Proto-Germanic - help me please!

[blitzkrieg80]

the reason the words seem similar to English is because English is a very Germanic language... in fact, Old English (aka Saxon, and very close to Low German) is more Germanic in many ways than Old High German, because it developed farther removed in the Northern lowlands, where High German was set amidst a hub of language traffic and it reflects it in many of its loanwords... English has its own horde of borrowed words from Latin, French, ect. though, besides becoming totally weird (in the context of its related family members) as an syntactical language and tossing gender and inflection to the wind, yet keeping strong verb forms and irregular plurals, just to keep things confusing ... English and German actually have many common terms like stark, swart, fast (as in hold fast), although much of it is considered arachaic these days (yet slang is making a comeback to Old Germanic, with -z and -a endings!) but the commonality is pretty cool and makes learning easy for both... Dutch and the various Scandinavian languages shouldn't be forgotten either Ja, mann!

Excellent question, I thought that myself, but it actually comes from the common Indo-European root from which Latin, Greek and Sanskrit have cognates. The reason it is not borrowed also, is that it's not exactly "semi" as we know it, but means 'half'/'incomplete' which is the same definition, but i don't think it can be applied to a circle

btw, frijaz means "one's own" also (abstraction in relationship between the idea of freemen belonging and participating in the tribe)... anyways, so it's: "Half-one's-own Authority/Dominion of Subjugated People" or "Half-free Authority of Subjugated People" ('subjugated people' is implied in leudi, a term like folk which originated in "army/host" but changed to encompass a more abstract relationship of tribes/peoples)