Questions tagged [germanic-languages]
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Did English phrasal verbs evolve from the same ancestors as German verbs with separable prefixes?
It seems as if many Germanic aspects of the English language exist in their full-fledged forms in German and in vestigial forms in English.
I wonder whether phrasal verbs in English are somewhat like ...
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What is the difference between old english words 'ric' and 'wald'
Ric and Wald are both name elements that are quite common in Old English names — for example, Eadric and Eadwald — and both seem to mean ruler or power or authority or might.
Are there however more ...
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The Saxon word "Scop" as in "bard."
Old & Middle English/Germanic Languages–Scholars, please help.
I'm interested in any information you might share on all senses of the Saxon word "Scop," meaning "Bard" or "...
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Original / old English word for Metal or Metalcraft
I would like to write my story in Anglish, which is basically, to my understanding, English without borrowed words from other languages. I like it because it sounds familiar and strange at the same ...
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How can I keep away from latinate? [closed]
Are there resources to help me keep away from latinate when I write? Preferably, they would let me trade latinate words for older, better words.
A thesaurus might help (or better, a good dictionary ...
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Synonyms for "impact ventilation" and "cross ventilation" of (West) Germanic roots (dead / alive / old / new)
A German "end of the year" 2020 overview of absurdities and rather funny trends mentions British "Corona talk" about the German words
Stoßlüften = impact ventilation,
Querlüften = ...
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palatization of y- from *ga-
Premises
The common Proto-Germanic prefix
*ga‑
affixed to past participles was reduced in Modern English, obscuring its
historical participial morphology now beyond modern recognition, as seen
for ...
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Why don't the names of the devices, in which evaporation and condensation occur, have the same ending in English? [duplicate]
In thermodynamics, the evaporator evaporates and the condenser condenses a substance. While these devices have the same ending in other languages (e.g. French and German), how did it come to pass that ...
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What Germanic language is the most understandable for the native English speakers? [duplicate]
What Germanic language is the most understandable for the native English speakers?
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Why is borne a past participle of bear?
This is a question people seldom ask. In the English language, past participles are verbs that usually end with -ed. But bear is one exception. It has bore and borne as past participles, but not ...
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Why the structure "was born", and not "is born" like in many other languages?
My question is why English uses the past "was" in "I was born", and many other languages (the majority of the European languages for instance), use the present "is" with this past participle?
(Je ...
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Why is the passive voice more prevalent in English than in other European languages? [closed]
Although the active voice is predominant in the English language the ‘ideal’ proportion of recommended passive sentences is still regarded as between 5% and 10%(source1) ( source2). Which is ...
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How did English gradually change into an analytic language?
English might be the most analytic language in the IE family, in that it has no case, no gender, and very few personal pronouns. Since PIE and other IE languages are generally synthetic, then what ...
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What is the inverse of schaedenfreude? [duplicate]
If schadenfreude is pleasure from another’s misery, what is displeasure caused by another’s success.
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When do I use a direct or indirect article to denote something?
The concrete example stems from a text that I am co-authoring with a friend whose native language is Czech. Mine is German. It goes like this:
This regime is called random phase
To me, it feels ...
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How to pronounce Lich [closed]
So I've played some fantasy games and I've recently started playing Divinity original sin. Before this whenever I encountered the word Lich I heard it as if it would rime with "itch", "bitch", "Kitsch"...
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Seeking etymological explanation of card game Euchre based on its spelling
Am seeking etymological explanation how, Euchre, the United States’ most popular card game in the late 19th century, might have come to be spelled in that manner. It is speculated that the game ...
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Are there any Germanic cognates to "lithe"?
When winter first begins to bite
and stones crack in the frosty night,
when pools are black and trees are bare,
’tis evil in the Wild to fare.
In this time of ...
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Etymological link between "shall" and "will"? [closed]
"X shall happen" means "X is (strongly) expected to happen" ("X wird geschehen") or "X is hoped for to happen" ("X soll geschehen")
German "Ich will, dass X geschieht" means "I want X to happen" (...
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Verbs formed from noun or adjective roots by adding -ja-
I know that there exist some verbs which were formed in Proto-Germanic by adding the causative marker -ja- to nouns or adjectives, such as these pairs:
doom (noun) > deem (verb)
food (noun) > feed (...
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Does the origin of the auxiliary "shall" lie in the medieval blood-money practice of wergeld?
Perusing some 19th-century grammar books for another purpose, I came across an interesting etymology:
"According to Grimm 'shall' or 'skal' is the preterite or perfect of a verb meaning 'to kill'. ...
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What is Germanic about English -- an incomplete list. Can others add things I missed?
I attempted a list of features of the English language that are clearly Germanic, and wrote only what came to mind off the top of my head. Doubtless it is woefully incomplete and has other flaws. What ...
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Doesn't English have vowel harmony?
Perhaps I'm not educated in this subject, but if vowel harmony means "all the vowels in a word to be members of the same subclass" then does this mean that English has vowel harmony too? For instance, ...
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Andrea - (fe)male name
When and why did Germanic languages (and more in general, languages outside Italy) started to use Andrea as a female name? To my rough understanding of Greek, this is a male name, which comes from the ...
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Old English sounds and Germanic languages [duplicate]
What languages still use the 'ge' prefix that was part of the Old English grammatical structure? I've searched and found German, but am not sure that is the only one which still does. I'm interested,...
