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In many cases, the loanword has assumed a meaning substantially different from its German forebear. English and German both are West Germanic languages, though their relationship has been obscured by the lexical influence of Old Norse and Norman French (as a consequence of the Norman conquest of England in 1066) on English as well as the High ...
The meanings of these words do not always correspond to Germanic cognates, and occasionally the specific meaning in the list is unique to English. Those Germanic words listed below with a Frankish source mostly came into English through Anglo-Norman, and so despite ultimately deriving from Proto-Germanic, came to English through a Romance ...
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).
German – Wenn Schweine fliegen können! is identical with the English saying "when pigs fly", although the older proverb Wenn Schweine Flügel hätten, wäre alles möglich ("if pigs had wings, everything would be possible") is in more common use, often modified on the second part to something impossible, like "if pigs had wings, even your ...
Bahnhof verstehen (transl. to understand "train station") derives from the German language idiomatic phrase "Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof" – I only/just understand "train station" – meaning to not be able, or perhaps not willing, to understand what is being said. It has the equivalent meaning to the English language idiom "It's all Greek to me ...
A First World War Canadian electoral campaign poster. Hun (or The Hun) is a term that originally refers to the nomadic Huns of the Migration Period.Beginning in World War I it became an often used pejorative seen on war posters by Western Allied powers and the basis for a criminal characterization of the Germans as barbarians with no respect for civilization and humanitarian values having ...
The French idiom acheter (un) chat en poche and the Dutch een kat in de zak kopen and also the German die Katze im Sack kaufen (all: to buy a cat in a bag) refer to an actual scam of this nature, as do many other European equivalents, while the English expression refers to the appearance of the trick. [5]
The German ja has no fewer than 13 English equivalents that vary according to context and usage (yes, yeah, and no when used as an answer; well, all right, so, and now, when used for segmentation; oh, ah, uh, and eh when used an interjection; and do you, will you, and their various inflections when used as a marker for tag questions) for example.