Animals - Germanic languages compared 

The same as the Scandinavian word hingst which also means stallion.

The word "Hengest" also exists in old English, and means the same thing.

It's the same in Dutch. Female horse is a merrie, like English mare. Nightmare is nachtmerrie.

And we also have the old word ros.

It’s also called “ross” in Faroese. It’s used maybe 50/50 together with the word “hestur”. :)

@@tangente00 as far as I know, this redundancy is not a sign of infancy, but there are other linguistic principals active. A few examples: people in German also use longer forms with other words like Bauchnabel instead of just Nabel, Eidotter instead of just Dotter. There are many very common examples. The reason in a nutshell: When people talk to each other there are always small and big disturbances like noises, inefficient brains, just little things like your ears closing for a millisecond while yawning and stuff like that. If you make your words slightly redundant, one or the other part of the word has a higher chance to be heard and registered. That's not my theory. I read it in a book by a linguist. I just can't remember his name.

@Talpa 1987 No it has something to do with the many german languages which existed in Germany before everyone started using standard german. Until 200 years ago Germans still spoke mainly their local versions of German and only educated people used the universal German. Standard German had a really hard way to become spoken by everyone because its more archaic than the local languages and therefore complicated. Thats why German words are often so descriptive, people just wanted to prevent misunderstandings.

@@lahelia9691 I don't know your qualifications and your sources, but I know the qualifications of the linguist who gave the explanation I gave and so I will just believe what he said. That of course doesn't mean that his reason is the only reason. The thing you mentioned might as well be an additional reason.

@@Speireata4 sure but tbh it doesn't sound plausible to me, it makes no sense. There is probably another reason for that.

@Moe5Tavern So damn right! Vollkommen richtig. I thought the same. Normally no one says "Haifisch", just "Hai".

Interesting! I wonder what the original word for bear in Germanic languages was. “Urs” in Romanian.

I didn't know that! Fun! In Portuguese it's Urso

not even Indo-European but Hungarian also lost the word for bear, we borrowed "medve" (meaning honey-eater) from a Slavic lang. Same thing happened to wolves and deers, their names mean "the tailed one" and "the horned one" (in Hungarian "farkas" and "szarvas" respectively).

Same thing with Slavic languages. The new name literally means honey eater

Yeah, a swedish saying about trolls: "Don't speak about the trolls, or they be at and inside of of your doorstep" - If you speak about something or some one, you summon them. Like, the law of attraction or something.

Dog... Old French "Dogue" (example Bouledogue = Bulldog) ?

German has "Dogge" which is specific type of dog. Apparently called "Great Dane" in English.

In Swedish dog means died 🤷

@@felixschneidenbach2422 oder grosse dane

French is not germanic language because its romanic language and his brothers are italian , spanish, portugel and romanian and of course romansch in swisserland . I think author never studied this language and than doesn't know differens between that's languages .

English is not much different if you follow the other abnormalities, not only your beloved English.

@@erynn9968 English is a perfect example of the people who live in Britain… it’s a European language pretending it isn’t. Brexit made it obvious that the Brits don’t consider themselves European, and honestly, it’s gross.

@@L333gok how does it pretend it isn’t, could you please explain me as a linguist to a linguist? And what do you mean by European language if not geography, may I ask?

@@erynn9968 it doesn’t matter it was just a comparison. The problem is that brits think they are better than us and that’s why they left the eu. They need to reconsider leaving the eu

@@L333gok 1st, more than a half Brits didn't want it (most didn't go vote cause they were young ppl). Second - your example doesn't make sense because it assumes Brits chose unique words INTENTIONALLY - which was never true, and no language in the world works like this on a big scale. Words' etymology is well studied for English, and I don't remember a single word that was intentionally invented instead of an existing one just for the sake of difference.

It's also the Dutch word for a male cat.

@@Elaud Interesting

@@Elaud Also the Dutch word for a hangover, lol.

@@gertvanderstraaten6352 in German too

@@ladypurple3851 origin of Kater as hangover in german was Katarrh (catarrh in english). Students and their excuses.

Amazing, thank you 👍

@@jeanlucmascoli2903 My pleasure!

@@aaronmarks9366 : I also read this description you made long time ago.

So germanics language are fake?

?

I am already working on the next one :)

@@TheLanguageWolf I truly hope it will come out as soon as possible

Scottish isn´t Germanic

@@diesesphil But Scots is.

@@TheLanguageWolf Can you do Slavic languages ?

