TheJuggler wrote:

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

Scytale wrote: 'mors-dood' means dead beyond any hope of revival

hmm... could be the origin of the german "mause tot" (mouse dead) sein (instantly fell into german...) ...
because i was always wondering what a mouse has to do with being dead

I'm vigilantly taking notes, here.
reminds
Also, Dutch sounds awesome. I remember a while back I mentioned to some German friends of mine that I had fallen in love with Sächsisch (because it reminds me of Dutch). You should have seen their faces .

Haha, I can picture their faces yes... And also that place in SA is the weirdes ever.
We have a lot of weird expressions like that indeed. But ehm, I think its more because we are a rather weird bunh, so that name in SA is nothing more than normal. (Normalcy is extremely important in the Netherlands).

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

Scytale wrote: 'mors-dood' means dead beyond any hope of revival

hmm... could be the origin of the german "mause tot" (mouse dead) sein (instantly fell into german...) ...
because i was always wondering what a mouse has to do with being dead

According to internet it comes from the Low German word 'murs' which means 'suddenly'.

TheJuggler wrote:[...
Also, Dutch sounds awesome. I remember a while back I mentioned to some German friends of mine that I had fallen in love with Sächsisch (because it reminds me of Dutch). You should have seen their faces .

Yes, when swearing the guttural sounds of "Godverdomme" are quite a bit more satifying than "Goddammit"

Dinosawer wrote:

TheJuggler wrote:[...
Also, Dutch sounds awesome. I remember a while back I mentioned to some German friends of mine that I had fallen in love with Sächsisch (because it reminds me of Dutch). You should have seen their faces .

Yes, when swearing the guttural sounds of "Godverdomme" are quite a bit more satifying than "Goddammit"

Yes indeed, and what about something else "swearing with deseases"
"krijg de tering" means "I hope you'll get syphilis and die"

Dinosawer wrote: According to internet it comes from the Low German word 'murs' which means 'suddenly'.

which way goes the evolution?

mors -> murs -> maus?

murs -> mors -> maus?

Tsjernobyl wrote:

Dinosawer wrote:

TheJuggler wrote:[...
Also, Dutch sounds awesome. I remember a while back I mentioned to some German friends of mine that I had fallen in love with Sächsisch (because it reminds me of Dutch). You should have seen their faces .

Yes, when swearing the guttural sounds of "Godverdomme" are quite a bit more satifying than "Goddammit"

Yes indeed, and what about something else "swearing with deseases"
"krijg de tering" means "I hope you'll get syphilis and die"

I'm a nice person, I don't say such things

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

Dinosawer wrote: According to internet it comes from the Low German word 'murs' which means 'suddenly'.

which way goes the evolution?

mors -> murs -> maus?

murs -> mors -> maus?

murs->mors (Dutch)
and
murs->mus->maus (German)
As I understand it

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

Dinosawer wrote: According to internet it comes from the Low German word 'murs' which means 'suddenly'.

which way goes the evolution?

mors -> murs -> maus?

murs -> mors -> maus?

Yeah well, morsdood = very dead, not just regularly dead bud more dead that just dead... morsdoos = dead beyond any chance of revival, as said before.

Swearing with diseases is a common thing here

Tsjernobyl wrote: "krijg de tering" means "I hope you'll get syphilis and die"

[geeking out]
Another reason why I like Dutch so much! English isn't mutually intelligible with *anything*, but I've noticed the more German I learn, the more Dutch I understand. "Krijg" was immediately obvious as a cognate of "kriegen."
[/geeking out]

That the word for "mouse" is so similar in so many different languages -- English, German, Polish, Afrikaans, Russian, Danish, Georgian, Bosnian, Latin, and even Hindi -- tells you a couple of interesting things.

One is that it must be close to the proto-Indo-European word for the critter, since the places where that word is found tend to be the places where the extremely energetic Indo-European culture traveled (and conquered). The other is just how common the lowly mouse is.

