![]() The roots of many words are similar, but the grammatically, Swedish looks more like English than German. There is a lot of similarity between German and Swedish in terms of vocabulary. The remainder of the paper will discuss the various approaches to the Persian-Germanic hypothesis after its initial formulation. Germanic languages such as Swedish and German belong to the Indo-European language tree, which also includes French and Italian. Furthermore, Hugo Grotius’s and Marnix van Sint-Aldegonde’s contribution, which has been largely overlooked in this connection, will be focused upon. The role played by Franciscus Raphelengius (senior), Justus Lipsius, Josephus Justus Scaliger will be re-evaluated. This contribution aims to shed new light on the earliest stages of Persian and German vocabulary comparison carried out by Dutch humanists. Until the elaboration of comparative linguistics as an autonomous academic discipline at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Dutch (or German) and Persian were often considered to have a privileged relationship, an idea which gave birth to the so-called “Persian-German theory”. Despite the supposed Semitic nature of Persian, some striking lexical similarities between this language and the Germanic languages became unmistakable to many Western scholars. On top, German has about one hundred common noun stem endings in contrast to typically less than a dozen in Romance languages.Renaissance Europe (re)discovered Persia and its language. Noun genders in indoeuropean languages mostly depend on the stem ending, and that one is very different in Portugese and German. Apart from the same words in German and English, there are other significant examples that English and German are similar. Portuguese words all have genders, not sure if this would be good or bad for learning German as a few or most of them would be different For example, German is one of the very few European languages with verb-last word order and German tenses work nothing like tenses in most other European languages either. English and German are similar but in many parts of grammar they are not. English had the same system but eventually they threw a grenade at it. It has thousands of irregular verbs but they boil down to 150 stems in seven categories. Though German is much more organized in that. German and English share a lot of basic vocabulary. So, I was thinking: would it be easier for me to learn with a Portuguese or English mentality? Most (all?) Lëtzebuergesch speakers are bilingual with German. It's not reciprocal though because German has a lot of oddities codified as grammar that are absent or merily stylistic choices in those languages. I was thinking: for a native of which language German would be easier to learn?įor Dutch, Afrikaans, and Yiddish speakers. It's still not hard to learn for German speakers. Icelandic and Faroese are most similar to Norwegian.Įnglish is the Germanic language least similar to German or any other Germanic language because of the huge inventory of French-origin words it has in everyday use. A few hundred lessons suffice to get to a solid level. Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are similar to German but German speakers stand no chance to read or understand what is written or said in those languages without studying them. And German speakers from the southwest can understand spoken Lëtzebuergesch and Yiddish to a large degree. German speakers from the northwest typically can also understand spoken Dutch and Afrikaans to a large degree. ![]() Once you learned those (not a huge problem), reading Yiddish is about as hard as reading Dutch. For Yiddish, the main show stopper is that it is written in Hebrew letters which most German speakers don't know. ![]() The same is true for Lëtzebuergesch and to a lesser degree to Afrikaans. Most German speakers can read written Dutch to a large degree, and will only stumble upon the endless number of false cognates. What other language you think is similar to German?ĭutch, Afrikaans, Lëtzebuergesch, and Yiddish are very similar. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |