Sören Kuklau wrote: > On 3/24/2002 10:28 PM, Garth Wallace apparently wrote exactly the > following: > >> Because that sounds like it should be a garden (as in, a place filled >> with plants tended by people) for children, whereas in English >> "kindergarten" means the first grade of school (coming the year before >> "first grade"). > > Umm well, but "Kinder" means "children" and "Garten" means "garden"...
Right, but "kinder" and "garten" are not words in English--that is, while the compound "kindergarten" was borrowed, its components were not. So it's a single unit in English. A German might hear "kindergarten" and think "child's garden", but an English-speaker wouldn't hear the component terms and would just think of kindergarten the word in English, which means the first year of school (in America anyway; the British have a bizarre school system that I don't pretend to understand).
