Cognates: English, Dutch and German Words from A Common Root
For entertainment purposes only;
not systematic; not exhaustive.
My English and German are not perfect but good enough: you'll get the idea.
About 2300 years ago, the Germanic tribes started spreading out
("conquering") from their 'homeland' in present-day Denmark
and Southern Sweden to much of Northwestern Europe; consequently,
their speech started to grow apart. Around 350 AD/CE several tribes
(Angles, Jutes, some Saxons, some Frisians) moved on to what's now
England. Change was not random but mostly followed a pattern, as for
instance (English/Dutch/German) old/oud/alt, cold/koud/kalt and many
similar words, or like the 'softening' of many German consonants
(book/Buch, apple/Apfel.) Dutch is generally more like German than
like English, but sometimes developed like English (moon/maan/Mond),
and sometimes went its own way (weather/weer/Wetter.)
Stricly speaking, cognates are words that are not only similar in
different languages but also come from a common root word in the
'mother' language that those languages developed from. For instance,
English/Dutch/German dream/droom/Traum and
head/hoofd/Haupt.
But words like English/Dutch table/tafel and
curtain/gordijn are not cognates because they originate
in Latin words. A word like 'computer' is also not a cognate.
Recognizable Words in
Dutch and English
"G" in Northern and
Southern Dutch,
"CH"
in German
Family Tree, Pond Ripples
Language development is often pictured as a family tree, groups
growing apart and separating, but Schmidt's 'Wave Model' (1872) suggests
that language changes spread from the dialects of groups that are
politically or economically dominant, or culturally prestigious,
like ripples from a rock thrown in a pond.
Frisian
Frisian is nowadays only spoken by about a quarter of a million people
in Holland and a few pockets in Germany and Denmark.
It is said that speakers of Frisian have little difficulty reading Old
English: Frisian is closely related to the language of the Angles and
Saxons that crossed the North Sea to England ca 500 AD/CE; but then
there were 1500 years of separate development, and English was greatly
influenced by the French of the Norman invaders and also by the
languages of the Vikings, and Frisian was even more massively influenced
by Dutch.
Spoken Frisian
Next to West Germanic and North Germanic was the third
branch of the Germanic languages: East Germanic, but its languages have
disappeared. Luckily for us, the bishop Wulfila ca 350 AD/CE made or
supervised a Gothic translation of the New Testament that has in
large part survived.
Compare Gothic and Old English
The Streamlining of English
The Scandinavian languages are the Northern branch of the Germanic
language family. When the vikings came to England ca 800 CE,
their languages and the English of that time
were still not that different, people could understand each other.
It probably sounded like a distant dialect to the other party.
The close contact of the related languages led to a great streamlining
of English grammar,
hammering out many irregularities - English has far fewer exceptions than
Dutch and German.
Still, I had been wondering where the English 'extended' archaic possesive in
for instance
"the friends of my father's"
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came from, until I realized it is like in German, just the
regular possesive-S in the noun:
die Freunde meines Vaters
- in Dutch the noun does not have the possessive-S:
de vrienden van m'n vader
About a quarter of the cognates were found in B.C. Donaldson:
Dutch (M. Nijhoff, Leiden 1983)
Thank you Fabian Wenzel and Frank Nitsch for pointing out several typos
and mistakes in the German.
![[Marco at Microphone]](artwork6/MarcoMicrofoonH150RT.jpg)
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