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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| zekecoma Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5125 days ago 561 posts - 655 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 1 of 17 22 January 2012 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've noticed, that when I was learning German, that it contained a lot of English words
in it. Now, that I'm learning Russian. I've noticed the same thing. Why does English have more influence on so many languages, but hardly the same in return? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| a3 Triglot Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5037 days ago 273 posts - 370 votes Speaks: Bulgarian*, English, Russian Studies: Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish | Message 2 of 17 22 January 2012 at 8:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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Because it's lingua franca. And many of those English words that are borrowed by other languages actually came from Latin into English.
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| zekecoma Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5125 days ago 561 posts - 655 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 3 of 17 22 January 2012 at 8:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm more talking about modern day words, that didn't exist in Latin.
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| ReQuest Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4813 days ago 200 posts - 228 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, French Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 17 22 January 2012 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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In Dutch this happens too... It's just because most new inventions and concepts are English, or in English so it's accesable to many.
Long ago languages had time to think of names for things, let's take mathematics, in Dutch it's wiskunde, because back then communication wasn't that fast, there was time to think of words, now with the whole world connected all the time, there is just no time to think of a new word and then mostly the English word is being used. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zekecoma Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5125 days ago 561 posts - 655 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 5 of 17 22 January 2012 at 9:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ah I see, but if this continues, then every language will sounds more English, than it
originally was. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6363 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 6 of 17 23 January 2012 at 6:47am | IP Logged | ||
English is, in all probablility, the the language that's been the most influenced by others. Not only does it have a huge French substratum, but it's got loan words from Latin, Greek, Swedish, Cantonese, Hindi, Arabic, Turkish, Hawaiian and pretty much every other major language in the world. English doesn't look at all like the other Germanic languages, or like its older self, because it's been so profoundly changed. At the moment, English is the international lingua franca and it exerts a large influence on other languages. For most languages, this influence is still far less than the influence French once exerted on English, and yet English didn't turn into French. So while some of us may bemoan the loss of some native terms (I do it myself sometimes), it's not the end of the world. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6378 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 7 of 17 23 January 2012 at 8:02am | IP Logged | ||
And in German, in many cases it must've been cognates rather than loan words - English and German belong to the same group, the Germanic languages. Like also Danish, Dutch, Icelandic... Edited by Serpent on 23 January 2012 at 8:04am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Mani Diglot Senior Member Germany imsprachendickicht.b Joined 4686 days ago 258 posts - 323 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, Welsh, Luxembourgish | Message 8 of 17 23 January 2012 at 11:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, of course German adopts many English loan words at the moment, especially in the fields of technics and communication, but I don't think it will change German per se. English is the chic language of the last decades and will be for the next decades as well, I suppose. So, sure it has an effect on the German vocabulary, but so had French and Latin and Greek too (just to name some contributors). Languages are alive, they constantly change (if we like it or not).
For instance - this is an example of Grimm's Aschenputtel (German version of Cinderella) 1st edition, 1812. (Cited from the German Wikisource.): Der Schnee deckte ein weiß Tüchlein* auf der Mutter Grab**, und als die Sonne es wieder weggezogen hatte, und das Bäumlein zum zweitenmal grün geworden war, da nahm sich der Mann eine andere Frau. Die Stiefmutter aber hatte schon zwei Töchter, von ihrem ersten Mann, die waren von Angesicht schön, von Herzen aber stolz und hoffährtig*** und bös****. * declined it should be: ein weißes Tüchlein ** a use of the genetivus possessivus that sounds rather odd today, it still is correct language, but written today it would probably be: auf das Grab der Mutter *** hoffärhtig - a word that completely vanished from today's German, I had to look it up, means something like überheblich (bigheaded), arrogant **** today you'd say: böse (And just to mention it - I picked a part that is close to today's spelling.) And about finding English words in Russian, are you sure that these words are English (= English origin) and not loan words that English also adopted from a third language (e.g. French)? (Same question goes for German as well.) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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