Re:Learn to read Middle English
by dahart on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @02:21PM
(#23469197)
I really enjoy finding how some of these cognates are connected, it opens up meanings and interpretations of words in English that I didn’t realize were there. It does make learning German a little frustrating though. I get this constant expectation that it should be easier because the languages are so close together, but the closeness makes a lot of things ironically harder. It seemed easier to grasp the word order in Japanese, for example, than German.
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I get a perhaps similar kick out of reading proto-indo-european word lists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary
English "heart" is in French, "coeur", and in Greek, "kardia". Unrelated? No! In Proto-Indo-European we think it was "k̂erd"! Soften the leading k, stop voicing the final d, jiggle the vowel, and you get "heart". Lose the final d and you get "coeur". Jiggle the vowel, add a trailing vowel for streamlining, and you get "kardia".
Better yet, soften the leading k and you get "hṛd", the Sanskrit word. Add a trailing vowel, and you get "hŕday", the Hindi word in use today (or so wiktionary tells me).
This is pretty awesome, thanks for the link! Not having studied many languages, I was recently surprised to find out how many English cognates there are in languages like Persian... I had no idea it came from proto-indo-european.