hated pronouncing the umlauts.

> God but I hated pronouncing the umlauts.

How comes you hate pronouncing umlauts and don't hate these various sorts of t-th-d sound? As in think-tank-they-did?

> God but I hated pronouncing the umlauts.

That's interesting, what's your native language? I found that the umlauts map pretty well to how a lot of people from GB pronounce their Us, As, and Os. If I had to transliterate the word "use" for example I'd write that as "jüs" in German.

The last class I got to help teach in Grad School was The Nature and History of the English language. Leading undergrads to this epiphany is also very gratifying (that and being able to explain the weirdness that is English orthography).

Any Danish speakers here? It should be even closer to English as that's where the Angles and Saxons are from.

Look at my lists of Norwegian translations. Most either apply directly for Danish too, or with minor changes ("Bokmål", the written language used by a majority of Norwegians, was largely derived from Danish, and hasn't diverged all that much)

I'm pretty sure there are, at least I think I see Norwegians all the time : )

When you know Norwegian or Danish you can see a lot of similarities. The explanation I got was that around year 1000 Norway/Denmark was pretty much a naval superpower.

It's actually more recent. From the mid 1300's the Norwegian and Danish monarchy merged through marriage, and Denmark became by far the dominant party in the union. (Schelswig-Holsten was also for some time part of

The union lasted until 1814, when Denmark (and by extension Norway) had supported Napoleon, and Sweden had joined the other side. Sweden got Norway as a "price". But during that period, a lot of people had started preparing for an attempt at Norwegian independence. And while we entered into a looser union with Sweden, there was a long ongoing debate about creating a new, formalised Norwegian language.

We ended up with two, but one of them - bokmål - was basically Danish + Norwegian pronunciation + various spelling reforms, as this was effectively what was spoken amongst the upper classes in the cities, and this (with further spelling reforms) is the dominant written language today (the other was based on spoken dialects, and is further from Danish but not that much) .

So we've "only" had about 200 years for the languages to diverge again.

true - many people assume small, common words come from German, until they see how much closer the (especially spoken) Danish words are.

Place with the google translate pronunciation button for some simple sentences for a while - you'll be surprised how much you understand

The fact that the Angles and Saxons were from an area that is currently Denmark means nothing. Territories, country borders and the languages and cultures occupying them have changed significantly in the north of Europe after the collapse of the roman empire to the present day.

The angles and saxons spoke a western germanic language, whereas modern danish is a northern germanic language.

EDIT: as a side node: Frisian is the language commonly regarded as being closest to English

Yes, right here. And actually English is really a Scandinavian language (Northern Germanic), and not Western Germanic as many believe:

http://sciencenordic.com/english-scandinavian-language

Yes, Danish seems to be in between German and English, except for the first example.

  die/der/das -> [see below] -> the
  drei -> tre -> three
  Donner -> torden -> thunder
  Ding -> ting -> thing
  daher -> derfor -> therefore
  du -> du -> thou

I have no idea what happened to the definite article in Danish though:

  ein Haus -> et hus -> a house
  das Haus -> huset -> the house

Aside: The Danish capitalization rules used to mirror the German rules until after WWII, where we switched to the Swedish rules.

Du isn't formal though?

Right, and neither is thou.

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