amazing foreign languages
Studying German really amazes me. When you least expect it, it makes you discover that words/verbs are actually from Latin, and similar to Italian. Just quite changed by their pronunciation and, as a consequence, spelling. But always corrupted in the same coherent way. It's as if you created a new language by giving your language to savages, which the Germans were at the time they met the Romans (now it's the other way around). So, that's what happened to Latin: the savages tried to speak Latin, but changed it and now you have the "German" language of which they are so proud. (The same applies to the British of course, and to the Romans, too, who were savages to the Greeks).
For example: you have "andauern", meaning "to last" and "to continue". How could you expect this to have anything to do with Italian? But if you investigate, you realize that it has something in common with "endure" and sounds strikingly similar.
Then you realize that we have "durare", which means just the same thing, and derives from the latin "in-durare" from "durus":
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/endure?s=t
Origin:
1275–1325; Middle English enduren < Anglo-French, Old French endurer < Latin indūrāre to harden, make lasting, equivalent to in- in-2 + dūrāre to last, be or become hard, derivative of dūrus hard
more information and confirmations here:
http://www.etimo.it/?term=durare
http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/?sigle=DWB&mode=Vernetzung&lemid=GA03474
And instead I should be talking about soccer with my idiot colleagues?
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Anyway, just like for looking up nazi background of actors/singers, I will be done with etymology soon as well, because this is too time-consuming.
I came across this "vocabulary builder" at vocabulix.com, and it gave me the word "die Socke", meaning "sock" in English, so -- by the way that's why I keep coming up with these etymology posts -- so I said to myself: come on, "sock" and "socke" cannot have
anything to do with Italian or Latin.
Well, partly right and partly wrong. It comes from the Latin "soccus":
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sock?s=t
Origin:
before 900; Middle English socke, Old English socc ≪ Latin soccus slipper
But you see, now we say "calza", which is also from Latin, but we don't use that other term. So, even when I cannot sense the Latin origin of a word, it might still be there.
more info here:
http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/?sigle=DWB&mode=Vernetzung&lemid=GS30215
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soccus
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soccus
By the way, they all come from the Ancient Greek "σύκχος".
Now imagine a Greek learning German or English... he hears "my socks", and he's not going to imagine that it comes from a term used in his country thousands of years ago.
...
One last example and then I am done, but I won't provide links because this is getting too long. "Sauber" means clean, right? Well, it is related to English "sober", and Italian "sobrio", and originates from Latin "sobrius". So what I am now noticing is that words don't just get "corrupted" in 1) their pronunciation, in 2) their spelling, but also in 3) their meaning.
Indeed, "sobrio" doesn't mean "clean" in Italian, but only "essential", "simple", "moderate" and "without useless (expensive) fineries".
This is not exactly the same as "clean", but you know... the Germans got it from the French, the French got it from the Romans... in all these kilometers and centuries, the word's pronunciation and meaning got corrupted quite a bit.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sober?s=t
Origin:
1300–50; Middle English sobre < Old French < Latin sōbrius
Or maybe the Germans got it directly from the Romans, but... you know what I mean anyway:
http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/sauber
Herkunft
mittelhochdeutsch sūber, althochdeutsch sūbar, über das Vulgärlateinische < lateinisch sobrius = nüchtern, mäßig, enthaltsam; besonnen; ursprünglich = sittlich rein
...
How interesting. An exception: the German "scherzen" lead to the Italian "scherzare" and "scherzo". This is an exception. In this case, there is no Latin equivalent. We took it from the Germans from the start:
http://www.etimo.it/?term=scherzare
But guess what, the English equivalent, "joke" is all ours, once again:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/joke?s=t
Origin:
1660–70; < Latin jocus jest
...
With thousands of words in every language, there is a risk of going on forever. So I'll cut it out and only use this etymology research to learn and remember the new German words.
By the way, how many words in each language?
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I've been searching and had the same experience as this guy:
http://www.lingholic.com/how-many-words-do-i-need-to-know-the-955-rule-in-language-learning-part-2/
The most “objective” measure that we have available for counting the number of words contained in a given language, then, is to calculate the number of words contained in its largest dictionary (really, it’s not that objective, but it’s the only measure we have access to!). I thus began to research answers to this question in regards to some of the world’s major languages, but quite surprisingly, I couldn’t find any resource on the net actually listing languages and their associated number of words based on dictionary word count. So after having scourged the net for scattered answers, I’d love to share with you my findings.
He goes on (link above) to provide a table, that says that English has "171,476 words in current use". It's pretty good work all things considered. I really could not find anything either on the subject, to my surprise.
