>Germany produces books of foreign words that are used in German. I once
>tried to explain (in German) to some Germans why this is an absurd idea for
>English. I don't think they were able to grasp - or perhaps I was unable
>to express - why the very concept of "foreign words" does not exist in
>English.
The German word for that, "Fremdwort," is actually misleading:
in reality, they refer to... neologisms, not to actual non-German
(hence "fremd"/"foreign") words. For, such words as Pferd, Mauer,
Kirche, Peitsche, Grenze, Kutsche (words of Latin, Greek, Slavic
and Hungarian origin) aren't perceived as "Fremdwörter". Nor
the calques (Lehnübersetzungen) or modern creations such as
Fernsprechanlage. (An irony: German dictionaries dealing with
such neologisms/Fremdwörter are usually captioned "Fremd-
wörter...lexikon" Of course, "Fremdwörterwörterbuch" would
be quite weird. :-)
(An idea of how would English look like if it were Germanized
is rendered by the German joke-"letters" known as "Filserbriefe".
Have a look at this example - incl. a brief explanation:
http://www.lostangel.ws/onemakes.html )
OTOH, the difficulty of comparing Deutsch with the West German
dialect... English :-) consists in the fact that --> English contains a
vocabulary which is over 60% of Latin origin (hence the stem
problem you yourself mentioned), --> and it lost the power
to generate derivates by means of morphology mechanisms as it
is still possible in German; e.g. by using the word mouth it is
impossible to naturally build, say, a *mouthly as a 100% synonym
to... oral. In German, this is the usual way: Mund => mündlich.
In spite of that, German vocabulary is also full of Latin-Greek-etc.
words, even if this can't be compared with English (which is at the
same time sort of an esperanto that's able to assimilate almost
any word from any other language -- and free of morphology
constraints at that :-).
>Of course it's because of the very high percentage of common words in
>English not built on native stems. All words are English.
Yes, but strictu sensu they aren't (i.e. those French and Renaissance
words aren't native words of the ol' Angles, Saxons and Jutes; mouth
yes, but oral no).
>Peter
George