1.4 Latin and Greek in German — the academic layer — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read German words of Latin and Greek origin — Universität , Philosophie , Demokratie — without hesitating, because each is the English word with a German ending on it. Convert an English ending into its German counterpart in both directions: -tion , -ity , -ism , -y , -ics , -ure , -ment . Read the gender of a noun off its ending, which for this layer of the vocabulary is almost always reliable — the one part of German gender you do not have to memorise. Say where German spelling of these words differs from English — Greek ph and th , Latin c — and where the stress falls. Prerequisites : 1.3 — you have the six sound correspondences, and you need them here for the opposite reason: this is the layer of the vocabulary they do not touch, and knowing where they stop is part of knowing them. Everything in the last three lessons concerned the inherited half of your vocabulary. This lesson is about the other half, and the good news arrives immediately: because these words entered German and English at about the same late date, from the same sources, for the same purposes, they are shared almost unchanged. There is no sound change to undo. What there is instead is a small set of endings, and the endings are so regular that they are worth an afternoon of your time and then never trouble you again. The layer matters out of proportion to its size. It is not the vocabulary of a conversation in a shop, and if your goal were only to order a coffee you could skip it. But it is nearly the whole vocabulary of a lecture, an essay, a newspaper leader, a legal document and a scientific paper — which is to say it is the vocabulary of everything this course exists to get you to. An English speaker who learns these endings in one lesson can read the abstract of a German academic article in the first month of study, long before being able to hold an ordinary conversation. That inversion of the usual order is unusual and worth exploiting. The rule Change the ending, keep the rest. And let the ending tell you the gender. English ending — German ending Gender · example -tion — -tion feminine · die Nation -ity — -ität feminine · die Universität -ism — -ismus masculine · der Kapitalismus -y (Greek) — -ie feminine · die Philosophie -ics , -ic — -ik feminine · die Physik -ure — -ur feminine · die Kultur -ment — -ment neuter · das Argument -um — -um neuter · das Museum -ist , -or — -ist , -or masculine · der Journalist , der Motor -ance , -ence — -anz , -enz feminine · die Distanz , die Existenz Read the right-hand column again and notice what it is doing, because this is the single most useful thing in the lesson. German nouns have three genders and the gender is mostly unpredictable; the grammar volume will give you twelve rules of thumb that get you to about seventy per cent. In this layer of the vocabulary, the ending gives you the gender at a rate close to a hundred per cent. Every noun in -tion is feminine. Every noun in -ismus is masculine. Nouns in -ment are neuter, with der Moment (a moment in time) the one exception you will meet early; the end of this lesson comes back to it. Beyond that there are only a handful of exceptions. So the academic layer is not merely easy to read. It is the one part of the German noun where the hardest thing about German nouns has been done for you. The endings, with enough examples to convince you Each block below is the same ending applied to words you already know in English. Read the German and translate nothing. Ending · gender Words -tion · feminine Nation · Information · Situation · Revolution · Tradition · Funktion · Produktion · Konstruktion -ität · feminine Universität · Qualität · Realität · Aktivität · Identität · Nationalität · Elektrizität -ismus · masculine Kapitalismus · Sozialismus · Idealismus · Organismus · Mechanismus · Journalismus -ie · feminine Philosophie · Biologie · Psychologie · Theorie · Demokratie · Energie · Industrie · Geographie -ik · feminine Politik · Physik · Musik · Mathematik · Kritik · Technik · Logik · Fabrik -ur · feminine Kultur · Natur · Literatur · Struktur · Figur · Temperatur -ment · neuter Argument · Dokument · Experiment · Element · Instrument · Parlament -um · neuter Museum · Zentrum · Gymnasium · Datum · Album · Stadium -ist · masculine Journalist · Polizist · Artist · Optimist · Idealist · Terrorist -or · masculine Motor · Professor · Autor · Doktor · Faktor · Direktor -anz · -enz · feminine Distanz · Substanz · Toleranz · Existenz · Konferenz · Intelligenz no ending · varies Problem · System · Thema · Theater · Student · Moment · Prinzip That is eighty words, and it took no memorising, only a look. Add the obvious neighbours of each — every field of study in -ie and -ik , every political creed in -ismus , every abstract quality in -ität — and the figure passes a hundred and twenty without effort. The last row is the group to watch, because those words take no ending at all and so give you no gender clue; they have to be learned individually, and two of them are traps. Where German keeps the original spelling The one thing that will slow you down on the page is not the ending but the letters in the middle. Here the two languages have made different choices: German keeps some Greek spellings and simplifies others, and it rewrites the Latin c that English keeps. Greek ph usually stays ph : Philosophie , Physik , Phase , Atmosphäre — though a few common words have gone over to f : Foto , Fotograf , Telefon . Greek th stays th — and is pronounced as a plain t , since German has no other value for it: Theater , Theorie , Thema , Mathematik . Latin c , on the other hand, does not survive as a letter, because German has no use for a letter with two values: before a , o , u it is rewritten k , and before e and i it is rewritten z . So culture becomes Kultur , class becomes Klasse , centre becomes Zentrum and circle becomes Zirkel . The stress is the other thing to get right, and it moves. In the inherited vocabu