You could take some other English and German words and just throw -fish on the end. Walfisch, tuna fish. Probably just that pattern of (phono-semantic part) + (extra semantic clarification part) . Stahl would seem to have been an acceptable but ambiguous forerunner of Diebstahl. German has Ren but since the English only remembered one kind of Tier, their language ends up with the completely unnecessary reindeer. Tell me you love antlers without saying “I love antlers”-national motto of England, probably.

The other interpretation, I guess, is to see it as which animal has the lowest “fired arrow to edible mass” ratio in a land where an incredibly high percentage of trees are coppiced or pollarded for very specific purposes. (I mean to say that the place was lousy with bows and arrows. Fletcher, Archer, Turner, and Yeo are all surnames. Likewise botch is a very common word, given its origin in niche technical jargon.)

@@polyhistorphilomath : In german it is also Rentier ( but french spoken it means a totally different thing!)

Thanks for the remark, I did not notice that unfortunately

Well, that's maybe so in the Netherlands, but in Belgium arend and adelaar are synonymes, with the latter and older form.

I think both Adelaar and Arend are correct in Dutch, although Arend is more common. Arend seems cognate with Örn.

@@tammo100 @Sven Bras The original comment was right.

Also, Arend is way more closely related to the variations of Orn, basically being the same with a D on the end

In Austria we also use Fack/Fock for pig, which comes from the Proto-Germanic term farhaz and ultimately from Proto-Indo-European pórḱos. Both terms have an English equivalent as well (pórḱos -> pork; farhaz -> farrow).

Ros is also used in Dutch. And Hengst for a male horse and Merrie for a female horse.

@@TheBluverde I thought that Pork came from Norman French, while pig and boar and swine were English.

@@Delgen1951 Well, yes. The Proto-Indo-European word pórḱos evolved into the Latin word porcus, which became porc in Old French and, via Anglo-Norman, eventually became pork in English.

@@TheBluverde : In Württemberg there had been formerly in every village a ,Farrenstall' , but a Farra is in our dialect a breeding bull.

Swedish: Bear = Björn Lion = Lejon Dog = Hund Cat = Katt Wolf = Varg Fox = Räv Rabbit = Kanin Squirrel = Ekorre Owl = Uggla Bat = Fladdermus Horse = Häst Cow = Ko/ Kviga Spider = Spindel Eagle = Örn Shark = Haj

How different is your language from any of the other Scandinavian languages? Is it its own language or more of a dialect?

@@geerenmo It's definitely its own language with its own dialects. Speakers of other Nordic languages do not understand us without prior exposure.

Danish: Bear = Bjørn Lion = Løve Dog = Hund Cat = Kat Wolf = Ulv Fox = Ræv Rabbit = Kanin Squirrel = Egern Owl = Ugle Bat = Flagermus Horse = Hest Cow = Ko Spider = edderkop Eagle = ørn Shark = Haj

@@weepingscorpion8739 Thank you for the knowledge.

Grumphie sounds adorable for a pig

ác means oak in Anglo-Saxon/Old-English. The name for squirrel seems to be ác-wern or ácweorna. The wern/weorna part.. speculative perhaps analogue to Dutch 'weer': against or like a guard? Some creature which is protecting oak trees.

@@giselavaleazar8768 and "weer" also means weather. The other 2 meanings you mentioned are correct as well.

Eekhoorn is similar to the word acorn in Dutch which is eikel so you could be right. Idk why there's a ''hoorn'' so maybe squirrels used to have horns or maybe they're referring to their teeth as horns so maybe the word literally meant acorn teeth before

in German we do have Hengst as well

Same for Denmark: "Hingst" = Male horse

@@NoahRealFake ah, danke!

@@matshansen4967 ohh, nice. Fun to see those correlations

@@LukasToya yeah, it’s cool to discover such things

Sorry, we put them there, there were enough herbs to eat and they couldn't run away. Nice source of sustainable meat.

I think I once read somewhere that the English word was originally "cunny" but because that sounds to much like female genitalia the words coney and bunny were basically "made up" for lack of a better phrase. Maybe someone could confirm this?

Frisian would have been the cherry on top, too bad it's not present in the video

Wasn't scotts gaelic?

@@cactusowo1835 That's Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic languages, mostly spoken in western Scotland. Scots is a Germanic language spoken predominantly in eastern Scotland, some consider it to be a dialect of English (not the same as Scottish English, which is a dialect of "true" English).

