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Among the primary innovations in Proto-Germanic are the preterite present verbs, a special set of verbs whose present tense looks like the past tense of other verbs and which is the origin of most modal verbs in English; a past-tense ending; (in the so-called "weak verbs", marked with -ed in English) that appears variously as /d/ or /t/, often ...
The shift results in characteristic differences between modern standard German and other Germanic languages, such as: [9] German Wasser vs. English water, Dutch water, Swedish vatten (German /s/ vs. other Germanic /t/) German Zunge vs. English tongue, Dutch tong, Swedish tunga (German /ts/ vs. other Germanic /t/)
Of modern German varieties, Low German is the one that most resembles modern English. The district of Angeln (or Anglia), from which the name English derives, is in the extreme northern part of Germany between the Danish border and the Baltic coast.
The High German languages (German: hochdeutsche Mundarten, i.e. High German dialects), or simply High German (Hochdeutsch [ˈhoːxˌdɔɪ̯t͡ʃ] ⓘ) – not to be confused with Standard High German which is commonly also called "High German" – comprise the varieties of German spoken south of the Benrath and Uerdingen isoglosses in central and southern Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein ...
However, he found considerable discrepancy between the most common and least common words. The top thousand words were 83% of English origin, while the least common were only 25% of English origin. [6] However, due to the variability of vocabulary of individuals, dialects, and time periods, exact percentages cannot be taken at face value. [3]
The main difference between Old High German and the West Germanic dialects from which it developed is that the former underwent the Second Sound Shift. The result of the sound change has been that the consonantal system of German is different from all other West Germanic languages, including English and Low German.
English /ɹ/ can be pronounced the same as in English, i.e. , or as the corresponding native German /r/ e.g. Rock [ʁɔk] or [rɔk]. German and Austrian speakers tend to be variably rhotic when using English loanwords. [citation needed] English /w/ is often replaced with German /v/ e.g. Whisk(e)y [ˈvɪskiː].
These forms fall somewhere in between these two languages. As in German, the adjectives in Low German may make a distinction between singular and plural to agree with the nouns that they modify, [91] as well as between the three genders, between the nominative and oblique cases and between indefinite (weak) and definite (strong) forms. [92]