1.5 German words English took — and German words from English — Epoché
What you will be able to do Name a good number of the German words English has taken, and use the fact that you already pronounce several of them almost correctly. Recognise the much larger flow in the other direction, and predict the gender and the spelling a German text will give an English word it has borrowed. Conjugate a borrowed English verb in German, which is simpler than conjugating a German one. Spot a word that looks English, is written in Latin letters, and does not mean what you would assume — beginning with the mobile telephone, which German calls something no English speaker has ever called it. Prerequisites : 1.4 — you have the endings of the Latin layer, and you need the idea behind them here: that a borrowed word carries a date, and that the shape it takes tells you when it arrived and through which door. The last three lessons were about inheritance. This one is about trade, and the trade has been unequal in both directions at different times. English took a few hundred German words, almost all of them in two narrow bands — the vocabulary of thought and the vocabulary of the table — and it took them consciously, often keeping them at arm's length as foreign words that retain a foreign flavour. German has taken several thousand English words, mostly since 1945, and it has taken them the way a language takes words it needs: absorbed, given a gender, fitted with German endings, and conjugated like anything else. For you, the two directions are worth different amounts. The German words in English are a short and charming list that gives you a foothold and a few free pronunciations. The English words in German are a large and growing part of the working vocabulary of anybody under fifty, and knowing how German handles them saves you real effort. The third group, the words that look English and are not, is where you will actually make mistakes, and it gets a section of its own. The rule A loan keeps the spelling of the language it came from and takes the grammar of the language it went to. What happens Shown on German into English: the capital letter is dropped, the meaning usually narrows Kindergarten — kindergarten ; Angst — angst English into German: the spelling is kept, a capital and a gender are added computer — der Computer ; team — das Team English verbs into German: add the infinitive ending and conjugate weak download — downloaden ; chat — chatten Some German words are built out of English parts and mean something English does not das Handy — a mobile telephone The last line is the one to remember, and it is the reason this lesson comes immediately before the lesson on false friends. A false friend of the ordinary kind is an accident of history: two words drifted apart over a thousand years. A word like the German one for a mobile telephone is not an accident at all. It was assembled in German, out of English material, in living memory, by people who were not trying to reproduce English usage. English has no claim on it, and no English speaker can guess it. German words English took The list falls into two unequal halves, and the split is revealing. One half is abstract: the vocabulary English borrowed because German philosophy, psychology, music criticism and historiography had named something English had not. The other half is concrete and mostly edible, and it came with immigrants rather than with books. Field Words English uses thought and feeling angst · zeitgeist · weltanschauung · schadenfreude · gestalt · wanderlust · doppelganger · poltergeist scholarship and art leitmotif · bildungsroman · festschrift · umlaut · ablaut · realpolitik · ersatz · hinterland childhood and school kindergarten · wunderkind the table delicatessen · pretzel · pumpernickel · sauerkraut · bratwurst · schnitzel · strudel · muesli · lager animals and objects dachshund · poodle · hamster · rucksack · glockenspiel · zeppelin war and the road blitz · flak · autobahn · verboten Two things are worth noticing about that table. The first is that you can already pronounce a fair number of these words in a way a German speaker would accept, because English never quite naturalised them and has kept something of the original sound. The second is that the meaning has often narrowed on the way across. In German, the word behind English angst is the everyday word for fear of any kind — a child afraid of a dog uses it — whereas English has reserved it for a particular existential unease. In German, the word behind blitz means lightning, and nothing about bombing. In German, the word behind gestalt means shape or form and is entirely ordinary. That narrowing is a trap in the direction that matters. You will see a familiar word in a German text, read it with the specialised English sense, and miss the point of an ordinary sentence. The corpus example below is the clearest case there is: it uses the word behind English angst in the plainest possible way. German English Keine Angst! [1] Don't be afraid! Hast du einen Rucksack? [2] Do you have a backpack? English words German took This is the larger flow by an order of magnitude, and it is concentrated in the areas you would expect: computing, business, sport, popular music, advertising and the language of the young. The words arrive with their English spelling intact, which is why a German newspaper page can look half-familiar, and they are then fitted into German grammar. Field Words, with the article computing der Computer · das Internet · der Chip · das Update · der Server · die Software work der Job · das Team · das Meeting · der Manager · das Marketing · der Trend leisure die Party · der Star · das Ticket · die Show · das Hobby · der Song sport das Training · der Trainer · das Match · der Sport · das Tackling the everyday das Baby · das T-Shirt · der Pullover · das Shopping · das Design adjectives cool · fit · fair · clever · happy · easy The genders in that table are not random, and three rules of thumb cover most of what you will meet. A borrowe