Words from Germanic
4 words in Curio passed through Germanic on their way into English.
About Germanic
Branch of the Indo-European language family, with West, North and East Germanic subgroups · spoken today
Where
Iron Age Scandinavia and northern Germany → Europe, Northern America, Oceania and Southern Africa
When
Speakers
No reliable count
No dated count exists. Wikipedia gives about 515 million native speakers across the branch.
Family path
- Proto-Indo-European
- Proto-Germanic
- Germanic
- Old Northern FrenchOld FrenchFrench
- English
Dashed: reconstructed, never written down
Where it came from
All Germanic languages descend from Proto-Germanic, spoken around the middle of the 1st millennium BC in Iron Age Scandinavia and northern Germany. In the 2nd century BC, Germanic tribes moved south to settle in what is now western Germany and along the Baltic coasts. Proto-Germanic is known for features such as the consonant change called Grimm's law.
Source: Wikipedia
Family
Germanic grew out of Proto-Germanic.
Languages that grew out of Germanic: Old High German.
The words, A to Z
- blanket
This cozy word for a bed-cover started life describing the color of a cloth, not its warmth.
- garrison
Behind this word for troops stationed to defend a place is an old promise of safekeeping.
- helmet
This head-protector's name literally means 'little helm.'
- vandal
A word that turned a whole people into a synonym for destruction, thanks partly to one poet's grudge.