Can someone explain how to identify the origin of words in English? I want to be able to divide the Anglo-Saxon derived words from the latin as I read in the future to better grasp the prose and how it's constructed.
Bonus points for books recs that cover etymology and basic linguistics.
Pic unrelated
Buy an etymological dictionary, they can be super interesting
desu u can just tell by looking most of the time. could learn latin if you really wanted to be able to tell, or examine different specific endings/sounds/phonemes for latin/germanic. at that point though u may just wanna learn latin, which would make u be able to distinguish greek, latin, and anglo roots.
desu
What is your first language?
Native English speaker
learn latin, learn German, and you'll judge with 80% accuracy
Brief words with "rough" sounds are of Germanic origin. Long words that sound "technical" derive from Latin.
It's a general rule, but of course it has exceptions.
fittingly, "rough" is Germanic, while "technical" is Greek (over Latin).
here ya go, pal:
Learn french and then realize any word in french that has and english counterpart is probably not anglosaxon
This.
Also related is a very interesting book by Owen Barfield called history in English words.
learn french.
it becomes very obvious which words are latin based, and which are anglo-saxon.
What about words like mushroom, which comes from the French word mousseron (moss), but mushroom in French is champignon which doesn't look anything like mushroom?
Words about everyday objects such as "arm" "leg" "tree" etc tend to be very old. Like the words you might have a kids song about. If you start studying it you start to recognise some of the patterns and can get a good sense of origin fairly easily.
And many k-n type words are from the vikings.
my first Veeky Forums redpill was realizing latin is used to conceal the vulgar descriptions of anglo-saxon language.
Instead of sheath, we say vagina
I am pretty sure
explain, identify, origin, able, divide, derived, future, prose, constructed, bonus, points, recommendation, basic, linguistics are of latin origin.
related to, although un is from English.
etymology is greek
How do you mean? Sheath sounds less vulgar and more like a nickname for it or slang
Generally the letters J, X, K, and V (I think) indicate Latin or Greek-through-Latin origin
Cunt is actually native.
Etymology is mostly based on prejudice. You have a reasonable expectation for a word to be derived from this etymon or that etymon based on preexisting "facts" like what family the language belongs to or what languages the mainstream historical consensus tells you it had contact with.
This is particularly noticeable with Latin, Romanian, Albanian, and Greek where you get fractal etymological mobius strip between them.
It's pretty easy to tell. They have a completely different aesthetic.
>English words
Cumbersome, embiggen, withhold, overthrow, happiness, unwieldy, wisdom, childhood, friendship, golden, western, homeward, warlike comely, handsome
>Romance words
Condensation, reiterate, rectify, Fantasise, intelligence, abandonment, experience, decompression, mobility, conspiracy.
>Greek words
Philosophy, biology, agorophobia, kinetic, oligarchy, demotic, ecclesiastic, pentagon, monophonic, polygamy, atheistic
Norse words are quite a but trickier as they are so similar to Old English but a few stand out. Apparently it's common for words beginning with Sk- to be of norse origin as this sound developed into Sh- in the native English equivalents.
so sky, skill, skip. Also certain dialects have a lot of norse borrowings so words like bairn are of norse origin. Place names ending with -by or -sey are often norse, e.g. grimsby, anglesey.
Here you go:
Friendly reminder that categorizing languages in terms of how "rough", "fancy", "vulgar", etc. they are is some really stupid shit. Besides, French and German have very similar phoneme inventories; they sound much more alike than many people think.
The normal way is to learn Latin, Greek, French, and/or German so that you don't have to learn a thousand "tricks" and you just actually recognise the real roots/loanwords.
That isn't us, it's been built into the English language for the past millennium. When the Normans invaded they became the aristorcracy and the Anglo Saxon speakers became the lower class.
yep learning 4 languages is very easy and can be done in a bout 5-10 minutes per day :)
That's my point; these perceptions are just based on politics and history, not linguistics. There's nothing actually in the German language that makes it "to the point", or "harsh-sounding" or whatever people say.
i studied french and german for years and i disagree. they didnt just arbitrarily decide french was the language of love
>these perceptions are just based on politics and history
Your point being what exactly?
You probably know this site but:
etymonline.com
By the way if anyone in this thread can speak german and wants to know more about the german language, i can recommend buying a "Kluge" (an ethymological dictionary) got mine today and really love it. (ISBN is 3110223643 )
Really? So there's something inherently about French that makes it romantic? Something about its syntax, semantics, or phonology that's more filled with love than German? Point it out to me then.
My point being that languages themselves don't have these abstract features. If for some reason the French people spoke Indonesian instead of French, that would be considered the language of love, because that perception has nothing to do with the language itself.
learn old french too
See if your library provides a login to the Oxford English Dictionary online. Mine does and it's incredibly interesting, especially for etymology and usage history.
>Brief words with "rough" sounds are of Germanic origin. Long words that sound "technical" derive from Latin.
This can lead you astray though. There are plenty of words this isn't true of.
For instance: Cock. Sounds Germanic right? No! It's from Latin "coccus"
For english, download the OED FORFREE
>Is this available for a "Windows Computer"?
yes, it is freely available for windows
>OED_update_4-0-3.exe
[the link is dead, so search the web for this file]
here for the explanation of the shady business of Oxford publication
users.datarealm.com
>There are huge (640|617Mb) post-installation v4.0.0.3 updates for Macintosh | Windows (the latter a corrupt file, pursuant to OUP changes on 22 January 2013; use the OUP-USA Tech Support mirror instead). These refreshes of the code supply a new OED icon (a “carousel” of 20 books like the image on the CD case, except that one volume is open with a magnifying glass straddling the gutter – an amusing allusion to the generally-reviled two-volume “micrographic” Compact Version), and more importantly solve a few of the problems described below, albeit with a beefed-up SecuROM under Windows. Funny thing about this refresh: the Windows version calls itself “OED_update_4-0-3.exe” (655,401,876 bytes, MD5: 9fe0d6169a19738caf3fa8b99e76a632, downloaded 9 August 2010) but it doesn’t seem to require a previous installation, and it doesn’t seem to care whether you originally bought the full version or the upgrade — in fact, the freely-downloadable Windows update (but not the Mac update) is the complete v4 package (just as earlier SOED updates had been nearly complete save for a boot loader, pronunciation audio files, and some non-essential Help PDFs), and furthermore many correspondents confirm that if you use the SecuROM-free swhx.exe Screenweaver launcher described above, it doesn't ask that any disks be inserted to authenticate, and it functions pretty much like the Macintosh version: no copy protection or verification baggage, and no blacklisted apps either.
Go to a university and use the Oxford English Dictionary. It's a big 20 volume dictionary of English words and their history. This will take you back as far as Proto Indo European, which leaves you only having to do some minor internet research on the proto indo european roots if you need to be that in depth.
Proto indo european, if you don't know, is a single ancient language from which greek, latin, sanskrit, and their derivatives from India to Scandanavia to Italy all developed.
Did you even read the whole post? He said there were exceptions, and that that was only a general rule.
Jesus Christ this board is going to hell.