Dante's Peek
etymonline.com
etymonline.com
It's a tool I make heavy use of --- the Mastodon toots hashtagged #OccasionalEtymology are only a very small fraction of these (https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/occasionaletymology https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/tagged/occasionaletymolo...)
And it's mostly a labour of love by Douglas Harper. Yes, there are some ads, but the Paypal, Patreon, and Swag links do help out. And if you can contribute to something on the Internet that Does Not Completely Suck, it would be a Good Thing.
(The error was for "anime", which etymonline has being derived from French, but which Japanese sources widely agree is just an abbreviation of "animation".)
"William Jones's astonishing paragraph" must be the following:
The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jones_(philologist)#Sc...
Wikipedia says its "often cited as the beginning of comparative linguistics and Indo-European studies".
I love etymology and usually all the higher-language words come just from latin and are the same in all of them.
English might not sound frenchy, but it has a lot of words coming from it, (-ation, -tion, -ssion, -able, -isme, -if/-ive
Unlike all other examples, these languages are not that close; it would have been Yiddish and German, or Ladino and Italian: both Yiddish and Ladino are basically German and Italian, respectively, only written down with Hebrew characters, with some words from it.
A better example would be Modern Hebrew and Torah Hebrew.
Yiddish is basically German in the same way that Dutch is basically German: it's often possible to directly translate a word with some simple letter substitutions, but the choice of different letters in each language's orthography reflects an underlying difference in pronunciation.
E.g. אוי וויי is often transliterated as "oy vey" while the corresponding Standard German pronunciation would be "au weh". If you ignore the usual Hebrew letter values and pretend that it's actually an unorthodox orthography for Standard German (א glottal stop, וי au, וו w, יי eh), I've found written Yiddish quite easy to get used to as a native German speaker, but understanding it spoken aloud is much more difficult.
What an odd assertion. There's a massive difference between "proper English" and how it's commonly spoken. Reading something like Trainspotting makes that evidently clear if you happen not to chat with ordinary people regularly.
"Carbon" becomes "Kohlenstoff", and "metabolism" becomes "Stoffwechsel" in German.
These might be literally translated back as "Coal-stuff" and "stuff-change" but that is an unfamiliar way to say it in English because it remains in the lower register, not derived academically from old Latin and Greek.
I think you're missing the point entirely. Of course no-one says those. Did you miss the "that is an unfamiliar way to say it in English" part? We do say "coal" and "stuff", but we just switch up when talking about carbon, the stuff of coal.
The point is not that there are different dialects (although there are to an extent, but that's an entirely sperate discussion) It's that English vocabulary can be sorted into these two registers, a common and an academic one, and that this distinction is largely absent in several other European languages.
This may be "an altogether different phenomena" to what the author is describing, though that should not stop you buying it. Equivalently, it should not impede your purchase of the concept that English does have some form of "high/low language pairs".
> The point is not that there are different dialects (although there are to an extent, but that's an entirely sperate discussion) It's that English vocabulary can be sorted into these two registers, a common and an academic one, and that this distinction is largely absent in several other European languages.
I don't understand the distinction you're describing in English. You give an example of "coal" and "stuff" and "carbon", but I don't understand why you're arguing that "carbon" belongs to a higher/academic register. Your examples seem to support the inverse of your argument, which is that German (and presumably other languages) has a distinction between a higher and lower register (one could choose between "Carbon" or "Coal-stuff") and English doesn't have this distinction (you must use "carbon" when talking about carbon and "coal" when talking about coal).
> This may be "an altogether different phenomena" to what the author is describing, though that should not stop you buying it. Equivalently, it should not impede your purchase of the concept that English does have some form of "high/low language pairs".
I don't disbelieve the author's premise, but that's not your premise. English doesn't have a single "high dialect" or a single "low dialect", but again, I don't think that's what TFA is talking about with respect to other European languages. Rather, I'm guessing the author is arguing that because Latin was the written language for continental Europe, and because the scribal class was markedly different than the illiterate masses, there was a considerable divergence between formal/written Latin and vulgar Latin which was persisted as vulgar Latin became the Romance languages--indeed, this division has deep historical roots into Latin itself (scribal/educated Latin was different than spoken Latin) and perhaps even earlier. On the other hand, in England, that educated Latin tradition never took root--the English vernacular quickly became the language of literacy hundreds of years before written French, Spanish, Italian etc came into existence (continental scribes were clinging to written Latin). Again, I'm not sure if that's what the author is driving at, but it seems that way to me.
Not the OP, but - in German and other similar languages, there is no equivalent to "carbon" as a term with a separate etymology. The word for carbon is "coalstuff" - it is the thing which coal is made out of. Similarly, oxygen is "acidstuff" - because it was originally believed to be the cause of chemical acidity.
If English had developed as other Germanic languages did, it would also use these kinds of terms for the elements, as well as in other parts of science, academia, and formal speech. Compound terms, which form a large part of common language (e.g. motor-way, hand-bag, table-cloth) would also be used in technical, political, and legal language.
Instead, the "high" part of English is derived from Latin and Greek. The English call it science, rather than "nature-wit-making", because of the use of Latin among early academics meant they already had the word "scientia" instead. Nobody felt the need to apply Germanic-style compounds in a realm where all the vocabulary already existed.
This results in two registers in modern English - that for words which are used in common speech, which are distinctly Germanic-sounding, and use lots of compounds; and that for words which come from academic, scientific, or political speech, which are Latin- and Greek-sounding, and largely lack compounds.
English speakers can mostly automatically use these registers to affect their communication: you can easily make something sound pompous with a lot of high-register Latin-based terminology, or alternatively make it sound plain and common with low-register Germanic compounds.
> It's that English vocabulary can be sorted into these two registers, a common and an academic one, and that this distinction is largely absent in several other European languages.
But the example you give is of English using the same word for common and academic context.
You're missing the point of "but the example you give of a low register" - English does not use the lower register in that context. It's noticeable by contrast with other languages where that higher register is largely absent, which do use the standard register throughout.
This guy gets it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24981922 , for what it's worth. If you don't think if it's a significant point, then stop reading.
> If you don't think if it's a significant point, then stop reading.
My point is that I either don't understand the point, or the point is wrong. Not that I think it is an insignificant point. And that isn't a very productive way to share messages on a message board.
If English "doesn't use the low register in this context", then that implies that there _are_ different registers for different contexts, right?
In English, that is. In Dutch or German or Swedish, there are not.
> And "coal" and "carbon" are not interchangeable.
Um? No one said that they were, and that's not the point in any form. We're talking about formation of (related) words. IDK if this conversation is worthwhile, to be honest. You seem to be actively evading the point.
e.g. "There are two ways for offense to score in American football. One is a touchdown. Translating a touchdown into soccer is equivalent of saying the ball is kicked past the goal line, but when you literally reconvert that back to American football, you can't score by kicking the ball across the goal line.". That does not prove that there are two ways to score in football. That proves that there is at least one way to score in football.
> IDK if this conversation is worthwhile, to be honest. You seem to be actively evading the point.
Bizarre coming from someone who just said "stop reading if you don't like it".
In general, English in England does not display the variety of dialect found in mainland Europe or elsewhere in the world. Despite a variety of accent, it is overwhelmingly homogeneous in grammar and vocabulary (outside of slang).
There is no equivalent for English to the difference between Hoch- and Plattdeutsch, or between Tuscan Italian and its other variants - in both of these cases, the overwhelming part of the population learns both their local low dialect and the high dialect as distinct "languages".
Things like good morning is very similar in german, dutch and Scandinavian languages.