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English ,the less Germanic of the ... ? | ||
Tags: Germanic Languages | English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| alang Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7222 days ago 563 posts - 757 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 25 of 52 03 February 2014 at 2:59am | IP Logged | ||
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How about comparing English with Frisian (Frysk). Both are close to each other, but I still cannot really understand Frisian. Only the tech. words, which are English. Just search Frysk on Youtube. (West Frisian anyway) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4291 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 26 of 52 03 February 2014 at 3:08am | IP Logged | ||
In Dutch, "worden" is used for this purpose likewise. "Ik werd opgebeld" for, "I was rung" when referring to telephones; "Het boek wordt gelezen" for, "The book was read"/"The book got read". I think that Swedish uses "att bli" or something for a similar purpose. I have heard about Frisian being closest to English, with the closest major language as Dutch being closest to English. But the fact that native Anglophones can barely understand anything of either languages surely displays how removed English is from the Germanic family. If one gives a native monolingual Anglophone a Dutch or Frisian newspaper, I highly doubt that they can even understand the basic idea of the article, compared to Swedish/Norwegian/Danish, Icelandic/Faroese, Dutch/Frisian/German, etc. And even thereamongst can all of them have many similarities. English seems to simply be like it is out of any of these groups. Edited by 1e4e6 on 03 February 2014 at 3:23am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4033 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 27 of 52 03 February 2014 at 3:11am | IP Logged | ||
It does hold true. It is the difference between the dog is fed (he is given food), the dog is fed (habitually). We lost use of our word "worth" which would be used like "The cat is worthen fed food" We no longer use "through" for inanimate caused passives ("He was destroyed through his cowardice), we just use "by" for everything. This is not the work of vikings or Normans, these features were lost around the EME period along with some vowels and the "gh" sound as in "yech", and we stopped forming comparatives with vowel changes (old; elder; eldest) which happens in German for nearly all short adjectives with a, u, or o, around then I guess. Other plurals died then too and the effective use of umlauting and prefixes in English for many grammatical purposes. There must have been some continuous failure historically. Edited by Stolan on 03 February 2014 at 3:24am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4291 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 28 of 52 03 February 2014 at 3:19am | IP Logged | ||
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Would it also be, "The cat worth food gefed"? Also English had "þ", so it would be, "The
cat worþ food gefed" or something like that. If English kept a Germanic spelling, "Þe kat worþ voed gevet" probably looks closer. But I know that I used "through" for a predicative passive, i.e., "Through stupidity made I mistakes", "I had through persistence the second round of the tournament won". Most past participles in English required the mandatory "ge-" prefix like in Dutch and German as well. I am not sure when this was lost (or worþ gelosten?) or why, but this must be taken into consideration whilst using "worþan", which is the equivalent of the Dutch/German "worden"/"werden". Edited by 1e4e6 on 03 February 2014 at 3:33am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4033 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 29 of 52 03 February 2014 at 3:27am | IP Logged | ||
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It survived in set phrases up until the 1800s as in "Woe worth the hour". I was using it in the modernmost form. Oh
look, "modernmost" has a red underline when I am typing this. English word derivation is defective too. English is turning into Mandarin! Edited by Stolan on 03 February 2014 at 3:30am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 30 of 52 03 February 2014 at 10:04am | IP Logged | ||
I can more or less understand written Frisian (at least in those variants I have seen on the internet), but it is my Dutch and Low German that function as bridges - not English. And this is not the only case where linguistic relationships are less important than later developments - Icelandic/Faroese and Norwegian comes to mind: even the most hard core Westland dialects of Norwegian are closer to modern Swedish and Danish than they are to Icelandic. Another example: Italian, the extinct Dalmatian and Romanian are traditionally lumped together, but with the demise of Dalmatian the link has been broken - and now Romanian is sailing alone around like the Flying Dutchman on a sea of Slavic languages, whereas Italian has been in constant contact with the other Romance languages to the West.
Danish has also lost the w- word, except in a few set phrases like "helliget vorde dit navn" ('hallowed be thy name'), but the verb "at blive" has taken its place with no obvious consequences for sentence constructions. It has far more important consequences that half the sentences in Modern English are formulated with various kinds of 'progressive tenses'. Another characteristic trait of English is the use of "to do" as a dummy verb. This is not totally unknown in other Germanic languages, but even in Low German where it is most common its counterpart "doen" is used for emphasis and not to solve a self-inflicted word order problem. The shift from "through" to "by" is less important because it doesn't change the construction in any fundamental way. For something more drastic you have to go to the Nordic languages, which have developed a synthetic passive by integrating an old reflexive pronoun in the verbal forms: "jeg spiser osten -- "osten spises (af mig)" (I eat the cheese - the cheese is eaten (by me)'. The stepping stone for this development was the reflexive construction "osten spiser sig" (the cheese eats itself - which of course sounds more natural with an animate subject). The reflexive pronoun lost its reflexive/reciprocal interpretation in some contexts and at some point also its independence. Edited by Iversen on 03 February 2014 at 10:30am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 31 of 52 03 February 2014 at 11:23am | IP Logged | ||
Same in Dutch/Swedish. West-Frisian has undergone quite a Dutchification over the years because of its proximity to Dutch. Using "to do" as a dummy verb in Dutch sounds like kiddie speech. Edited by tarvos on 03 February 2014 at 11:24am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4669 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 32 of 52 03 February 2014 at 3:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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German has two passives (werden and sein passive)
not unlike colloquial English (static ''be'' and dynamic ''get''). Edited by Medulin on 03 February 2014 at 3:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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