2774: Dear and Teuer Jul 25, 2024
The words ‘dear’ in English and ‘teuer’ (expensive) in German both originate from the same Proto-Germanic root, but over time they have diverged in meaning and usage. Both ‘dear’ and ‘teuer’ trace their origins back to the Proto-Germanic word *diurijaz, which means ‘precious’ or ‘valuable.’ While the sense of money being valuable (in the sentimental sense) might be clear by itself as a gradual progression in German, the English usage was also reinforced by Old Norse ‘dyr,’ meaning ‘precious.’ Likewise, ‘expensive’ (i.e., teuer) is divergent from the original sense in that it is the reaction to something being valued, but this would be the same sort of relationship as another doublet pair with ‘wet’ being the experience of ‘water,’ each word coming from the same root. ‘Dear’ and ‘teuer’ are yet another of countless examples of cognates with understandably similar but by no means identical meanings.
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.
2419: Read: Unique Germanic Evolution Aug 5, 2021
English is thought of as being unusually different to its European relatives because of its borrowed (usually Romantic) words, but this is not always why. 'To read' for instance is a Germanic word meaning 'advise; counsel' that developed differently to any other. *rēdaną, also led to the German 'Rat' (council)—also borrowed in some Slavic areas for political divisions—and Dutch 'raden' (to advise; guess), and this root eventually came to mean 'to interpret' in English and then specifically 'to interpret a letter' hence 'reading'. This now exclusive meaning is unique, but it should be noted that the Scots word 'rede' can also mean both 'to advise' but also 'to decipher', also from Middle English.
2417: Functionality of Ge- in German Aug 3, 2021
Like German, Old English frequently used the prefix 'ge-' for a variety of purposes. Indeed, while most Germanic language use this—a feature lost in Modern English—it wasn't used in all the same ways. While both Old English and Modern German use this for participles and to indicate association like the modern 'co(m)-' prefix derived from Latin, in Old English this was also used as an intensifier, especially indicating a completed action of a verb. The prefix could also be used to form nouns and verbs indicating a result.
2411: Language-Specific Names for Germany Jul 28, 2021
There are a number of etymologically distinct names for Germany around the world—far more than other countries—that are shared by at least a few languages, but others too went another way. Particularly North American native tribes made these names, like Lakota's Iyášiča Makȟóčhe (Bad Speaker Land), Navajo's Béésh Bich’ahii Bikéyah (Metal Cap-wearer Land); Cree has two different names both meaning roughly the same as those. Other languages like Sorbian, Silesian, and Medieval Greek took their names from different Germanic states, not so dissimilar to the practice of ancient languages taking their names from tribes. Kinyarwanda, the language of Rwanda, uses 'Ubudage' or just 'dage' thought to derive from the 'guten Tag' greeting during the days of the German colonial presence. Old Norse used the term 'Suðrvegr' literally 'South Way', which is effectively opposite to 'Norway' (Norþweg). Medieval Hebrew went another way and used the biblical name אשכנז (Ashkenaz), thought to be the ancestor of the Germans.
2410: Standard Etymologies for Germany Around the World Jul 27, 2021
Around the world, there are roughly 7 etymologies for the country of Germany where various languages derive their exonyms, along with a few exceptional cases. Those would be:
•From Latin 'Germania' as seen in English and Russian
•From 'Alamanni' tribe as in French (Allemagne) and Arabic
•From Germanic ‘Diutisc’ as in German (Deutschland) or Chinese
•From the Saxon tribe, as in Finnish (Saksa) and Romani.
•From Slavic němьcь as in Polish (Niemcy) and Hungarian
•From Prussia, as in Tahitian (Purutia) or Silesian
•A root found in Baltic states without clear origin, like Lithuanian (Vokietija) or Latvian (Vācija)
Some of these roots have applied to different Germanic states too, like Austria or the Holy Roman Empire in various languages. Notably this list means the term used in Romantic French and Spanish is Germanic, and the term used in Germanic English is Romance based. More on the exceptional cases next.
2409: Functionality of Ge- in German Jul 26, 2021
The prefix 'ge-' in German has a wide variety of meaningful, grammatical functions, though this is on the decline in some. One use is to form collectives, such as 'Gebirge' (mountain range) from 'Berg' (mountain), 'Gewässer' (body of water) from 'Wasser' (water). It is also used for nouns from verbs to express frequency and repetition, like 'Gerede' (chatter) from 'reden' (talk). It is used quite commonly and fairly ubiquitously for forming past participles from verbs, especially with '-en' or '-et' suffixes, though this last point is contentious about how distinct 'ge-' is if would require these suffixes. Aside from these, it is also used to express the terminitive case in certain regional dialects—e.g. 'geleiten' (escort) from 'leiten' (lead)—along with referential nouns formed from verbs—'Gelege' (clutch of eggs) from 'legen' (lay). Finally, it is used to indicate union, like the Latin-based 'co-and 'com-' do in English and indeed certain German loan-words.
2404: @ in Hebrew and German Jul 19, 2021
The modern Hebrew word for the @ symbol is שטרודל (strudel), as in the German dessert. This is coincidental that both the pastry and the symbol are from the same name, but in German, and also Yiddish whence the Hebrew derives, this literally means 'whirlpool' and is supposed to be reminiscent of something twisting and spinning. In German, the word for the @ symbol is 'der Klammeraffe' which means 'spider monkey', though 'Klammer' on its own does not mean 'spider' but rather 'bracket'.
2272: Intro to Hunsurik: Brazil's Own German Mar 6, 2021
The language of Hunsurik, a German language spoken in Brazil, in many ways mirrored the historical process seen in the development of German in the 18th and 19th centuries. In those times, there was no standard German, neither in spelling nor in dialect. Eventually in the early 19th century this started to take place in Germany along with the unification of the country around what is now the standard, but with mass immigration to the Americas, German use in Brazil instead involved the Hunsrück dialect in part due to numerical superiority among the German immigrants. The spelling as well does not resemble that of Standard German, resembling certain aspects of Dutch and Portuguese orthography, but despite having around 3 million speakers and a number of school its writing is not standardized or even completely codified.
1715: Diminutive Suffixes in German Dialect Aug 25, 2019
About 80% of Yiddish vocabulary is from German, more or less depending on dialect, but when it comes to grammar the number is harder to discern. For instance, it is common for Yiddish to have the diminutive suffix -l (ל-), even using this in place of the word for small 'kleyn' (קליין) as is the case in German. For instance, 'city' in German is 'Stadt' (pronounced like SH-t [ʃt]), and in Yiddish it's 'shtot' (שטאָט), but a town—when not a village—is sometimes 'Kleinstadt' or just 'kleine Stadt' in German but 'shtetl' (שטעטל) in Yiddish. However, this Yiddish feature is Germanic, not Slavic or Hebraic, and does appear infrequently in some dialects. For instance, the Austrian town Neustadtl an der Donau (literally: New Little Town on the Danube) uses this convention, which is not really standard for German.
