Timeline for How to effectively find English cognate(s) for a German word?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
7 events
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| Sep 20 at 3:01 | comment | added | RDBury | @tofro - Latin is supposed to be helpful for Lawyers and Doctors since a lot of the terminology and jargon actually is Latin; possibly that's also true in German speaking countries. But I would say Latin words in English are "borrowed" instead of "cognates". For an English speaker, reading French can actually be easier than German because French and English borrowed or inherited a lot of the same words from Latin. For example the English "image" is "image" in French (pronounced differently) but "Bild" in German. | |
| Sep 19 at 18:01 | comment | added | tofro | If I would have to guess, there are way more Latin/Roman cognates in English that German ones. So better learn Latin then? :) | |
| Aug 20 at 9:51 | comment | added | Jonathan Herrera♦ | @RDBury schaffen exists as a weak verb, with the pariticple geschafft. It might also be interesting (just in case you don't already know) that in Swabian dialect schaffen means "to work", and they use "Geschäft" as "job, office, work". Ich gehe ins Gschäft is "I go to work" in Swabian. | |
| Aug 20 at 8:55 | comment | added | Honza Zidek | See my edit as my answer to your scepticism related to the usefulness of cognate awareness in the learning process. | |
| Aug 19 at 23:09 | comment | added | RDBury | @bakunin - Good to know. The participle is "geschaffen" in modern German, but if you imagine "schaffen" as a weak verb then it might have "geschäft" as a participle, ignoring the ablaut. Nominalization often turns participles into nouns in German, so we have a reasonably plausible explanation for "Geschäft" from "schaffen". That doesn't explain the drastic shift in meaning though. I'm sure there is an explanation, but we're already getting into "too much information" territory from my point of view. | |
| Aug 19 at 15:54 | comment | added | bakunin | Note that the "ge-" in "Geschäft" once was a productive prefix indicating perfective aspect of a word. For instance: "sitzen" (to sit) is non-perfective but "hinsetzen" (to sit down) is. In Middle High German you didn't say "ich setzte mich hin" but "ich gesaß - the "ge-" indicating that you meant the process of taking place rather than the state of being sat. This, btw., is the same "ge-" nowadays used to build the Partizip Perfekt. | |
| Aug 19 at 15:10 | history | answered | RDBury | CC BY-SA 4.0 |