Secrets of the Words You Know
Blog 9: English as a Germanic Language 6: English and German
First, the answer to the question at the end of the last blog: the English equivalent of ‘Kirkegaard’ is ‘Churchyard’.
(‘Yard’ in the sense of an enclosed area has a different origin from ‘yard’ as a measure of length, as we will see in a later blog, but similarly illustrates the evolution of Proto-Germanic *g to English ‘y’.)
We will now turn our attention to German, which like English descends from ‘West Germanic’, one of the main sub-groups of Proto-Germanic itself.
Modern German is largely based on the dialects of Southern Germany (’High German’, as opposed to the ‘Low German’ of the North). Following migration to Britain, there was very little direct contact between the speakers of Anglo-Saxon or the various stages of English and what emerged as standard German. The two languages have thus developed independently for some 1,500 years.
Looking at how far the sounds of English and German have diverged in that timescale is therefore a good introduction to the much greater depth of time to Proto-Indo-European, the common ancestor of the Germanic group and of other Indo-European languages.
In this brief survey, we will focus on how the initial consonants inherited by Anglo Saxon and Old High German from their common Germanic ancestor have evolved over this period.
I: Sonorant Consonants
For the sonorants, described in Technical Note 1 (in this case ‘m’, ‘n’, ‘l’, ‘r’, ‘w’ and ‘y’), this is a story of little difference between English and German, showing that most of these sounds have been well-conserved over the period since the two languages split. I will just give illustrative but representative examples in each case.
M and N
Thus for the nasal sounds, we have identical initial matches:
mouse/Maus mouth/Mund nail/Nagel
(Worth noting, by the way, that ‘Nagel’ conserves the Germanic ‘g’ that has shifted in English to the ‘i’ of ‘nail’ as a result of fronting)
L and R
For the ‘liquid’ sounds, we have the same outcome:
long/lang rain/Regen
(again, German ‘g’ and English ‘i’ for the original second consonant of rain/Regen)
W and Y
For the semivowels it is a bit more complicated.
For ‘w’ the spelling is identical, so
weather/Wetter way/Weg
but German pronounces ‘w’ as ‘v’.
This evolution in German is, as we shall see, a common one: indeed English and Dutch are among the very few Indo-European languages to have conserved what was probably the original sound of *w.
(‘Weg’ shows the correspondence of German final written ‘g’ to English final ‘y’, which is the outcome we can expect from the fronting of Germanic ‘g’ in English. All German final consonants are in fact sounded as voiceless due to more recent sound changes.)
For the Proto-Germanic *y German keeps the sound, as does English, but spells it with the letter ‘j’:
year/Jahr young/jung yeah/ja
(English ‘yes’ goes back to ‘yeah-so’)
While the initial consonant of these three doublets all go back to a Germanic *y, we saw in Blog 8 that because of fronting there are many other inherited words in English beginning with written ‘y’ that go back to a Germanic *g. You cannot therefore assume that English inherited words beginning with ‘y’ will have German doublets also beginning with that sound.
So our first conclusion is that sonorant consonants seem to be relatively stable.
II: The Sibilant S
S shows rather more variability between the two languages in initial position:
- Before vowels, German keeps the spelling ‘s’, but voices *s to a ‘z’-sound, so salt/Salz, and say/sagen with the initial letter in German sounding as an English ‘z’;
- Before all consonants – except in obvious borrowings like ‘Skulptur’, where the initial ‘s’ is pronounced as in English – German changes pronunciation to ‘sh’. This is still spelt ‘s’ before ‘p’ and ‘t’, but ‘sch’ before sonorants and (as in the case of ‘schadenfreude’) Proto-Germanic ‘k’. As we saw in blog 6, English changes pronunciation (and spelling) before an original ‘sk’ to ‘sh’, but it keeps ‘s’ unchanged before other consonants. So we have, for example:
to smart (as in ‘feel pain’)/Schmerz (pain) snow/Schnee to starve/sterben (to die)
The varied outcomes of *s in German are good examples of the importance of phonetic context (Technical Note 2)
III: The Stops and Fricatives (excluding S)
It’s helpful to discuss the remaining Proto-Germanic consonants by point of articulation and main characteristic as follows:
Articulation Labial Dental Velar
Voiceless P t k
Voiced b d g
Fricative f th h
In initial position English has conserved all nine of these consonants much as they were over 1500 years ago, except for the many cases where an inherited ‘k’ or ‘g’ has been changed to ‘ch’ or ‘y’ by fronting.
