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Archaic English equivalents of German/Dut | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5355 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 1 of 18 07 June 2010 at 7:30am | IP Logged | ||
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Tonight I was pondering on the relationships between English, Dutch and German, and I began to wonder about words that are still used frequently in modern Dutch or German, yet have equivalents in English, that are overly archaic. Due to William the Conquerer and the great French influence on English, I realize that there are many words which were in use in Old English, yet disappeared by the time Middle English came about. Therefore, I am primarily interested in words which initially survived after the French influence, i.e. from Middle English onward.
For example, I was thinking about the Dutch/German verb pair, begrijfen/begreifen (to understand/comprehend). What would the English equivalent be, to grip, to grasp, something entirely different? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5338 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 2 of 18 07 June 2010 at 8:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, Dutch 'begrijpen' already has the word for 'to grasp' in there; 'grijpen' and considering the similarities of grijpen/grip/greifen I think they're probably related in some way with Dutch and English having retained the original p while it changed to an f in German under influence of Grimm's law.
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| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5355 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 3 of 18 08 June 2010 at 6:53am | IP Logged | ||
Are you aware of if there is an English equivalent to begrijpen? Another word which I wonder about is blijven, bleiben, ??? in English. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| nimchimpsky Diglot Groupie Netherlands Joined 5614 days ago 73 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English | Message 4 of 18 09 June 2010 at 10:03am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know if my example is correct, but i was very suprised when i read the word frolic in an English novel. I,m not a native speaker of English but to me that word sounds archaic. However in Dutch it is a frequently used word. Edited by nimchimpsky on 09 June 2010 at 10:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6771 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 5 of 18 09 June 2010 at 1:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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"Frolic" is not archaic at all.
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6442 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 18 09 June 2010 at 1:59pm | IP Logged | ||
It doesn't sound archaic to me, but it isn't extremely frequent. That said, I use it fairly regularly - I know a dog who absolutely frolics when he's let off-leash on a grassy area. There's no other word which is close to describing it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| modus.irrealis Bilingual Triglot Newbie Canada Joined 5881 days ago 29 posts - 37 votes Speaks: English*, Greek*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Danish, Turkish | Message 7 of 18 11 June 2010 at 12:36am | IP Logged | ||
Very interesting topic - made me do some research.
The OED has the obsolete verb begripe (meaning "catch hold of") related to begreifen/begrijpen. For bleiben/blijven the OED has the obsolete belive/blive ("to remain"). Leave is derived from this live and there's also the obsolete beleave which the OED said replaced belive before itself becoming obsolete. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5786 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 8 of 18 04 August 2010 at 5:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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bleiben = stay in German, which at first seems the OPPOSITE of to leave, but think of "left behind" or "left-overs".
Speaking of leave, another example of what the OP was looking for is Urlaub = holiday in German, remove the Ur (German does so love those prefixes) and you have a cognate of "leave" as in "on leave." Another is Blatt = leaf (blade of grass, anyone?) and the cognate of leaf is Laub, which in German is foliage. Wissen = wit, which is archaic in English now except for the set-phrase "to wit". Erzaehlen splits the semantic field of our word tell with sagen (c.f. say), remove the prefix er (those crazy Germans and their prefixes again!) and you can now see that the zaehlen part is cognate with "tell" (compare for instance Zinn = tin, Zehn = ten, or Zoll = customs [think toll]). Of course there is a reason German loves those prefixes, as it uses them to build different words from the same root, here zaehlen on it's own = to count in German. To count? nothing to do with the English verb to tell then? Well yes, actually, think of sentences like, "I have 15 all told." There are just so many examples... Then there are the "nearly words" (to coin a phrase) like Beerdigung = funeral, which if it DID exist in English would be "be-earthing" pretty good description really. This kind of thing is one of the great joys of German I think. Actually thinking about it this word does exist in English, but in latin rather than Germanic form, presumably the German version is a calque of some original latin word. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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