Re:Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?
by henderson101 on Wednesday February 12, 2014 @10:44AM
(#7224872)
Frisian is even closer to English than Dutch. I always liked the rhyme : "bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Fries", which in Frisian is "Brea, bûter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk". There's a hilarious video on Youtube where the comedian Eddie Izzard attempts to talk to a Frisian Farmer in Old English and gets surprisingly far. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34
Re:Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?
by epsylon on Tuesday February 11, 2014 @04:50AM
(#7216750)
I'm currently learning Norwegian (for fun!) and I didn't expect to see so many lexical similarities between English and Norwegian. As a French (who is already fluent in English), this helps me a lot to memorize the meaning of words: I just have to squint long enough at it until I can recognize the Germanic root and its English descendant :-)
"the" doesn't have a direct equivalent in modern Norwegian - we add the article as a suffix instead (a car = en bil; the car = bilen), but for the rest:
drei -> three / tre Donner -> thunder / torden Ding -> thing / ting daher -> therefore / derfor
du -> thou / du
Older Danish is even more similar to German, though I don't remember it off hand. At school, when I wanted to get my German grade up, I got a copy of Faust, which was way above my German level, and then I got hold of an old Danish translation (1920's or so). The old Danish translation was much closer to the German, so it was reasonably easy to figure out how they corresponded, yet still close enough to modern Danish (and by extension Norwegian) that I could read it fairly quickly when I couldn't figure out the German.
And if you really want to see close relationship between German and English, read some Dutch. Dutch to me reads like German and English lightly mixed, with some other random letters thrown in.