English and intelligability with Germanic languages

" A Romance speaker can learn English much faster than even a Germanic speaker, because of the 70% Latin words in English, he already understands...not the case for a Germanic speaker. "


A germanic speaker will speak basic english very quick (using gramatical words, the, that, this, what, etc... or speaking about usual things, counting, calling himself, buying things, speaking about things he does, sleeping, eating, running... speaking about houses, doors, windows, welcoming people, greetings, speaking about your brother, fathers, etc... All this is the basis of the language; you don't need to know latin-rooted vocabulary to speak english. What the romance speakers already know is a specific vocabulary. All the basis vocabulary of romance languages is completly different of english. So you CANNO'T speak or understand english, even if it is "intellectual english" if you don't know the Anglo-saxon basis, and you are not able to speak anything nor understanding the meaning of the sentence, even if you understand some words (if you recognise them, because the romance words in English are generally very far from the original pronounciation). That different with germanic people who are able very quickly to use english in everyday situations, without so much learning, while we need years of practice to be able to buy something in a shop.
This is only when we have a good pratice of basic english that our knowledge of latin words can be helpfull, if we read scientific, political, business or philosophical writings.

"An english sentence with latin cognates seems to us as a unlogical copy-paste of latin words in an exotic system. If we don't know the meaning of basic words like "the" or "of", and don't understand the english word order this sentence is very far to be "perfectly understandable""

This works the other way for English speakers trying to read Latin languages. The link words and syntax are very different in both sets of languages and latin derived words in English don't always help when reading romance texts. The reason is because of the amount of 'false friends' that English shares with the romance languages it is easy to get the wrong idea of the meaning of a romance text.

Hi all, english is very easy to learn because is very poor of word flection, so for a romance speaker or germanic speaker it will be easy, it doesn't matter the vocabulary percentuals, when a language has got a logic and a easy to use grammar, guy try to speak or write chinese and you will understand, it easy to speak and to understand for example things will sound in chinese like ''mà maa mà'' basing on intonation to difference word'' sorry for chinese errors

The grammar rules are easy to learn, and the: a, of ,as , I , you, grom, etc.

What is difficult ? To learn a minimum of 30.000 Latinate words out of a total of 180.000 Latinate words.

What is difficult ? To learn a minimum of 30.000 Latinate words out of a total of 180.000 Latinate words.

Most english speakers who have this language as mother language don't know these latinate words, only lawyers, diplomats, scientifics or biologist can have some necessity to learn some of them for the specific use in their field. a lot of the common words of latin origins are deriving from greek and can be found in others germanic languages


ex a german text taken randomly:

"Da während des ganzen Mittelalters im Unterschied zu den romanisch- oder slawischsprachigen Nachbarländern in dem Land der Deutschen (deutscher Sprachraum) stark territorial zersplitterte politische Strukturen existierten, entwickelten sich die zum Teil extrem unterschiedlichen teutschen Dialekte (deutsche Mundarten) lange parallel nebeneinander her."

"Romanish, territorial, politische, strukturen, existieren, extrem, dialekte, parallel" are latinates or germanized greco-latin words. Having borowded latin is not a specificity of english. I don't have the percents, but I think if we count the latin words in the whole vocabulary used in german as some english speakers do it in this forum when claiming that english is latin at 80%... (=including all scientific words, and technical historical or places or peoples names), we will have the surprise to see that german is more latin than germanic too, wich would be stupid.

Well, a languages is classified by the grammar that has got.
For example sentence structure in englis is close to german one, not to the romance languages, as for the verb inflection and tenses, the syntax too

English does have a lot of words that come from Latin.

English contains a multitude of terms derived from Latin.

As you can see in the two sentences above, many of those Latin terms are synonyms for Germanic words. We have both. What Tiffany was pointing out is that while we have a huge number of Latin-derived words (this 70% that people keep invoking), we have a tendency to use the Germanic words for plain speech, and the Latin ones for when we want to be fancy. It has been said that Germanic terms often have more of a visceral impact on English speakers, while their Latinate synonyms are often perceived as being colder and more sterile. This isn't a hard and fast rule by any means -- there are plenty of sentences that we can't get through without using Latinate terms, and I'm not making any value judgments on words of either derivation.

As for other Germanic languages like German, Dutch, Swedish, Icelandic, etc., they're usually Greek to us -- you can pick out the occasional cognate here and there, but most of them are incomprehensible.

I never tried to count the percentage of Latin and Germanic words in English. But all that I know is that Germanic nations tend to speak English better than Latin nations, at least on a basic level. It's generally known that an average Dutchman or Swede speaks English better than an average Frenchman or Spaniard. Or has it to do only with subtitling films instead of dubbing??

"I never tried to count the percentage of Latin and Germanic words in English. But all that I know is that Germanic nations tend to speak English better than Latin nations, at least on a basic level. It's generally known that an average Dutchman or Swede speaks English better than an average Frenchman or Spaniard. Or has it to do only with subtitling films instead of dubbing??"


There is more than one reason I think: firt, english is very popular and well spoken is Scandinavia and Netherlands mainly (I think) beacause these countries are home of languages with few speakers (Danish and Norwegian is only 5 or 6 millions, Swedish eight, Dutch maybe 20 (sander will correct me)). To communicate with the main north European neighbouring countries they have choice beetween English and German; wich are the two main languages of northwestern Europe. In latin Europe English is not so usefull since latin languages like Spanish or French are international languages too.

