what do you think of this English sentence?

[gato]

The spelling of the German cognates are very different from the English. Maybe they are closer to Old English?

[chrix]

it's basically because High German went through a sound change, setting it apart from the other West Germanic languages.Basically you have English, Friesian, Dutch and Low German on one side, and High German on the other. If Daan was to provide you with the corresponding Dutch cognates, they would look a lot closer to English. So in this case it's German that has undergone the change.

Some examples:

1. T becomes Z : Tough : Zäh, Ten : Zehn

2. P becomes PF: aPPle: aPFel

there's a lot more, but I'm by no means an expert in comparative Germanic historical linguistics.

There's also sound changes outside of the High German sound shift, for instance the rule whereby English lost an N before a final fricative, which is why you have five, tooth, goose in English and füNf, zahN and gaNs in German. Dutch has partly kept the N as well: vijf, taNd, gaNs. (you can see from other Indo-European languages outside of Germanic, such as Latin, quiNque, deNs and aNser, that the N was present originally in proto-Indo-European, so it was English that lost the N and not German that inserted it)

[chrix]

Just to add: so of course English had undergone some changes of its own. Because the ironic thing is, ultimately French and English are related too, but more like distant relatives, while German and English are siblings, as it were. But the further the distance, the harder to see for the nonspecialist.

That's how Indo-European studies got started in the first place: a British colonial officer posted to India, who was trained in the major modern European languages and the two Classical languages as well as Persian (Latin and Ancient Greek) (apparently he knew Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese as well ), noticed how similar many words in Sanskrit were, and this discovery in the 18th century kicked off the discipline of Indo-European linguistics, systematically comparing the various languages and establishing subgroupings. The easternmost language is Tocharian, an extinct language once spoken in what is today Xinjiang.

[renzhe]

You have to admit, though, that (probably due to Norman influence), English has far more in common with Romance languages than other Germanic languages like German, Dutch, or the Scandinavian languages.

[chrix]

it depends on what you mean by "have in common".

English is still clearly a German languages, if you look at its grammar and basic vocabulary. The percentage of Latinate loanwords is higher than in German and Dutch. While England took a different route after the Norman conquest, German and Dutch went through a similar vocabulary formation process (during a period where many parts of Europe was shifting from using Latin as their written language towards using their respective vernaculars). Martin Luther when translating the Bible from Latin, is credited with giving the impetus in Germany.

For instance, he took the Latin word con-scientia and calqued it using Germanic elements: Ge-wissen (Dutch accordingly ge-weten). English just took the Latin/French:con-science.

So this is one of the major reasons you get a higher degree of Latinate elements in nonbasic vocabulary in English. But as I said, it's not the case that German and Dutch calqued words for all of the Latin terminology, some of them were also borrowed in their entirety.

[animal world]

Here's the above (i.e. German) list with the Dutch attached to it. I was unsure about a few words (zäh) so perhaps Daan can correct me. Dutch is my native language but i'm a little rusty in it these days. I also rushed this as i'm tied up in a horrible, and time-consuming, task:

zäh: ?

Ringen: ringen

es: het

war: was

denken: denken

ein: een

hinder- : hinderen

-nis: -nis

ist: is

nun: nu

aus - : uit

räumen : ruimen

auf : op

dem, den, der, die, das etc.: de, het

lang: lang

Weg: weg

zu: tot

Jahr-: jaar

hundert: honderd

oder: of

was: wat

Ende: einde

Haus: huis

hat: heeft

für: voor

innen: binnen

sprechen: spreken

an: aan

liegen: liegen

vor: voor

gehen: gaan

mehr: meer

seit: sinds, zijde

halb: half

ver-: ver-

folgen: volgen

[renzhe]

nu

wat

binnen

Interestingly, these can also be heard in Germany, especially in the north. Probably an influence of northern dialects.

[chrix]

according to my Dutch dictionary, zäh is taai in Dutch, which is closer to English tough. I think er is the cognate to es rather than het, and as far as binnen goes, there's some additional element at the beginning, though High German borrowed binnen and buten from Low German as well.

Dutch is halfway between English and German in a number of ways,it has less morphology than German, more than English. Not sure if it would actually feel more similar to English than to German to an English speaker though. There were only a couple of words subject to the High German sound shift in the sample (half/halb, taai/zäh/tough)...

[chrix]

renzhe yes, since Low German (Niederdeutsch, Plattdeutsch) did not undergo the Hochdeutsche Lautverschiebung, it is wat and not was. Naturally it has left its mark on the Standard German spoken in Low German speaking areas. Some Low German words have found their way into the standard language, sometimes triggering a meaning shift: Lippe (originally Low German, no sound shift) "lip", vs. Lefze (High German, sound shift), "chaps, (horse's) lips".

