English words that conflict with your language.

[ajaxfetish]

Yet we're closer to French than anything else...

Except Frisian . . . Dutch . . . Afrikaans . . . German . . . Swedish . . . Danish . . . Norwegian . . . Icelandic . . . Faroese . . .

But yeah, after Old Norse, French has had a deeper influence on English than any other language.

Ajax

[A Very Super Market]

Just a silly joke about the Norman influence everyone....

[Fragony]

Except Frisian . . . Dutch . . . Afrikaans . . . German . . . Swedish . . . Danish . . . Norwegian . . . Icelandic . . . Faroese . . .

But yeah, after Old Norse, French has had a deeper influence on English than any other language.

Ajax

More then you think, can't dismiss french influence in any language because it used to be the common standard for European elites to speak in French, also in England. French is a germanic language like English and German, maybe it takes the distance a non-native speaker can take to see the similarities.

[Azathoth]

French is a germanic language like English and German, maybe it takes the distance a non-native speaker can take to see the similarities.

But French is a Romance language.

[The Stranger]

This should be interesting. Don't worry about 'there' and 'their', countless English people get those two mixed up, and hardly anyone seems to use 'they're'

its very simple... i misspell it only when im in a hurry and typing casually, because then i tend to start writing phonetically... than and then i still find very hard, but apart from a few odd words, i tend to have little problems...

one thing i find very odd though, why do you pronounce sword as if the W isnt in there... its not the same with sworn, swagger, swollen, swallow etc...

[The Stranger]

But French is a Romance language.

it has some germanic influences, because the franks were germanic. before that they had celtic language. english though has a lot of romanic influences, from when the normans invaded. alot of english is french... hence the stubbornness of the french to maim their great french language into something of a bastard

[The Stranger]

english i think is easy to learn but hard to master.

[Fragony]

it has some germanic influences

It doesn't have some germanic influence it's a germanic language, has nothing to do with german, we just call this type of language germanic.

[The Stranger]

i know it has nothing to do with german... but isnt it classified as an romanic language?

[Centurio Nixalsverdrus]

French is a Romance language that's most closely related to Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Gallego, etc. Dutch on the other hand shares a language group with English, German and Frisian. IIRC.

[ajaxfetish]

French is indeed a Romance language, not a Germanic one. The Franks were a Germanic people and presumably spoke a Germanic language prior to migrating into Roman territory, but in France they came to adopt Latin as their language, and French is a descendant of that vernacular Latin, most closely related to Spanish and Portuguese (and other members of the Western Romance branch).

English and French are related only in that they are both Indo-European (one from the Germanic sub-family, the other from the Italic sub-family). However, of the external languages to affect English, French has had the deepest influence of any save Old Norse. Most of that French influence was lexical, though. As far as I know it had little if any effect on English grammar, and was not an important source of functional words.

Here's a great image if you want to see how all the Indo-European languages fit together:
Indo-European Language Family

Ajax

[Ituralde]

So my first thoughts when reading the topic were more among the lines of Louis furhter up. So despite what has been written before I share them with you anyway.

Three things that still get me:

1) gift, which means a present in English is spelled and pronounced exactly like the German word for poison. There's just so many possibilities for confusion there if you are not careful.

2) cell phones or mobile phones are called Handy in German. Handy is pronounced English as well and looks like a English word too if you dismiss the upper case. So a lot of people, even my profs at University have difficulty getting to grips with the fact that no English speaker will understand that a Handy is a cell phone.

3) eventually. That one is tricky for Germans as well. We have the word eventuell in German which means that something might or might not happen. While eventually means that it will definetly (yeah, yeah, I don't know how to write that word) happen. So a lot of people mix that up as well.

[Louis VI the Fat]

*Hands Ituralde a handy gift. Eventually*


When you shout 'Emergency !!!' a Frenchman will not think of a warning to impending disaster, but think something emerged, and will not understand all the excitement about it.

Entrée in English the main course, in French an appetizer. Most confusing.

'Person having pain' would make a Frenchman think nobody is having bread.


'Personne' in French can mean either one person, or everybody, or nobody, which in delightful retribution confuses the Anglos to no end.

[Centurio Nixalsverdrus]

A German supermarket once advertised a bag for sport clothing as "Bodybag", since "Body" (with y in plural) is "German" for a part of female clothing.

Another one is "aktuell" which means "up to date" in English which we always confuse with "actually" (tatsächlich).

[Subotan]

1) gift, which means a present in English is spelled and pronounced exactly like the German word for poison. There's just so many possibilities for confusion there if you are not careful.