@@wtc5198 Thanks for the information! I don't have that much clue about scottish, besides that they have their gaelinc language, gaelic is in my list of languajes that I will learn and when that time comes, I'll find more things about celtic languages

@@cactusowo1835 Celtic languages are awesome, there's six of them that are still alive: Brythonic: -Welsh -Cornish -Breton Goidelic: -Irish -Manx -Scottish Gaelic

thank you for the song names !

Thank you.

You two are welcome 💜

Coniglio in italian

Interesting, the german Word for oak is Eiche. So as a native german speaker eich relates too oak for me too. The seed/nut of an oak is called Eichel. My guess is Eich is related to Eichel as squirrels like to eat those. So id be sincerely interested where you have read that information out curiosity. I mean could be true what you said im no expert in old germanic languages, quite interesting to me.

The old English word for squirrel was more similar to the others. Im not 100%sure on the spelling as i don't have it in front of me but iirc it was something like aakhorn

@@toddwebb7521 Is that where the word "acorn" comes from? It's pronounced the same as Dutch "eekhoorn".

In old English it is not actually squirrel, but 'ācweorna'. I know this because of someone else of RU-vid and although the writing isn't similar, the sound is. It should sound somewhat like eckhorn(a?). And this one also refers to the type of tree: ac or eck sound is from oak. In Dutch this would be eekhoorn, with eek regering to eik. Eik = oak. I love this connection, you get to see how words trafelled.

Two reasons for this 1 - Norman invasion 2 - it’s an island nation not connected to the continent

Face palm

Makes sense in northern Saami fox is rieban and the Norse was reban

@@ganjafi59 Thank you! I hadn't really looked into it until now, just once heard in passing "rev" being used as an example of a Sami loanword in Norwegian. It's clearly the same word of course so the only question is which languge group borrowed it from which and I think we can find a clue in Hungary. Hungarian is of course a Finno-Ugric language even though it's not closely related to Sami or Finnish. The Hungarian word for fox is róka (and it's plausible it has the same root as ravasz which means cunning). It's probably also worth noting that the Estonian word for fox is rebane. I think this is quite clear evidence the the root of the word is Finno-Ugric and not Germanic/Indo-European. But that leaves another question. The only language from the Nordic region and the only language from the widespread Finno-Ugric family to have a completely different name for the fox, is Finnish. Where on earth did the Finnish word "kettu" come from??? Edit: No, wait, there's another question too! Is the English word/name Reynardine derived from the Nordic fox? The word isn't that similar but it's not completely different either.

@SaxonThrashQueen there is a theory that Germanic peoples are Indo-Europeanized Uralic Finnic people. That Germanic peoples are just Uralians who adopted culture from Indo-Europeans. Don't know how true that is though.

@SaxonThrashQueen not really confirmable. It's just a theory. Wouldn't matter if if a Danish historian said something.

@SaxonThrashQueen i wish there was a local 7-11

That's actually really interesting you got me to look up some more stuff about dalmål (the dialect some people in Dalarna speak) and it seems to have retained quite a few old Norse words. From what I can find it seems like this could be a consequence of the area being under Norwegian control for a long time during the middle ages. So my guess is that the natives of the area tried to keep their medieval Norwegian language alive which was relatively easy since a lot of them were pretty isolated from the rest of Sweden and from Norway. Their language seems to have eventually morphed into just a Swedish dialect but with some old medieval Norwegian/Norse words still being present in some form.

@@samuelwhite1228 Yes, there's definitely allot of Norwegian words in dalmål: "fejs/fjös" which I think is barn or something similar is the same in my grandma's dalmål. Also a funny thing about dalmål is that it's such a heterogeneous dialect.. you could travel just one kilometer and alot of common words would be totally different.

My grandparents in western Norway say "vevkjerring"

Thank you for your words!

Has French been influenced that much? I know that Spanish has tons of similarities to Arabic for example, and also quite some to Dutch

@@nanogalactic6016 those are just coincidences. French has a Celtic substrate

@@wtc5198 The similarities with Arabic aren't coincidences. They are a result of the Islamic conquest of Iberia where Arabic was spoken alongside early Castillian Spanish and other early Spanish languages

@@oliverbrown9415 Yeah some could've been due to mutual influence

@@wtc5198 Yes you're right. As a general rule, most Spanish words beginning with al have some Arabic origin. Take 'alfombra' for example, meaning rug or carpet. Over time the definite article 'al' from Arabic became inseperable from the noun leaving modern Castillian with 'la alfombra'.