The second reason is linguistic. English is a germanic language, so it is not surprising that it is easier to a germanic speaker to learn English than for a latin speaker, especially to learn the basis of the language wich has a lot of similarities with Dutch, and maybe with scandinavian.
Of course they will miss the latin vocabulary of English, but this vocabulary is usefull mainly when the basis of the language is known, to express things with more subtilities.

<<But all that I know is that Germanic nations tend to speak English better than Latin nations, at least on a basic level. It's generally known that an average Dutchman or Swede speaks English better than an average Frenchman or Spaniard. Or has it to do only with subtitling films instead of dubbing?? >>



I would think that has more to do with the fact that all of those countries border on Germanic-speaking countries and are more likely to do business in the UK or Germany.

And the reverse is not true. There are a lot of people in the US who speak both English (a Germanic language) and Spanish (a Romance language) just fine.

Also, English speakers don't seem to preferentially seek out other Germanic tongues to learn -- French and Spanish are the more common second languages around here. And from what people in the UK have said, there as well.

After reading the whole topic I have got a notion that some folk comming from "latin" countries deem it an award that English has loaned lots of latin words. Yet as a matter of fact when most latin/french words were added to the germanic word pool and indeed replaced some of it, it was but "cool" to use foreign words in order to spice up their tongue.
The whole thing, however, concerning "percentages" are not worth mentioning since oftentimes there is ONE aboriginal word but 5 to 6 synonyms of latin or greek sources. So although there may be 70% of not germanic origin, you may substitute 90% of latin words for their germanic synonyms. Often it is all up to one's own taste, whether one prefers latin or germanic offsprings*lol*.
When it comes to scholarship, however, everything changes. There is no difference between English and German since words concerning these topics utimately derrive from Latin and Greek...almost all of them.
I personaly regard it as a loss, that English was unable to resist the latin/french sway and lost most of it's former personality due to it.
Howsoever, germanic tongues usually differ more from one another than latin tongues do, for they are much more transmutual than the latins are. I don't know why but while latin tongues are almost the same (besides French), germanic tongues are more independent.

>>As for other Germanic languages like German, Dutch, Swedish, Icelandic, etc., they're usually Greek to us -- you can pick out the occasional cognate here and there, but most of them are incomprehensible.<<

At least with me, with German a lot of the more technical vocabulary which is *native* can be very hard to remember, due to not having direct equivalents, whether through cognates or loans, in English, while Latinate and Romance vocabulary in German is usually transparent in most cases (but some are not obvious, such as "Meer" and "kaufen", due to the English equivalent of "Meer", "mere", not being used by itself today, and due to the English cognate of "kaufen", "cheap", having a quite different meaning today from it).

On the other hand, the underlying grammar and patterns of usage in German seem quite familiar and generally intuitive in many cases, unlike that of the Romance languages, which I generally find to be just as unfamiliar as native German technical vocabulary. Even the inflection patterns in German are at times rather familiar, such as German verb inflection, which does not differ much from that of Early Modern English. Furthermore, even usages that I would have assumed to be idiomatic in English turn out to have direct German equivalents, such as English "What is with him" translating practically directly to German "Was ist mit ihm". On the other hand, this ends up having the downside in that it often is just too easy to directly calque English-language usages to German ones without even thinking, which can result in problems at times (for example the use of German "bis" in the place of English "for" for measures of time or distance). However, it is surprising when I end up doing something of that sort, and then end up thinking that I probably should have tried to use more idiomatic German, when it turns out that what I said in German did mean exactly what I intended.

Philx : « For example sentence structure in englis is close to german one, not to the romance languages, as for the verb inflection and tenses, the syntax too. »

Oui pour le système verbal. Oui et non pour la syntaxe. Par exemple le placement du verbe allemand en fonction de la nature de la phrase ou partie de phrase est fondamentalement différente de celui du verbe anglais. La construction du passif anglais à l'aide de l'auxilaire <être> est similaire à celle du français et distincte de celle de l'allemand qui utilise <devenir> = Al <werden>. L'allemand et le français ont ceci en commun que l'emploi des personnes impose des désinences verbales spécifiques alors cette règle est limitée à la seule 3e personne du singulier en anglais.

greg, könntest du bitte neu das auf Deutsch schreiben?

Tiens, mais c'est notre ami « Guest » qui reprend du service ! Et un peu de 'courage' aussi...

Travis : ja sicher ! Ich meinte nur daß, ich mit Philxs Feststellung teilweise einverstanden bin. Zum Beispiel auf deutsch befolgt Verbplatzierung spezifische Gesetze, die auf englisch onhegleichen sind — besonders in Nebensätze, in den das Verb am Satzende gewöhnlicherweise abgeschoben wird. Außerdem differenziert sich die Bildung des deutschen Passivs vom englischen aus : auf deutsch wird das Hilfsverb De <werden> = Fr <devenir> gebraucht wobei De <sein> = Fr <être> sowohl auf englisch als auch auf französisch wohingegen benützt wird. Schließlich haben deutsch und französisch gemein, daß bestimmte Verbendungen zum Gebrauche der Personen gezwungen werden, während auf englisch solch ein Zwang auf die dritte Person Singular sich beschränkt.