2) cell phones or mobile phones are called Handy in German. Handy is pronounced English as well and looks like a English word too if you dismiss the upper case. So a lot of people, even my profs at University have difficulty getting to grips with the fact that no English speaker will understand that a Handy is a cell phone.

3) eventually. That one is tricky for Germans as well. We have the word eventuell in German which means that something might or might not happen. While eventually means that it will definetly (yeah, yeah, I don't know how to write that word) happen. So a lot of people mix that up as well.

Heh, those are all excellent examples. Ueberalles also gets me, as I always think that that should be "Overall". The other classics are "Sechs", "G", "Koch", "Kochin" "Rat" etc.

[pevergreen]

Entrée in English the main course, in French an appetizer. Most confusing.

I was of the opinion that the Entrée preceeded the main course, followed by dessert.

Thats how it is here.

[Husar]

1) gift, which means a present in English is spelled and pronounced exactly like the German word for poison. There's just so many possibilities for confusion there if you are not careful.

Great example, forgot about that.

3) eventually. That one is tricky for Germans as well. We have the word eventuell in German which means that something might or might not happen. While eventually means that it will definetly (yeah, yeah, I don't know how to write that word) happen. So a lot of people mix that up as well.

This one confused me as well at first, though I got used to it eventually.
And by the way, it's "definitely".


Êntrèé or however it's spelled sounds too much like "entry" for it to be a main course.

[Louis VI the Fat]

I was of the opinion that the Entrée preceeded the main course, followed by dessert.

Thats how it is here.

So it appears to be indeed.

Always ready to jump on any Anglo in-fighting, so beneficial to our bid for global domination, I present this exchange between an Australian and an American, slugging it out on who takes the title of least capable of emulating French civilisation:

Why do Americans refer to the main course of a meal as the "entree?"


December 14, 2007


Dear Cecil:



I was reading your enlightening discourse on the likelihood of people dining on mammoth (The Straight Dope: Have explorers had feasts of woolly mammoth? ) and was somewhat dismayed to see you use the term "entree" to allude to the main course of a formal dinner. I understand that as you are writing for the Teeming Millions, who mostly live in the USA, you need to dumb things down a little, and using American idiom is a simple way of doing that. Can you explain to me, though, why Americans would use a word that so clearly does not fit the intended meaning?
— Tony from Australia





Strong stuff, Tony, coming from a country that's only in the last 20 years crawled from a primordial ooze of baked beans and Vegemite to lie panting on the shores of respectable cuisine. Even after recent advances, the Aussies are still trailing about a century behind the serious culinary world powers, so I'll excuse you for not knowing what you're talking about foodwise. What I won't stand for, however, is some smart-ass impugning the intellect of the Teeming Millions - that's my department. So cut the sass and acknowledge your ignorance, and I'll dumb this down enough for you, too.



The issue here is that what Americans call an entree isn't known by that name to English speakers elsewhere, who tend to stick with main course or main dish. Such people often figure entree (from French entrer, "to enter") correctly refers only to a dish serving as an entrance to the meal - i.e., an appetizer, which is how it's used in, e.g., Australia - and assume that the clueless Yanks are getting it wrong yet again. Not a crazy assumption, frankly, given recent world events, but in this instance it's off base.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

To see why, we go back roughly 100 years, to when the ritual of the formal dinner - devised in France and modified for use throughout the West - had come to the end of its golden age. A key venue for displays of refinement by the upper and middle classes, formal dining, though less elaborate than it had been 100 years before, retained a tricky set of rules governing everything from the order in which guests entered the room to which of a dozen utensils was most appropriate for eating conger eel.



By the late 1800s, a typical formal dinner in the UK ran to about six courses: soup, fish, entree, roast (or "joint" - no giggling), maybe another savory course (often a pudding), and dessert. As you'll notice, the entree wasn't the opening act. It was generally a "made" or highly prepared dish - possibly meat and vegetables, maybe sweetbreads or liver - as opposed to the more unadorned roast, but this distinction could be blurry; in the earliest use of entree cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1759, the dish described is a roasted ham. So while one could argue that the entree was the last of the preliminaries, it seems equally defensible to see it as the entrance into a series of what we'd now call main courses. Under main course, in fact, the OED has "one of a number of substantial dishes in a large menu," and in most cases the entree was clearly substantial enough to qualify.



This interpretation prevailed in the U.S., where British conventions held sway, but as American menus became more streamlined in the early 20th century (old-school chefs were already griping about graceless, hurried modern dining as of 1905) some courses got the ax. The roast lost its automatic spot (possibly due in part to WWI meat rationing), the additional savory dish fell away, and soon enough the entree had gone from one of several main dishes to the last main dish standing.

