2663: Ƶ & the Nazis Apr 2, 2022
The letter Z, and especially with a crossbar Ƶ, became a symbol closely associated with the Nazis, at least on first glance. Strictly speaking, the Ƶ iconography is not a letter, at least not originally, but a rendering of an old hunting tool known in German as a Wolfsangel, or wolf's hook in English. Basically, it was a metal, Z-shape set of hooked barbs, often with another spiked bar in the middle, which would be embedded in meat and left for wolves to eat and impale themselves on. This was associated with a rebellion after a 15th century peasant uprising used it symbolically, and it also looks like a Germanic rune eihwaz ᛇ. While the latter factor added extra Germanic symbolism, it is not why it became associated with the Nazis.
2648: sondern, sunder, & sine Mar 18, 2022
The German for 'especially' is 'besonders', and more commonly as the preposition meaning 'but rather; except is 'sondern'. The basic root also is used for compound-nouns to mean 'private'. This is related to the English 'sunder' meaning 'to separate' but in Old English the word also meant 'special; particular'. Still, lots of Indo-European languages have words with this root that mean 'only' or 'without' like the Latin 'sine' and all its derivatives like French 'sans' and Portuguese 'sim'.
2636: ernten, earn, אַרן Mar 6, 2022
Though the closest language to German is Yiddish, there are many Yiddish words of Germanic origin that do not have similar meanings. For instance, the Yiddish word אַרן (arn) means 'to bother; to be annoyed', but the Modern German 'Ernte' means 'a harvest'. Both of those are also related to the English 'earn'. The root of all of these did likely mean 'harvest; reap; labor', and each word in the different languages sprung off of a different definition. The meaning was kept more literal in German while it meant 'toil' and then just 'be bothersome', whereas in English the idea of 'reaping' and perhaps even 'deserving' is what held.
2632: free & friend Mar 2, 2022
Though it's doubtful anyone in the free-love movement would have been aware of it, the word 'free' used to convey a meaning of love. The Old English for 'free' (frēo) is from the Proto-Germanic *frijaz which meant both 'beloved' but also 'unbound', as in literally not enslaved. This is related to 'friend' as well, & in many languages like German, the word for 'friend' and 'lover' are the same one, here 'Freund'.
2626: stout (beer) Feb 23, 2022
The beer called 'stout' bears its name because it is a strong, dark beer. If the term had come out today instead of in the 17th century, it may well have just been called 'a strong'. The root in other Germanic languages means 'proud', like the German 'Stolz', but the definition is different in English due to the euphemistic meaning that replaced the sense of 'proud; haughty' with 'fat' in the Middle Ages, and again in the 14th century with 'strong-bodied'.
2623: storm Feb 20, 2022
As a noun, 'storm' will usually refer to atmospheric disturbance or other moremetaphirical uses, while as a verb this word denotes a forceful, single-direction push like a military action. This same dichotomy also exists in German, leading to the English calque of 'stormtroops' in WWI from the German 'Sturmtruppen'. The Germanic root found in Old English as well saw both meanings of the atmospheric storm and a more generic 'to attack' without specifically referring to rushing something fortified. Moreover, it had another meaning of 'rage', which isn't as often seen today outside of more poetic uses.
2604: Answering a Negative Question: 3-Form Systems Jan 31, 2022
Now only a historical detail, English used to have a 4-form system for answering questions with 'yes', 'no', 'yea', & 'nay', but this is not the only way to set it up. German has a 3 form system, as do many Germanic languages with normal 'ja' (yes), 'nein' (no), but also the word 'doch' which responds contrarily to a negative question to clarify that is it isn't affirming the negative. For instance:
You didn’t go?
Doch, [in fact, I did]
Without such a feature, to answer 'yes' in English is ambiguous. In addition to Germanic languages, French has this with 'oui' (yes), non (no), and its third form 'si' (yes, contrary to the negative). This shares a root with the Spanish 'sí' (yes), which does not have the same nuance.
