This means, they all have a common ancestor. To this group also belong Dutch, Scots, Frisian and Low German. The first ever printed book seems to be in Korean: JikjiĮnglish and German are West Germanic Languages. The first printed book (by the Gutenberg press anyway) was a bible in Latin. or that the first printed book was written in German?

In the end I'd like to point out, as mentioned in the comments, that this page is not really of remarkable quality and contains at least one plain wrong statement: house / Haus.Īs pointed out in the comments, this depends heavily on the chosen words on the list and may not be overall conclusive. there are other words that are related but maybe not at first sight, e.g.

While nowadays, German has a lot of English words (especially of technical background) incorporated in its language, e.g. However, this does not mean, that you can simply talk, read or understand German just by speaking English and hoping a non-English speaking German will understand you or vice versa. Using such a method, English was evaluated to have a lexical similarity of 60% with German and 27% with French. For example, Ethnologue's method of calculation consists in comparing a standardized set of wordlists and counting those forms that show similarity in both form and meaning.

There are different ways to define the lexical similarity and the results vary accordingly. A lexical similarity of 1 (or 100%) would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words. In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. It seems to be true in terms of lexical similarity

German words in english lexicon