1384: The Family of 'As' Sep 25, 2018

As mentioned the other day, 'like' as a preposition or a conjunction is a bit of a Germanic anomaly, but in some ways so is 'as'. While 'like' is pretty much on its own in terms of linguistic relatives, 'as' is related to the Dutch and German 'als', however, the context in which all three are used is very different for the most part. In German, 'als' can mean 'as', but would normally translate as 'than', and would be able to introduce comparative relative clauses in a way that 'as' usually does not, and in Dutch it functions mostly the same as German, though not completely. In this case—as would probably be imagined—German is more traditionally Germanic than English, as 'as' relates to 'also' and used to be able to introduce more clauses than it can now, or if you will, "it introduced more clauses as [it is able to] now". Moreover, 'similar' also has a shared root to 'as' and is where the Danish 'som' of the same meaning comes from.

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