As we shall now see, the evolution of German has, in the case of one of the labial stops and all three of the dental consonants, been rather different.
However, we will start with the velars.
K
Here we will consider words beginning with a hard ‘k’ sound in both languages, including English words spelt with an initial ‘c’. There are many straight matches, such as:
cold/kalt clear/klar knee/Knie
(In Modern English, the initial ‘k’ of ‘knee’ and similar words like ‘knight’ is of course lost in speech – one of many examples where English spelling is a useful guide to a word’s history)
But, as we might expect, there are also cases where English has ‘fronted’ an inherited *k, as we already noted with….
church/Kirk
……and can see in words like cheese/Käse chin/Kinn
G
From our discussion of fronting, you will not be surprised to find two different types of matching under G also. In the first, where English has not fronted inherited *g (or, as in ‘give’, has adopted an Old Norse word), both languages show ‘g’:
to give/geben to go/gehen good/gut
In the second, where fronting has taken place in English, German ‘g’ normally matches an English ‘y’:
yellow/gelb yester(day)/gestern
However, occasionally the expected ‘y’ does not exist in English at all. Examples include:
like (meaning ‘similar to’)/gleich luck/Glück
In both these words, the core element begins in fact with ‘l’ rather than ‘g’. The German ‘g’ is a cut-down version of the very common German particle ‘ge-’, of which the English equivalent would have been fronted to an easily overlooked ‘y’ or ‘i’. This is occasionally visible in old texts: for example the first known musical ‘round’ in English, ‘Sumer is icumen in’, dating back to the 13th century, or the carol ‘Adam lay y-bounden’. In standard modern English, this ‘i‘ or ‘y’ has almost completely vanished, but it does underlie the first letters of ‘enough’ (German ‘genug’), ‘alike’ and ‘among’.
H
Here we are back to identical sounds, as in:
hand/Hand heart/Herz to help/hilfen
This shows that Proto-Germanic *h was not fronted in either language.
Next, the labials:
P
Here, we see a regular correspondence but not a perfect match, since the German doublets in this case all show an affricate ‘pf’ in initial position while English conserves the voiceless stop ‘p’:
penny/Pfennig pipe/Pfeife (a musical pipe or whistle) to plough/pflügen
German does have many words beginning with a simple ‘p’, but they are almost all more recent borrowings, from the obvious ‘Porträt’ (portrait) to the less obvious ‘passen’ (to pass), both being words borrowed from French in both English and German.
B
It is easy to find doublets beginning with ‘b’ in both languages, for example:
bed/Bett to bite/beissen brown/braun
F
There are many obvious matches. Examples include:
to fall/fallen feather/Feder fire/Feuer
So far, so simple. But there are similar matches between English ‘f’ and German written ‘v’ (also pronounced ‘f’) So:
father/Vater folk/volk four/vier
The reason for this is that certain German dialects voiced initial ‘f’ to ’v’, but that standard German has reversed this. A limited number of inherited words, such as the three above, retain the now obsolete initial ‘v’, but are pronounced as ‘f’.
There is therefore a full match in sounds in initial position between English ‘f’ and German ‘f’, however the latter is spelt.
Finally, the dentals:
T
As with initial P, the German match is different but consistent, as you can see from:
ten/zehn tooth/Zahn to tow/ziehen (to pull or drag)
Each language has derived a noun from the latter verb for something doing the pulling: in English ‘tug’ and in German ‘Zug’, the word for a train, among other things. (We mentioned the link between ‘tow’ and ‘tug’ in Blog 8.)
In German, ‘z’ is pronounced as the affricate ‘ts’, a clear parallel to the affricate ‘pf’ we noted under P.