[drone]

I love the Straight Dope.

[Ituralde]

A German supermarket once advertised a bag for sport clothing as "Bodybag", since "Body" (with y in plural) is "German" for a part of female clothing.

Another one is "aktuell" which means "up to date" in English which we always confuse with "actually" (tatsächlich).

Yeah that second one is a common mistake.

And for the first one. Germans just seem to love using English, but often don't bother to check whether they are using it correctly. Two examples that I just remembered.

1) "Baby an Board" This one is pure genius. I get "Baby on Board" which is the usual English phrase. And I would also understand "Baby an Bord" which would be the German phrase (yeah apparently we have no word for Baby). But mixing them up like that.

2) "World of Accessoires". Once again, Germans use the French word accessoire, while the correct English version would be "World of Accessories".

[The Stranger]

sounds kinda gay...

[Viking]

If I compare my language with English, I find alot of conformity.

dei - they
der - there
her - here (similar pronounciation)
da - that

Yet if words of the same meaning are nothing similar, they do rarely look like words of different meaning. The word "gift" is then an exception, since it just as in German means 'poison' in Norwegian.

[Husar]

(similar pronounciation)

For some silly reason I've never understood either it's actually "pronunciation".

[Viking]

For some silly reason I've never understood either it's actually "pronunciation".

Oh c'mon, this is not the "correct the poster above you" thread.

(otherwise the misspelling had anything to do with conflicts between languages )

[Husar]

Oh c'mon, this is not the "correct the poster above you" thread.

(otherwise the misspelling had anything to do with conflicts between languages )

I was actually correcting you AND sympathising with you at the same time because I find the correct spelling silly.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Gift is probably Dutch, since in Dutch the meaning of “gift” depends on context. ‘Gift’ as poison in Dutch is more typically referred to as “vergif” or in older texts “vergift”, with gift as “gift” meaning a gift being the preferred use.

[Fisherking]

Maybe I missed it but as to confusion from one language to another, why have none of the Germans listed become?

In German you would gladly become a steak but it may not be a good idea in English.

What many cite as a French influence in English is actually Latin. Norman French had an influence but most French is just borrowed words and the structure is more Latin.

English once had all of the cases and genders of German, as well as the assortment of ways to make a plural. I can’t say that it is bad that it has been streamlined.

It all dose make it more difficult for English speakers to master other languages, at least I think so.

My struggles with German are legion and I won’t even mention Bavarian...

Some of you have confused grammar with sentence structure. English is a very pliable language and it adds to its expressiveness. Nouns can be used as verbs and verbs can be used as nouns and make sense.

The vowels are problematic. Any one can sound like almost any other in a given word and the number of different accents don’t help that at all.

English has more sounds with fewer letters than most other languages and the use of diphthongs can cause problems for non native speakers.

But if you want a challenge you can try the oldest spoken language in Europe. The spelling scares the heck out of me and the pronunciation of letters needs to be relearned and more...

Try to learn Irish or as some would say Gaelic...

[Ituralde]

Of course become is a classic. But at least it's one you learn about at school extensively.

And Gaelic really is scary. Just seeing the written word and then how it is pronounced astounds me every time!

[Furunculus]

This is for people who don't have English as their native language. There are many words in English I have to think about before typing them.

'Dungeon', it just seems wrong to me. Did it in a single try but only because I use it as an example. I also tend to type 'there' when I mean 'their', and 'than' when I mean 'then'. There is no cure but trying really hard.

Where do you get it wrong.

i imagine; where, were, we're, ware, would also be confusing.

[TinCow]

This is a very interesting conversation. It's a particularly odd one for me, because I put a great deal of effort into mastering the English language, but am very poor at speaking other languages. I very much agree that grammar is less important in English than in other languages, or at least in the Romance languages, which are the only other ones I am familiar with. There is a great deal of grammar in English, but most of it is not necessary. Even with improper grammar usage, it is very easy to understand what someone is saying.

One of the main differences, as far as I am aware, is the depth of the Enlish vocabulary. I have seen statistics indicating that English has approximately 3 times as many words as German and approximately 6 times as many words as French. In most other languages, words tend to be combined together to explain a more specific or nuanced concept. While this can also be done easily in English, most of these concepts seem to have their own very specific word as well. In my experience, what separates and experienced English speaker from an inexperienced speaker is not so much the grammar, but the depth of the vocabulary. Those who are considered 'expert' speakers of English tend to achieve that perception based on the words they use, not how they arrange them.