Whether or not to call Low German a dialect of German is a touchy issue in the North, and I'll just stay outside this politically charged debate.

[renzhe]

LOL, it's hardly worse than the dialect/language issue when discussing Chinese

[chrix]

politically speaking, the roles are reversed though The German governments wants to protect Low German as a minority language and get it recognised by the EU.

You can file patents in Low German in the Federal Patents Office in Munich, though they will not be recognised as filed "in German", so you will have to provide a translation into High German.

[animal world]

As i said earlier, i threw these translations together in a jiffy. I have an interesting phenomenon for you, chrix. I've always been a big lover of French culture and language. It was my best subject in high school and one of my degrees is in French. I've also lived there. Most of my schoolmates hated French but loved English. Ironically, i was never that excited about English and looked down on American culture.

I'm digressing. When i return to Europe and speak the languages there my French is much more authentic and true than my Dutch, my native language. In Dutch i automatically and without even thinking about it will attach "is het?" and "is het niet?" to the end of many sentences, i.e. "is it?" and "is it not?." This is not Dutch at all! How can it be that French has been sticking to me much better than my own language? Is it perhaps just because of the similarity between Dutch and English that i literally and unwittingly translate words and expressions???

[chrix]

yes, cognates are not necessarily translations.

As for the phenomenon you describe, this could be due to interference (influence of another language, usually your mother tongue on a foreign language), and attrition (regression of your skills in your mother tongue if you don't speak it for a long time), if you've lived in another country for a long time and not spoken your mother tongue a lot. There's been people who almost completely forgot to speak their mother tongues after decades of not using them. Depending on the degree of your attrition, though, these interference effects would go away after being back in your native country for a set period of time.

The proximity between Dutch and English without doubt has helped you a lot in acquiring English skills, and I'm sure you're translating expressions and the like all the time, since more often than not English will have identical or quite similar expressions (actually when I spent half a year in Australia during my high school years, I started saying "Das Gebäude ist dort drüben, ist es nicht?" in the form of a tag question German doesn't use that way ). But my guess is that since you most likely wound up at a place where you meet few Dutch speakers (and according to my experience, Western Europeans don't tend to seek out their compatriots in the diaspora all that much unlike some other nationalities) and especially do not have a Dutch speaking partner, your opportunity to use Dutch just declined considerably.

[Daan]

Think you got them all between you, animal_world and chrix. The only one I wonder about is seit. Would its cognate perhaps be sedert rather than sinds? It seems such a huge shift to go from sinds to seit. Although logic dictates it would also be related somehow to zijde, so I'm not sure what happened there.

[chrix]

Daan, I checked my etymology dictionary for seit. Turns out it doesn't have anything to do with "side", but comes from the root "sow/seed", with some words of this word field developing meanings along the line of "to let (lat. sinere)", and "late, later" which is the case for seit. Scandinavian languages also have a word "sidra" or the like, which means "last". Apparently English since and German seit are cognates, bothing evolved from the meaning "later (than)". I'm not sure about the Dutch.

As far as "side/Seite/zijde" go, the same dictionary proposes that ultimately there is na connection with "säen/sow/zaaien" as well, but this sounds quite speculative.

[animal world]

Daan, you're probably right on "sedert." It does sound funny, a bit formal, to my ears that are not so used anymore to Dutch.

Chrix, your posts in this thread have been fascinating. I understand you're into linguistics (either studying or already working as such). Just out of curiosity, what sort of career opportunities are available in that field. I know that being a linguist is not the same as being a polyglot. What languages do you have under your belt, in terms of conversing and reading in them well?

[chrix]

animal world, basically you're preparing for an academic career. If that fails, which is a distinct possibility given the student-professor ratio, you have to create your own career. Linguists aren't trained to be translators, but some do get into that field, some wind up working for companies, some of which even deal with language-related stuff (such as software, or even for Google). Some run for office, set up their own business, it runs the whole gamut...

The languages I aspire to be conversant in are listed on my profile. Other than that, I've studied a lot of additional languages, including Dutch , but usually this is restricted to grammatical structures... Also two-and-a-half extinct languages (Latin, Classical Chinese, a bit of Classical Japanese)

[animal world]

Chrix, how about writing textbooks (or course material in other media (audio, online courses)??? In the US, textbooks can be an extremely lucrative market!

[chrix]

well, it's all about your talent. If a linguist has a talent for writing textbooks and/or teaching languages, then it might work out for them, but it's not necessarily what you learn while getting your linguistics degree. There's the neighbouring field of "applied linguistics" which includes the teaching of languages, and many a linguist has gone that route....

[Daan]

If seit and since are cognates, then sinds would have to be seit's cognate too, I presume. Because I would be very surprised if sinds and since were not cognates. I am afraid I don't have access to my university library network here in Taiwan. If I did, I could check the INL etymological dictionaries. You might have access, chrix?