Ah, throwback to my first English class where we didn't get a heads up regarding the "gift =/= Gift" situation. "Today is Tom's birthday. Sally gives Tom a gift. Tom is very happy." We deadass thought Sally poisoned Tom on his birthday, and that he actually liked that.

Especially in languages with irregular spelling, like English or Danish. Btw it's IPA transcription

yeah could only really read the english and german, no clue what the vowels were in the othere

@@wtc5198 Correct, English OWL doesn't much vary from Dutch UIL, when pronounced. 🦉

@ Hugo Bourgon. Interesting! But apart from the french word eau coming from latin agua, it occurs to me that it may also be connected to scandinavian aa/å , which sounds exactly like french eau. Did not the burgundian tribe come from sweden?!

There also lion who is wrote same( but not the prononciations)

@@simontenkate9601 No, but they are related via much more distant relations in Indo-European languages. Old English had the word Ea as well for River. They all come from the same root as Latin Aqua but k sounds in Germanic languages become Hs so Ahwa as it is in Gothic, then Ea in Old English and Á in Old Norse which became Å in Scandinavian languages. Some modern English dialects retain the word ea (pronounced as ee) just as some German dialects still have Ach for river.

@@hoathanatos6179 quite interesting, thank you. About ee for river: in frisian this als exists.

Also

isn't padda of Dutch origin? (Pad = Toad in Dutch)

Wij hebben ook kikvors .

Hingst in norwegian.

@@torbygjordet2533 "Hings" in Afrikaans (the daughter language of Dutch spoken in South Africa).

@@ettiennefaure4636 Hingst in Swedish as well..

In Dutch we use hengst for male horses and instead of fohlen, we use veulen. Veulen is a baby horse. I think the speach should be near identical.

Afrikaans is much more closely related to another language here than other languages they left out, Low German and Frisian

@@wtc5198 yes, but it’s much more spoken

@@mateoproductions2741 Low German is still much more spoken than Icelandic

I doubt it

Finnish was influenced by swedish for many years, that's why.

Oh the german word for shark is also "Hai".

Finnish is Uralic or Finno-Urgic... Hungarian, Sami and Permic are in the same language family 🇭🇺🇫🇮

@@fabianfuchs1402 , and beautiful Karelian!:)

It’s what happens when you show up for the Hansa and stay for the Sprachbund.

In Scots "Ky" is the plural of "cow" so you're in good company

They must have mixed it with Old Norse because in Old Norse the nominative singular was kýr so it went: kýr - kú - kú - kýr / kýr - kýr - kúm - kúa. I thought it was the same in Icelandic but apparently not? Anyway to compare in Faroese it goes: kúgv - kúgv - kúgv - kúgvar / kýr - kýr - kúm - kúgva. (case order is NADG).

The Dutch schurk seems to be a loanword from the German Schurke (from a Dutch etymology site).

Flittermouseman doesn't sound as cool.

@@skolex3121 Ok, that's true. :'D

Hmmmm.... German immigrants to Argentina in the 20th century you say?

@@wtr3059 of course, but obviously i mean prussia... especially my grandparents came in 1889

@@sadowlower 1889 is the 19th century man, 20th century is from between 1900-1999. Hence why I said hmmm

I'm also Argentine and one of the surnames of my (Swiss-)German family is Wiederkehr that means 'return', so now I want to return to Europe lol. I also have Italian family and they got literally all their surnames changed so I get you.

@@sadowlower Btw I was just making a joke, please don't take it personally

In German, the horse is also called "Ross", maybe a bit outdated. And a male horse is a "Hengst"

@@kilsestoffel3690 I would overall not say it is outdated but rather that it depends on the region. And in Dutch the words 'ros' and 'hors' are synonyms to 'paard'.

Vargur er samt notaður allt öðruvísi en úlfur

"Ulv" is the common word in Norwegian - but many still would say "Varg". An even older name was "gråbein" (greylegs).

Don't forget that female horse or a mare is called hryssa and meri in icelandic

Those words are called cognates

@@wtc5198 I know but not everyone does. Comparing "banana" in different languages is boring as hell, imo.

Bat = Flearmûs

It is ;) It's funny, it used to be common in English in the late medieval and early modern period, but at some point it fell out of use, with the main theory being that it started sounding too much like "cunny", an older term for "p*ssy" XD

@@aaronmarks9366 yet Quimby is an acceptable surname? Quim + (near)by or quim + island. So only some of these synonyms were taboo.

