Germanic verbs in English

These are lists of germanic verbs that are in modern use in both German and English.

It is generally understood that English is a germanic language, imported into England over a thousand years ago. For a few hundred years, it existed as a fairly consistent single language (Old English) and amassed a substantial literature, before England was overrun by Normans, who spoke Old French.

Before the move to England however, there was no single English language, rather, a mixture of languages and dialects, including the dialects of the coastal Angles and of Saxons. The language of tribes of northern Germany already had much in common with those of Scandinavia.

There was no “High German” a thousand years ago, either. High German developed in stages from dialects or languages in what is now southen Germany and Austria.

The notion of the “germanness” itself is contrived: there are no original languages (the linguist’s “proto-germanic” and “proto indo-european” are purely hypothetical: they serve as points of reference, but at no time did any people speak these languages), and the language actually being spoken in northern Europe 2000 years ago formed a continuum of dialects stretching from Celtic and Latin in the South to Slavic in the East to Scandinavian in the North.

Modern High German and modern English simply formed from different groups of dialects.

In many ways English is much more like Low German and Dutch (and even more like Frisian). Lists such as these comparing English to those languages would be much longer. But I am familiar with German, and for the purposes of comparison, it serves as well as those nearer languages—maybe better, because of the more pronounced divergence.

Many germanic verbs in English are no longer used as such in German, and many others are so altered as to be unrecognizable.

Although all germanic languages have been absorbing heaps of Latin words so long as those languages have been recorded, some of these Latin words were cognate with already existing germanic words. For example, the old germanic word “haupt” meant “head”—in fact those two words are cognate. The word "haupt" is still used in German, but as an adjective meaning “main”—the modern German word for “head” is “Kopf”. But this word derives from Latin “caput”, also meaning “head”. Yet “caput” and “haupt” are again related, only longer ago (pronounce the ‘h’ very hard). This is a case of English preserving the meaning of an ancient word which was is lost in modern German. It mostly goes the other way, but only mostly.

Ultimately, it comes down to a personal choice: am I satisfied that a word has been in germanic languages long enough that it qualifies as being “germanic”, and that given modern German and English words evolved from a single word being spoken by some ancient germanic people?

What’s the point? Perhaps that, there are enough words here to do some serious talking (and these are just verbs!). But also, it is rather interesting which words survived, and the form they took. Considering that German and English were distinct to begin with, and have been so long geographically separated, I find the similarity very impressive. We see here a part of the “common germanic” that linguists talk about.

You could almost speak using just the words English and German have in common. There are some holes, of course. Maybe a list of common English words that are not of germanic origin would also be interesting. (The criteria for such a list would be even hazier than the present one.)

Most of these verbs I got from the list at the Cactus 2000 site. Where it wasn’t clear to me, I checked with Dictionary.com, to corroborate that the English word was of germanic origin. I often consulted the Duden “Deutsches Universalwörterbuch”, and an old Langenscheidts Taschenwörterbuch. Other important resources were Sergei Nikolayev’s fascinating Germanic etymology database, (which can be found at the Tower of Babel (Starostin Etymological databases)), the excellent “Oxford Online Etymological Database”, and the ever-popular LEO Deutsch-Englisches Wörterbuch.

I left out

• verbs of clearly non-germanic origin
• verbs that do not have a verbal form in both languages
  (many German verbs exist in English not as verbs, but other parts of speech, and vice-versa.)
• recent loan-words

There are certainly mistakes here. I haven’t checked carefully. This list should not be considered authoritative.

to be

First let’s take care of the messiest verb, ‘to be’: sein. In German, its conjugation seems to take elements from at least three different words (‘bin’, ‘sein, ist’, ‘war’). English adds Norse elements:

The English past/conditional ‘were’ is spread across several German tenses. Maybe closest is the conjunctive ‘wäre’ in sound and function.

modals

Next are the modal verbs, which except for their fancy grammar, mostly correspond directly to English counterparts. The English “modal” forms come from a common past tense:

English ‘ought’ is an old past tense of ‘owe’, which has come to be used as a sort of modal verb. Old English had a cognate of ‘dürfen’, but it didn’t survive into Middle English.