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What's the English cognate with German "Stick" and Dutch "stik"?
Is there an English cognate with German Stick (as in Stickstoff) and Dutch stik (as in stikstof)?
What's the absolutely literal calque of Stickstoff/stikstof meaning nitrogen?
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German vs English who and where
I am a native English speaker and I have started learning German. I have learned the German word "Wo" equates to "Where" in English, and the German word "Wer" equates to "Who"
If both German and ...
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Why 'Germanic Languages' and 'Germanic Tribes'?
I've never been a fan of the word 'Germanic' and it's use to cover all Northern European (except the so-called 'Celtic Fringe') Tribes due to it's overtly political connotations. Can anyone tell me ...
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Why did Old English use C while other Germanic languages used K?
During most the first millennium CE, North and West Germanic languages were written in runic alphabets. Gradually, each language shifted from the runic alphabet to the Latin alphabet. The people who ...
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How are Old English participles declined to English participles? (both present and past)
I'm trying to learn about differences between English and Old English, and I found that there are some noticeable differences in the use of participle markings. I think that participles were declined ...
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Why is the word "Raubritter" (from German) used in English as the name of a rose?
The German word "Raubritter" was used as an alias for a German knight with Robin Hood's style. Now it is used in English as a name of a rose. How did this come to be?
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Is there a Germanic word for the Latin "number"?
Really just a curiosity, but I've been unable to find such a thing on my own...
I figure something as simple as a word for the thing you count with should exist in any language which has terms for ...
user109820
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Best etymological calque of the word Schadenfreude
This question is purely theoretical (i.e. I don't foresee actually trying to use the word), but using arguments based on etymology, as well as euphony and (least importantly) comprehensibility, what ...
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Etymology of English "Achoo" relative to other sneezing onomatopoeiae
So I was recently curious about the sound that people sneeze with in other languages and was surprised to notice the difference between the English onomatopoetic word "Achoo" and that of ...
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Answering a negative question with one word
There has been talk of how to answer a negative question without ambiguity, most often with a qualifying phrase needed for clarification. (For example, "yes, I do"/"no, I don't.)
I've noticed that ...
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Wer, wie, was, wieso, weshalb, warum, all start with W in German. In English they don't, why?
Wer, wie, was, wieso, weshalb, warum. Wer nicht fragt bleibt dumm.
This is the theme song to the German Sesame Street, IIRC
It roughly translates to:
Who, how, what, why, why ,why. If you don't ...
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/ð/ → /d/ shift in English
As a result of a /d/ → /ð/ shift, fæder became father, hider became hither and togædere became together, giving us our modern English forms.
However, I know that murder and burden have archaic forms- ...
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History of the non-rule that proscribes ending a sentence with a preposition [duplicate]
Famously, if not accurately, Winston Churchill is supposed to have responding to an editor who had "fixed" a sentence ending with a preposition by writing, "This is the sort of thing up with which I ...
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"Goose"–"geese" vs. "moose"–"moose" [duplicate]
Why is it that the plural of goose is geese but the plural of moose is moose? The same goes for mouse and house. Mouse becomes mice, yet house becomes houses.
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Where do “‑ess” and “‑ine” suffixes come from?
English has a lot of words in which the suffix ‑ess makes a word feminine, such as actress, hostess, huntress.
That looks like a suffix that is also used frequently in Italian, so I’d guess it has ...
- 2,496
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Pluralization of Germanisms
The German noun "Ansatz" is widely used (at least) in physics and, less frequently, in math texts in English. I have seen it always in singular though and now I must use its (English) plural. The ...
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Examples where English is "more Germanic" than German [closed]
English is a so called a Germanic language, as are German, Yidish, Dutch, etc.
In a way it seems natural to believe that German is "more Germanic" than English. But here it is not clear what "more" ...
- 3,659
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Old English instead of Latin in early Britain
For almost 400 years, Britain was a Roman province. During that period, naturally, Latin was an important language in the region. When the Germanic tribes invaded the British Isles (around the 5th ...
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Where does the phrase "on end" come from?
The phrase "on end" means "without end". It very much sounds like the German "ohn End" which itself is the short form of "ohne Ende".
Is this etymologically the right direction? (Sometimes these ...
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English from Icelandic?
Why is it that so many English words, as one traces their etymologies, run through Icelandic as one goes back?
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What we've gelost — why doesn't English use the prefix "ge-"?
The Germanic languages that I'm familiar with all use a prefix similar to ge- on past participles:
German: Ich habe mir den Fuß gebrochen.
Dutch: Ik heb mijn voet gebroken.
But English doesn't do ...
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What is the difference between these two "scip"s?
In a question about ships, I added an answer with the etymologies that underpin both ship and -ship.
"Ship" stems from scip: "O.E. scip "ship, boat," from P.Gmc. *skipan (cf. O.N., O.S., Goth. skip ,...
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Which native English speakers are linguistically the most "germanic"?
English is a Germanic language. Another significant Germanic language is of course German.
Which native English speakers are the closest to German basing on the following criteria?
accent-wise (...
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Why English pronunciation differs so much from written language, compared to German?
Given that English is derived mostly from German, when Anglo-Saxons (German tribes) migrated to Britain, how do you explain that
although German has a strict correspondence between written language ...
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