Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
English has the largest vocabulary of any language I'm aware of, with something like 850,000 words. Many were simply adopted from other languages because they conveniently expressed a concept. There's an old joke about an American tourist in Germany who sneezes, and a passing German says "Gesundheit!". The American says "Oh! You speak English!"  There are any number of words commonly used by English speakers who've quite forgotten (if they ever learned) that the word originated elsewhere.
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Dennis |
That was a funny joke
English and Danish have the same roots, they are both Germanic langauges, English has then also picked up a lot of French later, but a number of words are much the same - but their spelling and/or pronunciation - or even meaning - now differ so much that they they are harder to recognise. An example is the word 'harder' I just used. You'd have to catch the
central 'idea' of the word - which is much the same in Danish, even though the words would be used in different contexts nowadays - and English have more alternatives. Anyway, to me it's sort pf compering this word with that, finding the central idea. It's difficult to explain