On 23 November 2012 13:09, Bernd Oppolzer <[email protected]> wrote: > For a native German speaker, it is always remarkable that in the English > language > there are often two words for the same thing. One from the "indo-german" or > "anglo-saxon" > language origin, and the other from latin. Like here, with "animal" and > "deer". I didn't know > about the old meaning of deer as a synonym for animal, but this fits > perfectly in this pattern.
And occasionally two from Latin - one borrowed directly, and the other from French or another of Latin's descendants: the famous camera/chambre. But German itself has a number of pairs of Germanic/Latin words, zb: Telefon - Fernsprecher. The brilliant short summary of nuclear physics Uncleftish Beholding by Poul Anderson gives an idea of what a modern English without 1066 and all that might be like. Of course his was not at all the first try at showing what a delatinized (unromantic?) English would look like, and German too has had any number of tries at the same. > But this is also difficult for non-native english speakers, because sometimes > there might > be slight differences in the meaning of two words which have the same > translation, and we > cannot understand that. Also, words that sound the same as in our native > language possible > have a very different meaning. One example comes to mind: "eventually" means > "in the end" > in english, but in Germany it says "may be". That's what we call "false > friends" - words that > you think you understand, but in fact you don't. There are blatant ones (Gymnasium <> gymnasium) and subtle ones (kontrollieren ~~= control) with shared roots. To say nothing of those that just look or sound nearly alike, but with no actual (heh...) common origin. Tony H. About to leave the workstead and head home this Friday night... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
