English -- Germanic?

By DaWalrus · Oct 4, 2010 · ·
  1. I have recently gotten hooked on this meme, a song by Czech comedian Ivan Mladek. I loved it so much I have read through the original Czech text and more or less understand the individual sentences. Mind you, I also speak Russian. Yeah, Czech is also a Slavic language, but geez, the syntax is practically the same.

    I strongly suspect the same could be said of French and Spanish -- at least, I can tell the adjective goes after the noun. But I've never studied either of those, so I can't say.

    Also, having put some effort into studying German -- 3 semesters plus two trips to the country, plus periodic reading/listening online -- I can often understand sentences written in Dutch. The syntax also looks identical.

    All that said, transition from German to English or vice versa should be quite a bit harder than transition between Russain and Czech or Spanish and French. That's a guess, I don't know for sure, but check this out:

    G: Wie heisst du?
    E: What's your name (lit. How <callest-thyself> thee, heissen is a verb which means 'to be called').

    G: Ich habe es schon gekauft.
    E: I have already bought it.
    (lit: I have IT already BOUGHT, except it is an object of bought not have).

    G: Ich bin in der Stadt geblieben.
    E: I have stayed in the city.
    (lit: I am in the City remained.The verb am is always added when talking about position or motion of the subject).

    G: four cases, actively used.
    E: two cases, almost dead.

Comments

  1. w176
    Well. The beauty of German grammatical cases and articles is that to sound German you should just slur or mumble them and dont bother with the distinction in normal spreech.
  2. jacklondonsghost
    ^Having lived in Germany, I can say that that is definitely not true. It's quite noticeable when someone doesn't know the proper grammatical way to speak. No different than someone speaking poor English.
  3. Cogito
    Your first example, in Spanish, would be:
    ¿Cómo se llama Ustéd? (How do you call yourself?)

    So it is much like German in form.

    I won't go into further detail, but such syntactic and semantic quirks are common in most language to language translations. It makes things interesting for those who translate languages for a living. :)
  4. Joanna the Mad
    The Germans say that the Dutch sound like little children trying to speak German. Ha!
  5. Wreybies
    As Cogito has pointed out, these changes in syntax can sometimes lead one astray when it comes to our expectation of linguistics kinships. Not all changes from one language to the next are as intuitive as they might seem. As in the case of the Franco-Germanic connection, a geographic proximity has affected a change that would be otherwise unexpected. French, which is a Romance language, took a heavy borrow from Germanic syntax and today its syntactic structure is somewhat removed from its sister languages, Spanish and Italian. The same goes for the language of Romania, also a Romance language which is affected by the Slavic and Magyar neighbors.

    Я тoжe говорю пo-русски. Я работал переводчиком в американском воздушном флоте много, много лет тому назад. ;)
  6. DaWalrus
    Let me get it straight: you grew up speaking English, then learned a Slavic language well enough to translate all that cussing on the air?
  7. DaWalrus
    Okay, to go from Russian to Ukranian, which I understand almost perfectly, you need to learn translations of very few words, figure out a few endings (those change between genders and tenses for nouns, pronouns, verbs and adjectives). That's it.

    There is only one syntactic wrinkle that I can think of, and it's not major.

    Pronunciation is kinda important: some of my teachers in schools made a big deal of it, but they pronounced differently. No surprise there, Ukraine is larger than France.

    My guess is, learning Czech for me would be only one step up in difficulty.
  8. Wreybies
    Точно. :cool: I learned Russian at The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, Presidio of Monterey.
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