2596: crab, crib, & carve Jan 23, 2022
The word 'crab' is ultimately traced back to the Proto-Indo-European *gerbʰ- meaning 'to twist; to scratch; to claw', but so are 'carve', 'crib', and 'crèche'. Much of this has to do with leading to varied understanding, such as 'crab' and 'crayfish’ from Proto-Germanic *krabbô (to crawl) as opposed to 'crib' from Proto-Germanic *kribjǭ (wickerwork, basket) from the sense of twisting & weaving material. This led to a sense of 'clump; group' and then 'crèche' was born. 'Carve' is from the sense of this word as scratching, and is related to the Old Prussian gīrbin (number) from the idea of tallying.
2582: tectonic, text, and architecture Jan 8, 2022
The word 'tectonic', relating to the structure of the Earth's crust, is probably from the German 'tektonisch' of broadly similar meaning, but that is from Latin tectonicus meaning 'of an architect'. This root, from the Greek τέκτων (téktōn) for 'carpenter' doesn't seem to have much to do with geology nor related English words like 'text' or 'technician', but but its association with buildings and structures, still seen clearly in the German 'architektonisch' and indeed English 'architecture'.
2576: disk and tisch Jan 2, 2022
Though dishes can be concave and tables usually not, it is the idea of flatness which links the two together. Words like 'disk', but also 'desk', 'dish', and the German 'Tisch' (table) are all from the Greek δίσκος (dískos). In its original form this meant 'disk' as we use it now, and hence the Greek athletic 'discus'. This root was adopted into a Proto-Germanic language via Latin, eventually becoming German 'Tisch', Dutch 'dis' for 'table'—though this last word is far less common than tafel (table) or berd (board)—and the English 'dish'. English took a different root for 'table', but the story is similar.
2572: milk Dec 28, 2021
The English words 'milk' and 'lactose' obviously have related meanings, but moreover they share a common root. There is a clear set of relationships across Germanic languages for milky words like Milch (German), melk (Dutch/Afrikaans), as well as in Slavic languages молоко (moloko) in Russian, or mleko/mlijeko (Serbo-Croatian/Slovenian). Conversely, across Romance languages this is less clearly related with French 'lait', Spanish 'leche', and Italian 'latte' to the Ancient Greek γάλακτος (gálaktos) from γάλα (gála), but each of these comes from the same Proto-Indo-European root.
2555: flee, fly, float Dec 11, 2021
The participial form of 'fly' is 'flight' while for 'flee' this would be 'fled'. This pair is, perhaps unsurprisingly, related, but they've long been each slightly different to the other. In Old English, these were 'flēogan' and 'flēon' respectively, but they shared a common root from the Proto-Germanic *fleuhaną. Originally this root meant 'flow', and naturally enough this is also related. From this it elucidates how this root also led to words like 'fleet' and 'float', or Old English 'flēot' (ship).
2544: glass Nov 30, 2021
Although 'glass' refers to a material in English, throughout Indo-European languages the root of this word often led to other meanings for a variety of colors. The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root *ghel- meant 'shine' and as a result eventually came to mean 'glass' in Germanic languages, but also led to words for the colors yellow such as Old English 'glær' or Latin 'glaesum' (amber) or indeed Modern English 'yellow'. In Old Irish 'glass' meant 'green' and in Welsh 'glas' means 'blue'.
2540: Reuss & Its Naming Nov 26, 2021
Although now part of Thuringia, Germany, there was a principality of the Holy Roman Empire named after Slavs until the 19th century. 'Reusse' (German 'Reuß') is sometimes translated as 'Russian' though really it means 'Ruthenian' and although the land had long been populated with a high number of Slavs, this connection was cemented with the marriage of King Daniel of Galicia into the local nobility. This region was also associated with some singular naming practices, such as the House of Reuss naming all its men 'Heinrich' and numbering each, even those not in power, Heinrich I all the way to Heinrich C (Heinrich the one hundredth) before repeating the cycle, or with another line of this house restarting the cycle at the end of the century.
2535: Why 'Un-' Doesn't Assimilate Like 'In-' (Ir- Il- Im-) Nov 21, 2021
The prefix 'in-' assimilates to different sounds depending upon the context, becoming 'im-', 'il-', and 'ir-', but this is not true of 'un-', which is similar both semantically but more importantly, phonetically. For instance, 'in-' + 'responsible' is 'irresponsible', but 'un-' + 'responsive' is 'unresponsive'. This was true of the negating prefix 'in-' in Latin whence this use was borrowed, and while 'un-' is distantly related to this, it is really considered to be of a Germanic root where this does not happen.
2532: spew & puke Nov 18, 2021
Many unpleasant bodily functions will take on multiple euphemisms, and with vomit, two are indeed related etymologically. While the word 'puke' is understood to be imitative to some extent, the exact reference is vague, and has been associated with the German 'pfauchen' (spit) and Dutch 'spugen' (spit), though other cognates here would mean 'blow' or 'puff'. Likewise, the Old English spīwan (vomit; spit) is a cognate, and the origin of 'spew', with also has other associations with spitting. Across languages the two ideas are commonly connected. In the case of 'puke' and 'spew' though, the latter is certainly older.
2519: Germanic Stress Rule: Morae & Dreimorengesetz Nov 5, 2021
While the penultimate stress rule describes the stress accent for Latin, a similar rule for Germanic languages was proposed, called Dreimorengesetz (three-mora rule), wherein the stress is placed 3 morae before the end of each word; a mora is a unit for which a light syllable (generally a short one) is one mora and a heavy syllable (generally a long one) is two morae. This has its own problems, especially in the way it necessitates categorizing the final syllable as always light, but it does provide somewhat of a sense of Germanic languages' stress.
2500: Bears: How Fear Developed Terminology Oct 16, 2021
The word 'bear' and its many similar Germanic counterparts, along with other very different sounding words of Northern European regions diverge from the Proto-Indo-European '*rtko' as seen in the Latin 'ursus' and Greek αρκτικός (arktikos). The Proto-Germanic '*berô' is related to the word 'brown' (and as a matter of course, 'beaver') meaning 'brown one'. Many people have claimed this is as a euphemistic reference from fear of bears who more prevalently inhabited Northern Europe than around the Mediterranean where they were fewer and smaller. Not only Germanic languages have this phenomenon, as the Russian медведь (medved) means 'honey-eater' and some Celtic references once had similar euphemistic qualities.
2494: sehr & sore Oct 10, 2021
The German 'sehr' (very) sounds somewhat like 'very', and considering they mean the same thing they aren't related; it is related to the English 'sore'. The Old English sār as a noun meant 'ache; wound' or 'grievous' as an adjective, which is not so far from the English today, but so did the Old High German 'sēr'. Indeed, much like 'awful' or 'terrify' are bad and 'awfully' and 'terrific' are merely emphatic, so too is 'sore' negative while 'sorely' is emphatic. Many other languages have related words, but most have stuck with the meaning regarding pain.
2479: Swedish Tones Sep 25, 2021
While people tend to associate tonal languages which use pitch to distinguish between words otherwise pronounced the same with East Asia, there are languages around the world, such as Swedish (with Norwegian included), which also have some form of this. Swedish has two tones, the acute and grave tones, which are often distinguished by stress, as in English 'a rebel' and 'to rebel' but in Swedish there are genuine, noticeable pitch changes in terms of the individual vowels outside of mere stress. As a result, there are pairs of words differing only by these tones that have totally unrelated meanings, like 'boken' (the book) with acute tone, and 'boken' (spoilt) with a grave tone. In Swedish dialects spoken in Finland, these pitches are virtually nonexistent.