Hey, random question, is English influenced by Latin and Greek as much as it is by German?

English is considered to be a Germanic language, and a lot of words have the same pronunciation and meaning as is English, some examples are

English - Englisch

House - Haus

Land - Land

is - ist

when - wenn

Ground - Grund

man-mann

hello-hallo

any thoughts?

English is an amalgam of many languages. There's influences from many languages than just German.

Old English (Anglo Saxon) and German got mashed together and out popped English.

So is this going to be another 'When a mommy language and a daddy language love each other' moment?

If it developed directly from German they'd probably speak it in Germany

Old english was a germanic language. With the Norman Invasion came the introduction of a heavy norman french dialect, especially among the ruling/literate class. Some latin crept in directly at this point too since it was the primary administrative language. Modern English is basically a germanic-based language with lots of french word-forms and a more moderate latin influence.

you know what I mean lol

What the other two fine gentleman before me said. It's also got a bit of Latin and Greek in there too (correct me if I'm wrong about the Greek part), but not enough for it to have the credit that German and Anglo Saxon languages get. Centuries ago though in England, the Church would have told you differently.

I always thought it was a mix of Latin and Greek.

no. its roots come from latin, just like german and many other languages that come from europe. like with a great deal of spanish words being very similar.

This link might be helpful: http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/changlang/across/languagetimeline.html

If you read Tolkien you may notice he prefers words of Anglo Saxon (Germanic) origin.

When people are trying to sound smart they tend to use more words of Latin and French origin.

Well, Spanish came from Italian, which came from Latin. Greek has a big influence in many Slavic languages, and Germanic languages have a root of their own, that's why it's considered to be a root on it's own. Although English has big influence from Latin and Greek, It seems to have just as much of a German base, if not more, considering it's categorized under western-Germanic.

I don't think Spanish came from Italian. Romance languages are from regional types of "vulgar Latin", versions of Latin spoken in the provinces of the Empire.

Most of the Greek words you find in English are of the "technical" variety, things like anthropomorphic or barometer, and usually crept in from scholarly or medical fields. There used to be grammatical rules about coining greek or latin derived words. If you had a greek root you had to use greek prefixes and suffixes, like the examples I gave. Nowadays you see greek roots with latin prefixes and all kinds of crazy shiznit. http://stancarey.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/zazzle-white-t-shirt-polyamory-is-wrong.jpg...wtf

I read a few places that it came from Castillian Italian Dialects. My father told me that it did, and Spanish is his first language.

The roots of English and German do definitely not come from Latin. There's some Latin influences (mostly just loanwords), but the Germanic languages are a group all on their own. http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Europese_talen#mediaviewer/Bestand:IndoEuropeanTree.svg

From what little I know about languages, Italian and Spanish both evolved from very local forms of Latin, not Italian being the root language.

English came from an ancestral language that originated in Germany and Denmark, but its Anglo-Saxon roots were influenced heavily by Latin, Celtic, Norman French, and Norse. It's not from modern standard German, rather a Germanic ancestral dialect, that English evolved from.

Also viking, Indian, even some Japanese and a whole lot of other languages. Pratchett said that English was the kind of language that waits for other languges to pass by in a dark alley and rob them of their vocabulary.

Viking is Nordic based languages, which is technically considered Germanic in some aspects

Most of English's sentence structure is actually taken from Old Norse (since England was largely run by scandinavians during the viking age), and to this day our grammar is closer to swedish/danish than it is to german. Our vocabulary, on the other hand, is all over the place; tons of French and Latin, since the English nobility was french-speaking Normans for a long time, some greek due to its position as a scholarly language and tons more random crap. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Origins_of_English_PieChart_2D.svg

The funny thing is that England was orginally inhabited entirely by Celtic people, but words with Celtic roots in English are extremely uncommon (I think "weird" has celtic roots, but thats the only one I can think of).

Yeah, English is a pretty ugly language lol

English is an ultimate hybrid.

Old English is essentially German, because the Anglo-Saxons were a Germanic tribe.

Then we throw in French (William the Conqueror), Scandinavian (vikings), a bit of Latin and Greek (because Europe), and some other random stuff, and you get English.

Umm... what? Germans, including their language, were around long before Rome, and it never conquered them. In fact, they partially conquered it, towards the end. My understanding--supported by Germanic being a type of language group of its own rather than in with Latin-based--is that German developed independent of the influence of other language categories.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L48J65aC7A0

It's at least much more accurate than some of the outright falsehoods in this thread.

And as for English stealing from other languages: In reality, only a small number of singular nouns and verbs are taken from other languages during the colonial era. Most of the wider alterations it underwent were during the viking and Norman settlements, which were less a case of stealing and more a case of having it kind of shoved onto you.

Not quite correct. The Angles and the Saxons were actually two different cultural groups with their own languages which were Germanic in origin to begin with. Eventually their two dialects evolved into a common language in the British Isles, influenced by the Celtics who also lived there, as well as some Viking influences which again is a type of Germanic language. Then along came the Normans, which spoke a language derived from the Vikings and the Latin speaking populations that lived in France before the Viking conquests, along with some local Celtic dialects. The two groups trying to communicate with each other, the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans, would eventually lead to the development of English.


The Germanic languages come from the north of Europe, which the Romans never fully conquered, if at all. So Latin has had very little influence on it, other than through the Christian church. It's pretty much an independent language branch.