Know your Language

Where did your language come from? Actually that is an easy question because most of our languages came from the same stock of ... germanic. this has happened centuries ago but still today we can find evidence of our cultural connection. The northern branch of germanic leads to Iclandic, Norwegian and on the other part to swedich and danish. The western family tree of germanic splits in three parts: english and french, flemish dutch and afrikaans as well as german and jiddish. An other branch of the germanic language are celtic, italic, balto-slavic and as a surprise to me: albanic! It was so interersting for me to learn about languages and how they connect nations. And it makes learning new languages easier when you know you can sometimes conclude from your language to another. Like water, in german it is wasser, in french they call it eau, spanish agua and italian acqua and finaly swedish call it vatten. 

Those etymology researches get very interesting when it comes to concrete results and explanations for everyday expressions. Look what i found interesting about a well known country, the USA. David Crystal shows in his "Cambridge encyclopedia of the english language" from which sources the names of the american states come. Let´s have a look:

• Oregon comes from the algonquian tribe meaning "beautifull water"
• California: spanish for "earthly paradise"
• Nevada: spanish for "snowy"
• Arizona: papago: "place of the small sping"
• Utah: Navaho "upper land"
• Idaho: Shoshone "light on the mountain"
• Montana: spanish "mountains"
• Wyoming: algonquian "place of the big flats"
• Colorado: spanish "red" (colour of the earth)
• Dakota: sioux "friend"
• Nebraska: omaha "river in the flatness"
• Kansas: Sioux "land of the south wind people"
• Oklahoma: Choctaw "red people"
• Texas: spanish "allies"
• Minnesota: Dakota Sioux "sky-coloured water"
• Iowa: Dakota "the sleepy one"
• Missouri: Algonquian via french "muddy waters"

And there are more meanings but i haven´t jet looked them up. If you are interested in the origins of english terms and language i would sugguest that book by David Chrystal that i mentioned early in this post. I bought it half prized by amazon.de, so it is a bargain now!

http://www.jpc.de/jpcng/books/detail/-/art/David-Crystal-The-Cambridge-Encyclopedia-of-the-English-Language/buchnum/104837498