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by memsom 302 days ago
Ah - you are conflating Germanic for German. Germanic is not equivalent to German. German (deutsch) is a national language, Germanic is a language family. German belongs to this family, but it is not the root of all Germanic languages. English and German sit in the West Germanic branch, the East Germanic was mostly Gothic (dead) and the North Germanic languages are Swedish/Danish/Norwegian/Icelandic/Faroese and various other non national languages. English is a West Germanic language, but it was massively influenced by Old Norse (North Germanic) and various Frenches (and Latin/Greek in technical terms) as well as probably the native British languages somewhat in grammar (the present continuous tense in English also happens in Welsh, and is not very Germanic.)

So - Window is Germanic. It comes from Old Norse 'vindauga', and the modern Norwegian Bokmal version is 'vindu'[1].

The German word for Window comes from Latin [2].

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vindu

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fenster

1 comments

yeah, ok, my picture of these things was a bit simplistic, thanks for the correction and the details!