Thread: A Lexicon of English Words From (mostly) Hindi

I knew about the radical change from olde to middle english, and I knew too that the language of the court was French and highbrow, so a lot of the formal words in English (detest, indictment, implicate... the list goes on and on) have almost mirror images in french, which also makes having a large english vocabulary a powerful asset in learning French.

Although, in spite of it's germanic roots, English still has remarkably few distinctly german root words (like kindergarten).

Actually, a huge portion of English words are of Germanic origin. We just don't realize it. In English, the more basic the vocabulary, the more likely it is to be Germanic in origin. If you study German (I did in college, though I've gotten so rusty I probably couldn't ask for directions to the bathroom), you will be startled by how many German words bear a strong similarity to their English counterparts--the reason being, of course, that the modern English and modern German versions of the word both descend from an early medieval Germanic common origin. Just a few off the top of my head:

And - und
Good - gut
Flight - flug
White - weiss
Red - rot
Blue - blau
Green - grun
Bath - bad (original meant springs or a public bath, which is why many German place names begin with "Bad")
Stone - stein
Hello - hallo
What - was
When - wenn
Thank - danke
Middle or mid - Mittel or mit
Beer - bier
Fire - feuer
Wine - wein
Swine - schwein (of course, modern English speakers are more likely to say "pig" than "swine"... still)
Hound - hund (again, we normally say "dog" nowadays, rather than hound)
Bread - brot
Apple - Apfel
Forbidden - verboten
Sugar - zucker
Milk - milch
Cold - kalt
Snow - schnee
Ice - eis
Free - frei

Those are just a few. The list goes on and on, almost to the point where a person who speaks English but not German could make a fair guess at the meaning of many German sentences if they just assumed that the German words all share a meaning with whatever English word they sound like. And many modern English words are perfectly identical (in spelling, not necessarily in pronunciation) to the modern German words they share a Germanic origin with: Ball, hammer, fish, arm, hand, winter, etc.

Again, the simpler or more basic the word, the more likely it is to be Anglo-Saxon Germanic origin, as the basic framework of the peasant's language picked up more specialized or formal vocab from the Francophone nobility.


Sorry I seem to be trying to contradict everything you say, by the way.. that's not my intent! But once I start rambling on about language and history, it's hard to shut me up.

See I've never actually studied German, but I'm slightly familiar with it because I know a few (2) German people and watch a lot of foreign movies (occasionally they're in German).

But this topic brings a funny story to mind when my wife and I were watching a show about the childrens crusade a few weeks ago and I was using my laptop (facing away from the TV) while it was on.

We'd set aside this time especially because we'd both really wanted to watch it and my wife turned to me as it came to an ad break and said "Hey! You're not paying attention". I told her "Don't be silly, I'm listening to it while I do this on my lappy". She replied "Oh really, well then that were they just talking about then?? I bet you have no idea". I shrugged and said "They were explaining about the motivations for the crusades, with the strange weather, lighting and so forth that helped create a lot of religious fervour, this combined with how most of the children were starving and destitute. Why do you ask?".

Her face dropped and she looked at me funny.

"But they were speaking in German with subtitles".

I didn't even realise.

hahaha

no this is good because otherwise i would start making assertions like I've made here believing them to be true and really i am lying through my teeth at everyone

I had read in Bryson's The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way and it had mentioned that there was a surprising lack of german in English in spite of its roots (well, that's what I thought it said, anyways). My knowledge in this is pretty cursory, so maybe I will do a little research before making some ridiculous claims.