Quote:
Originally Posted by Roman
Since I've been trying to learn French, I've noticed that there are many words that are either the same or similar and sometimes it wasn't so obvious at first since it might typically be translated to a more common synonym.
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A lot of English vocabulary comes from French - thank the Norman conquest for this. An interesting
computer science paper (curiously published in a leading physics journal) of recent years on text compression developed a metric for measuring the "affinity" of different languages. By this metric, English was slightly closer to French than German, despite its common Germanic origins with German. I think an anaylsis of the words, or perhaps just the nouns, in the US Declaration of Independence (which was published in the preface of a printed dictionary I once owned) traced the language origins of them so: about 10% Latin and the rest split rather equally between French and Anglo-Saxon.
You might also enjoy reading about an old observation on the
etymological dichotomy of animal and meat names in English.
A French friend once observed that learning French vocabulary can be problematic for the Anglophone because some French words which look (almost) identical to English ones today have rather different meanings.
My French has much withered away over the decades, so I am at a loss for a good example. Perhaps "maintenant" will do. It means "now" and is only distantly related to the word "maintenance." I suppose "maintaining" something is the act of trying to keep things as they are "now," so one can understand how the words diverged in meaning over the centuries. For fun, one can also split "maintenant" into the French words "main" and "tenant" and come up with "hand holding," or as we say in English "at hand," which gives us the hint it means "now."