D
Unlike B, English words beginning with ‘d’ do not match their German equivalents. Consider, for example:
day/Tag (German ‘g’, English ‘y’ again at word end) dead/tot deep/tief
Here we see a regular correspondence of an English voiced ‘d’ to a German voiceless ‘t’.
TH
This combination of letters includes English voiceless and voiced ‘th’. Again, we have a regular alternation, this time between English ‘th’ and German voiced stop ‘d’, as in:
thank/Dank thick/dick thirst/Durst
(all with English unvoiced ‘th’)
the/der (die, das) then/dann
(both with English voiced ‘th’)
To summarise, German has shifted the inherited voiceless labial and dental stops *p and *t to the affricates ‘pf’ (penny/Pfennig) and ‘ts’, spelt ‘z’ (ten/zehn), respectively. It has also shifted the other two dental stops: *d to ‘t’ (day/Tag) and *th to ‘d (thank/Dank).
This set of changes is central to what is known as the ‘Old High German Sound Shift’, which took place over the period from 350-750 AD. The changes developed first in the far South of the German-speaking area, and spread North, to varying limits. Some innovations, which included initial *k developing into an affricate in parallel to the other voiceless stops, did not gain enough acceptance to secure a place in the standard language, and remained limited to a few Southern dialects. Some others spread beyond High German, and the evolution of *th to ‘d’ has been widely followed, for example in Dutch and its sister-languages.
The case of the dentals is particularly interesting as a ‘chain shift’, in which all three dental stops shifted articulation in sequence.
For three consonants, such a shift requires a fourth space into which the first mover can shift. In the present case the voiceless stop *t would have been the first mover, developing into the affricate ‘ts’, a sound combination not previously used. This then made it possible for the voiced *d to lose its voicing and so occupy the now vacant ‘t’ position, after which the fricative *th was similarly able to lose its fricative quality and so occupy the vacant ‘d’ position.
We will see later a set of quite similar but more thoroughgoing developments that marks out Proto-Germanic from almost every other Indo-European language group.
So we can see that stop consonants, even in initial position, are more prone than sonorant consonants to shifts, which may be systemic in nature (ie apply to different sounds with some characteristic in common).
Nevertheless, after over 1,500 years of separation, the relationships of these consonants in English and German remain clear.
Non-Initial Consonants
There is rather greater variability in non-initial stop consonants.
- We can see from cases like ‘pipe’:‘Pfeife’ (initial English ‘p’ = German ‘pf’ but medial English ‘p’ = German ‘f’), ‘seven’:’sieben’ (medial German ‘b’ =English ‘v’, rather than the ‘expected’ ‘b’ that we saw in initial position) or ‘water’: ‘Wasser’ (medial English ‘t’ = German ‘ss’ rather than the ‘ts’ we saw in initial position) that the evolution of such consonants can differ from those observed in initial position.
The Case of the Missing Nasal
Before we leave this very brief comparison of English and German, it is worth pausing on a mis-match that we noted in Technical Note 1. We saw there that the words ‘teeth’ and ‘dental’ each had a similar field of meaning and two dental consonants. This would suggest that they might form a doublet. However there was no ’n’ sound in ‘teeth’ to match the ‘n’ in ‘dental’. The word list above shows that the German word for ‘tooth’ has also conserved *n (‘Zahn’), though losing the second dental consonant. You can also see that a very similar situation exists as between ‘mouth’, with no ‘n’, and its doublet ‘Mund’, mentioned above.
Here are four other examples of English losing a medial nasal which is maintained in German (the first two words in the list go back ultimately to an *m rather than an *n):
- ‘five’: ‘funf’
- ‘soft’: ‘sanft’
- ‘us’: ‘uns’
- ‘goose’: ‘Gans’ (Clue: it’s worth also thinking why English ‘gander’ might have conserved *n, as mentioned in Blog 3)
This change is, like fronting, another defining difference between English and most other Germanic languages.
Can you deduce a ‘sound rule’ that covers these six cases?
And with that, we leave this brief tour of sound-codes between Germanic languages, reflecting changes in the last 1,500-2,000 years, and head back into the far more anciently-rooted relationships that English still shows with other languages descended from the speech community of over 5,000 years ago.