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Everyday words that were derived from the German language?

All I can think of are

Gesundheit

Fahrenheit

others?

8 Answers

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  • 9 years ago
    Favorite Answer

    About half of English since it is basically a German dialect.

  • Anonymous
    9 years ago

    This. That. Other. Book. House. Sister. Brother. Mother. Father, and many other relations. Mouse. The 'f' word. The 'a' word. The 's' word. Fox. Rat. Fish.

    Your examples are very recent loans, and retain their original form, my examples above are old loans. Incidentally 'gesundheit' is not used in Britain to any great degree - we normally say "Bless you" after someone sneezes, but I know that Americans say 'gesundheit'. Farenheit is the name of the person who invented that scale of temperature, thus is not so much of a loan, think of Celsius and Reaumur for the names of two other temperature scales.

  • 9 years ago

    I like Weltanschauung and Zeitgeist.

    WW2 gave us Gestapo, Panzer, Blitz(Krieg), Flak, and many more.

    The Welshman who gave Freud his international reputation by translating his work from a very colloquial German (so lay people could understand) into a pompous Latinate English (that might, and indeed did, impress academics) gave us "Ego" (for "Ich") and "Id" (for "es") among other delights.

    Whether English is a German dialect depends on definition. It is more usually called "Germanic" or more specifically "Low West Germanic" where "low" refers to altitude above sea level. The two languages parted company and became mutually unintelligible around 600 AD, and although sharing a common origin for most everyday words, many have gone an interesting semantic shift in English, toward the more pragmatic (beam is baum made useful in house construction), more material (a brand is a piece of red hot material taken out of the flames, the Brand; Tide is Zeit measured by the height of the shoreline), more personal (a wife is one's own Weib), more individual (a ghost is one particular Geist), more specific (to starve is sterben in the way a medieval peasant was most likely to do it), or just more down-to-earth (dreary describes the condition of an uninspiring agricultural landscape, not that of a poet's soul--daß ich so traurig bin!, loft is Luft brought down to describe the part of the house reaching furthest into it)

    Source(s): A lifelong interest in comparative historical grammar.
  • 9 years ago

    Schadenfreude, Frankfurter, Delikatessen, Rucksack, Sauerkraut, poodle, kitsch....Here are some more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words...

    Edit: English is not a German dialect. It is derived from a language known as Anglo Saxon, brought by early settlers who were a mixture of people from north Germany, Denmark and northern Holland. It is Germanic, but not German.

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  • Rain
    Lv 7
    9 years ago

    Bratwurst

    Kinder garden

    Lust

    Zipper

    Wiener

    Hamburger

    Blitzkrieg

    kaputt

    Poltergeist

    Pretzel

    Übermensch

  • 9 years ago

    There are so many words that are similar from English to German it would be impossible to explain all of them. Like, in American football we have borrowed "blitz" meaning "thunder" in German, that is more of a recent one. "Apple" in English and then "Apfel" in German. The English word "deli" comes from the German word, "Delikatessen," which is still sometimes used in English. "Fest" as in a film fest or movie fest, short for festival, can both be used in German. Again, the list of these could go on for days.

  • 9 years ago

    Bakery and Deli (from Bäckerei and Delikatessen, the latter of which originally meant "delicacies" or "fine foods")

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    6 years ago

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