German makes a distinction “ich werde…” to indicate future tense, and “ich will…” to indicate intent. This is lost in English, along with the very useful verb ‘werden’ (to become).

eat

The verb ‘to eat’: essen, has a complicated conjugation in German. The English verb is most similar to German 2nd person imperative ‘iss’, but 3rd plural is ‘esst’ 2nd person past is ‘asst’. Somewhere between them, is a sound like ‘eat’.

ken and wit

English has lost the distinction of the verbs for knowing a fact and being familiar with someone. The German words are 'wissen' and 'kennen', respectively. English uses 'know' for both, which is cognate with 'kennen'. The word 'wise' is cognate with 'wissen' (1st person singular 'weiß'), as is the word 'wit' (simple past of wissen is 'wot'). The original meaning of 'wit' is preserved in the phrase "(that is) to wit", where the sense was "that is to know". The Scots form of 'know' is 'ken', which exists in general English in the phrase "beyond my ken".

command form

Most German verbs passed into English in a form nearest their second-person imperative in German.

As to why…perhaps because it is the simplest form, basically with conjugation endings stripped off. But a more sinister thought would be, perhaps it was the language of people who learned the verbs as commands.

There are hundreds of such verbs. A few everyday examples are below.

Here is a list of several hundred more such verbs.

German consonant shift

Note how often these transformations hold:

These differences are ascribed to the “High German consonent shift”, that occurred around the 5th to 8th centuries, rather than changes in English.

from simple past

A few verbs seem to have come across sounding more like the simple past tense form of their German cognates.

verbs alike in infinitive

Verbs that end in -n or -en in English often compare better with the infinitives of their German cognates.

With the exceptions of ‘turn’ and ‘rain’, these are all verbs of becoming, and are to be interpreted as a past participle. The regular German past participle is identical to the infinitive.

verbs alike in 1st-person

A few English verbs are more like the German 1st-person singular indicative form than anything else.

verbs alike in 2nd-person

A few others are more like the German 2nd-person singular indicative form than anything else.

verbs with -ge

A smaller class of verbs in German is found only with the prefix ge- (usually an intensifier). Often this prefix is lost or modified in English.

strong verbs

Another remarkable germanic phenomenon is that of “vowel-raising”, in which the vowel of a word changes (according to some pattern) to effect a change in grammatical form.

English retains many vowel-raising verbs, and many are nearly identical to their German counterparts; each language has many such verbs that are not shared between them—I take this as a consequence of the ease of formation of such verbs, and that their formation is an ongoing process. In English grammer, these verbs are called “irregular”, but in German grammer, they’re called “strong”. In the table below are verbs that are shared by the two languages and exhibit this behaviour in at least one of them.

compound verbs

Although several prepositions (for:für, over:über, under:unter, in:ein) are shared by German and English, it is striking how very few compound words survived into middle English. After the Norman invasion, the vast majority of old English compounds were replaced by Latin or French equivalents.

A few remain, although the meaning of the prefixes in English is often lost. Note that some of the differences in prefixes pre-date the emmigration to the British Isles.

The distinction between the prefixes ver- and vor- is lost in English, becoming in both cases for-; the prefix be- still exists in English, but its semantic effect is lost.

The prefixes over-über, under-unter, and fore-vor have almost identical functions in the two languages. Moreover, compounds with them are rather cheap, and could be constructed at will. The following table omits the over- and under- words.

Furthermore, several germanic compound verbs exist in English only as adjectives. German verlieren, verloren (to lose, lost) is cognate with the lonely English forlorn; besetzen (to occupy) becomes English beset. And some have specialized in both languages, differently: German belieben (be pleased to) is used in English as beloved (which would in turn translate into the German geliebte).

frequentatives

One curious group of germanic verbs in English end in ‘-le’ or ‘-er’, and in modern German have cognates ending in ‘-eln’ and -ern’. Often, these endings indicate a frequentative, something that happens frequently or repeatedly. (But sometimes they act more as an intensifier.) There is a substantial overlap between the two languages, of verbs that are essentially identical; although most such verbs are not shared, there is still a similarity in feeling.

re-introduction

Of course, due to the ascendency of English as the primary international language, English words have been flowing into German at a great rate. There are many interesting effects, including the inclusion of words of common germanic origin, which have German cognates, being spelled and pronounced as in English!

There are also words of common germanic origin that have fallen out of use in German, which have been re-introduced as English words. This process strikes me as being very natural and proper.

Sharing

Cognate with De. Schar, to troop, like a division of an army. Not quite a verb yet in De.

shoppen

De. already had Schopf: a lean-to or shed. Unfortunately now "shoppen" has appeared too.

streiken

From E. strike. Funny the spelling was changed the spelling to get the vowel sound right, but the 'k' was left to make the distinction from its cognate Streich.

Going the other way, many germanic words have been re-introduced into English, mostly from Yiddish, Freud's psychoanalysis, and from the world wars. A lot of food names have also come over. These are mostly nouns and adjectives, there are a few verbs though:

spritz

Yiddish

strafe

WWII

waltz

1700s

yodel

Both from Swiss