For a native German speaker, it is always remarkable that in the English
language
there are often two words for the same thing. One from the "indo-german"
or "anglo-saxon"
language origin, and the other from latin. Like here, with "animal" and
"deer". I didn't know
about the old meaning of deer as a synonym for animal, but this fits
perfectly in this pattern.
At the moment when there is another word for the generalization, like
"animal", then the old
world "deer" can be used for a special meaning.
But this is also difficult for non-native english speakers, because
sometimes there might
be slight differences in the meaning of two words which have the same
translation, and we
cannot understand that. Also, words that sound the same as in our native
language possible
have a very different meaning. One example comes to mind: "eventually"
means "in the end"
in english, but in Germany it says "may be". That's what we call "false
friends" - words that
you think you understand, but in fact you don't.
Kind regards
Bernd
Am 23.11.2012 18:54, schrieb Pew, Curtis G:
On Nov 23, 2012, at 8:48 AM, Joel C. Ewing <jcew...@acm.org> wrote:
Which was exactly the point of the original Lindy post. "Deer" in English evolved from a change in
pronunciation of the Germanic "tier", but after the passage of time the meaning of "deer"
in English no longer matched the meaning of the the foreign word from which it is derived. Llindy was never
attempting to claim that today's translation of the words cited matched the original counterparts - quite the
opposite. That was the whole point!
Just to be clear, there was no borrowing here. English and German (and Dutch and Frisian) have a common ancestor, and English
"deer" and German "tier" descend from the same word in that common ancestor. The change from an initial voiced
"d" to unvoiced "t" occurred in High German; in this case, the English pronunciation is closer to the original. (Of
course there are other words where German retains the older pronunciation.) The word's original meaning was "an undomesticated
animal", and it has retained this meaning in German, while in English it has been narrowed to members of the Corvidae family. Even in
English this narrowing is relatively recent; there's a line somewhere in Shakespeare about "mice and other small deer."
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