The Language Transfer - German course has proven extremely useful for my German studies. A big part of the reason why is because it teaches a bunch of tricks for recognizing correspondences between the two languages. This comes in handy when trying to guess the meaning of various German words and also to establish useful mental mnemonics for these words.
Some German words are fairly obvious when guessing the corresponding English word. For example, consider the German word "bei"; it's pronounced (basically) like the English word "by" and has a similar meaning.
More generally, an “ei” sound in German frequently corresponds to a long "i" or long "y" sound in English:
| German | English |
|---|---|
| bei | by |
| mein | mine |
| dein | thine1 |
| leicht | light |
… which is not really surprising because the German "ei" sounds just like an English long "i".
HOWEVER, one of the weirder things I learned recently is that an "ei" sound in German can also sometimes correspond to a long “o” in English:
| German | English |
|---|---|
| Stein | stone |
| allein | alone |
| Heim | home |
| eigen | own |
| feind | foe |
| nein | no |
| heilig | holy |
| ein | one2 |
| zwei | two2 |
| beide | both |
| Geist | ghost |
| meisten | most |
… which is really surprising because (obviously) those two vowels don't really sound that much alike.
From doing some cursory etymological lookups it seems like most of the drift in sound was on the English side as the two languages diverged. The German "ei" vowel sound seems to be closer to the sound of the shared etymological root in many cases and then English speakers butchered the hell out of the sound until it became a long "o".
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Yeah, that's right: the German word for "yours" (dein) is actually etymologically related to the Old English word for "yours": "thine". In fact, the German word for "you" ("du") is similarly etymologically related to the Old English word for "you": "thou".
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Okay, technically not a long "o" sound, but close enough and still definitely etymologically related.
i just remembered this chost and re: zwei -> two, there actually is a variant of “zwei” in german that makes the connection more clear: zwo. i’d say people younger than maybe 30 wouldn’t really use it, but older people still sometimes do. one example is that in star wars, they localized R2D2 to “R-zwo-D-zwo”
