English German
good gut
better besser
best (am) best(en)
Grammatical correspondence is also shown in the verb system. Not only the ways of forming the past tense of regular words are
similar, even some irregular verbs are formed in similar ways. Moreover, both
languages show umlaut, although English umlaut is irregular (cf. p.8). The following list illustrates these points:
English German
laugh - laughed lachen - lachte
hate - hated hassen - hasste
love - loved lieben - liebte
think - thought denken - dachte
bring - brought bringen - brachte
sing - sang - sung singen - sang - gesungen
give - gave - given geben - gab - gegeben
fall - fell - fallen fallen - fiel - gefallen
Despite all these
similarities Modern English seems somewhat "more progressive" than Modern German as Kastovsky calls it. The reason for that is that it has simplified its in flexional system, as all Germanic languages did to a greater or lesser extent. Nevertheless, this is the reason why Modern English differs so radically from the language type still presented by
Old English and Old
High German.
low German shall not be left out in this chapter. The problem with it is that there is hardly any literature dealing with English and Low German correspondences. Nevertheless, from my point of view there are some similarities between these two languages. As I already mentioned, both did not undergo the Second Consonant Shift. So at least referring to pronunciation they are often similar (English ‘ship’ is not far from Low German ‘Schipp’ for example and it is nearly the same with ‘water’ and ‘Water’). But sometimes it is just the other way round so that the pronunciation is different but the writing and even the meaning is the same (cf.: Low German ‘just’ with the j pronounced as /j/ like ‘yes’ in contrast to English ‘just’, both meaning ‘exactly’; it is the same with Low German ‘jumpen’ and English ‘jump’). However, in my opinion most people do not see these correspondences because they do not know Low German or vice versa, many speakers of Low German do not recognize that their dialect is similar to English because many of them - especially old people who are the majority of speakers of Low German - do not know English.
As Robinson puts it, "English and German are two divergent developments of some originally unified language". With this turn paper, I tried to show in how far similarities between both languages still can be seen. Furthermore, it was my intention to give the reader a survey on the different ways and stages of development in English and German so that he or she is able to understand that ‘eat’ and ‘essen’ are not so dissimilar as they seem to be at first sight. In my opinion, Low German serves in many cases as a kind of ‘missing link’ between High German and English. I usually found it easier to translate an Old English word into a Modern German one when I thought of a Low German cognate. I think the reason for that is the Second Consonant Shift, which did occur neither in English nor in Low German. Unfortunately, most linguists do not feel alike, as it seems because I did not find a single book, which was dedicated to a
comparison between Old English and Old Low German similarities...
Therefore, I decided to take as many books as possible for basis information about Old English, Old High, and Old Low German and tried to make up a comparison between all three of them by myself with the help of all those little bits of information I picked out of those books. The problem was to decide between necessary and unnecessary information, so some paragraphs of this paper may seem a bit chaotic with regard to their inner structure. Nevertheless, I hope that those ones are not of so high consequence overall and that this paper is interesting and understandable in spite of that.
More summaries about the A comparison between English,German,and their ancestors Old English,Old High,and Old Low German