Probably the other word that is the most similar in the most languages is the word for "mother": mother, mater, matron, mater, ma, mām, mama, and so on. Possibly that's due less to culture and more to being one of the simplest voiced sounds a suckling infant can start to make. Maybe more interesting than that is how less common the word for "father" is across languages -- interpret that how you will.

I may not speak many languages, but as an INTP I sure can pretend to know a little bit about a number of them.

Georgian, an Indo-European language?

I didn't know that.

It's hard to call anything an "Indo-European language." The best you can say is that some languages take more or fewer words from the IE base words, depending on the degree of influence the Indo-European tribes had in those parts of the world.

Eastern Europe seems to have been the main/first place they went as a recognizable proto-culture, so the languages that grew there tend to have numerous words adapted from IE base words. But the extent of their influence stretched to western Europe as well as to the Indus Valley, so those languages show a few IE roots as well -- it's believed that's why "mūs" is "mouse" in Hindi.

The history of language is the history of cultures. Fun stuff.

Flatfingers wrote:It's hard to call anything an "Indo-European language." The best you can say is that some languages take more or fewer words from the IE base words, depending on the degree of influence the Indo-European tribes had in those parts of the world.

Eastern Europe seems to have been the main/first place they went as a recognizable proto-culture, so the languages that grew there tend to have numerous words adapted from IE base words. But the extent of their influence stretched to western Europe as well as to the Indus Valley, so those languages show a few IE roots as well -- it's believed that's why "mūs" is "mouse" in Hindi.

The history of language is the history of cultures. Fun stuff.

I'm afraid I'll have to disagree with you on this. PIE is the reconstructed, direct ancestor of a variety of language families found in Eurasia.
i.e. any language not descended from PIE is, by definition, not a proto-indo-european language.

Although I do agree very much with your other point! Languages -- and the insight they provide into the cultures that speak them -- are indeed fascinating things.

Can't speak for Dutch, but in Afrikaans 'mors' means 'to spill' or 'to make a mess', so I'd also interpret 'mors-dood' to mean 'so dead that your corpse is a mess'; a very... Visual metaphor. I didn't know the root was different!

Cornflakes: our 'Maus' is 'muis'

TheJuggler wrote:I'm afraid I'll have to disagree with you on this. PIE is the reconstructed, direct ancestor of a variety of language families found in Eurasia.
i.e. any language not descended from PIE is, by definition, not a proto-indo-european language.

I was imprecise with my words. Strictly speaking, you're right -- several languages are descended from the reconstructed IE base words.

In a more relaxed context, it's about as useful to say that (for example) English "is" a PIE language as it is to say that I "am" a Scythian.

On that basis, I think my comment that some languages have more or fewer IE roots than others is not only reasonable but useful. "Is" expresses only a binary member relationship; "more or fewer" tells you the degree of relatedness.

I should have said that better. Thanks for the chance to clarify what I meant.

Flatfingers wrote:

TheJuggler wrote:I'm afraid I'll have to disagree with you on this. PIE is the reconstructed, direct ancestor of a variety of language families found in Eurasia.
i.e. any language not descended from PIE is, by definition, not a proto-indo-european language.

I was imprecise with my words. Strictly speaking, you're right -- several languages are descended from the reconstructed IE base words.

In a more relaxed context, it's about as useful to say that (for example) English "is" a PIE language as it is to say that I "am" a Scythian.

On that basis, I think my comment that some languages have more or fewer IE roots than others is not only reasonable but useful. "Is" expresses only a binary member relationship; "more or fewer" tells you the degree of relatedness.

I should have said that better. Thanks for the chance to clarify what I meant.

Hmmm...I see what you mean now. I was thinking about this strictly in genetic terms, but you're right. Languages are more than their ancestry.

On another note, I hope I didn't come across as aggressive. It wasn't my intent to jump down your throat.