The First Law Of Motion (Johanes Bornlof) , The Goths (Bonnie Grace), Where the Thistle Grows (Bonnie Grace)

Same for Dutch! 'Ros' for 'paard' and it is usually used to mean something like the English word 'steed' instead of refering to the animal. 'Ross/ros' are probably cognates of 'horse' no?

@@mauritsponnette Yes, they are cognates. In German, there's also the word "Hengst" for male horses which I believe to be cognate with the Scandinavian words for horse shown in the video. Ross in German is also more of a "fancy" word, while "Pferd" is the everyday word.

@@Gandalf-fe3gw hengst is also a male horse in Dutch

@@Gandalf-fe3gw also ros is indeed a bit fancy too here. Something you'd see in a book, or a knight. The English counterpart would be steed

@@mauritsponnette yeah, horse=hross; in old spanish there was a word for a beautiful horse, rocin. Pferd or paard is of latin origin.

In Kurdish we say Rovî

Seems doubtful. It has also always been called rev (ræv) in Denmark and we have loads of foxes here, very doubtful that there should be a Sámi influence into all of Scandinavia, considering how extremely common foxes are all over Scandinavia and that proto-Germanic had the word rebaz, suggesting that it is an Indo-European word.

@@mroldnewbie and Kurdish is an Indo-European language, is it not?

@@jandamskier6510 I was not replying to Firat Belly, but to Asgaut Bakke. I don't know anything about the Kurdish language.

@@jandamskier6510 it is

In order, The First Law Of Motion (Johanes Bornlof) , The Goths (Bonnie Grace), Where the Thistle Grows (Bonnie Grace)

@@samarkand1585 thank you 🙏

@@stringb3042 a pleasure. Had to boot up Shazam on the phone and play the musics on my computer to find them

Only Eastern Slavic or Southern Slavic as well? 🤔

@@fabianfuchs1402 All branches. Western, eastern and southern.

Late to the party but I've heard "adderkop" used in Dutch as well. Most notably maybe in the Dutch translation of Cornelia Funke's Inkheart (Tintenherz)

The First Law Of Motion (Johanes Bornlof) , The Goths (Bonnie Grace), Where the Thistle Grows (Bonnie Grace)

volpe and zorro, I can't decide which one sounds better, just wonderful

Perro is NOT related to celtic, germanic, latin and much less slavic.

Mmm in Castilian (Spanish as you call it) we can also say "can" for dog, but it's something you'd hear in a Mexican movie, I'm from Argentina and it sounds horrible for me, "perro" is much better.

The answer is that "perro" and "zorro" are most likely substrate words from the ancient Iberian language that was spoken in eastern Spain before the Roman conquest. Alternatively, they might be of Basque origin, and there are some proposed French and Germanic origins for "zorro"

@@TheLanguageWolf Great name: Zorro Volpe. Sounds like an artist that makes wierd paintings in his own blood.

In swedish we use Kanin for domesticated and Hare for wild.

English-not one to go bald-also has Hare

The rabbits are in Germany called Kaninchen ( official word), Hase or Stallhase ( stable hare) are popular but scientific incorrect.

@TheWeeaboo in german Hase 🐇 und Kaninchen 🐰

hase is haas in dutch

"We have a job to do." It's a game reference if you don't get it, I'm sorry.

Why OCS, wouldn't proto Slavic be better

@@wtc5198 that's true

The video is about Germanic languages language, the English in the video is English as spoken in the British Isles (by which I mean there's no separate examples given for Scots, for Hibernian English, for Doric, for Welsh English etc). It would have been arguably more inaccurate to use the English flag. There's other languages in the Netherlands than Dutch, but no one seems to be complaining about the use of the Netherlands flag.

@@alexmckee4683 Lol, there is one Belgian guy complaining further up

Small correction, "erne/earn" are not from Greek "ὄρνις", rather, both the English and Greek words are independent cognates of Proto-Indo-European *h₃érō ~ *h₃r̥nés, "large bird, eagle"

@@aaronmarks9366 You might want to pass your comment along to the editors of Merriam-Webster's dictionaries (my source).

@@georgeadams1853 Ah ok, I checked and I can see where the confusion is, it's not very clearly written. I found: "Middle English, from Old English earn; akin to Old High German arn eagle, Greek ornis bird" "Akin to" basically means "cognate with" in etymologies, but the order it's written in here makes it sound like the English word comes from the German word, which in turn comes from the Greek word. In reality they're all just cognates of each other.