Similarities between German and English

Municipal budgetary comprehensive institution
Secondary comprehensive school № 31
Project
“Similarities between German and English languages ”
Surgut, 2016
CONTENT:
Introduction …………………………………………………………………….3
Chapter 1. The history of English and German languages…………………..4
Chapter 2. Similarities between German and English………………………..6
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………
Literature……………………………………………………………………….
Introduction.
If English is your mother tongue, then that makes German your uncle tongue.
Everyone wants to learn a new language, right? If you’ve ever tried to learn another language, you’ll know just how difficult it can be. Some people want to learn a new language to move abroad, get into university, interact with locals while holidaying abroad or simply to impress that special someone with your foreign language skills.  I wanted to mention some similarities between German and English, since I study both languages.The aim of my work is to find out similarities between German and English that’ll help students to learn German, find out and study information about history of these languages, make a comparative analysis of some linguistic phenomena.
Object: English and German languages .Subject: Similarities between German and English Methods of research: - studying information- analysis - determination- classification
Chapter 1. The history of English and German languages.
The history of English language begins with the invasion of Germanic tribes (5th century). The British Isles were inhabited by prehistoric population and the earliest inhabitants were Celts (Celtic tribes) and they preceded the Germans.
They began to settle in Britain in the 7th c. B.C. The earliest and highly civilized tribe was the tribe of Britons.
They had driven the predecessors into Ireland, Wales, Scotland. The third wave of Celtic settlers was the Belgae. They came later and they settled the home countries.
The Celtic tribes spoke dialects belonging to the Celtic groups. It wasn't the only language spoken on the British territory. Celtic Britain was a province of the Roman Empire. The first attempt to occupy the British Isles was made by Julius Caesar before B.C.
The Celtic tribes began to penetrate into the Isles and 100 years later under Empire of Roman.
The Romans brought to Barbarian Britain the administration, their way of life and their language.
The Celtic tribes were influenced by Roman civilization. The Romans founded military settlements or campus. The names of these settlements survived in some place names Manchester – castra.
They built roads, towns of Roman soldiers and they named this towns - colonies. The word "colony" survived in some names - Colchester. The growth of towns was very considerable. Among the trading centers of Roman Empire London was the most significant. It was a small settlement. It turned into the intensive town.
Wealthy roman landowners lived there. Under Roman occupation the Celts in Britain were Romanized to a certain degree and the influence must have been stronger in the town than in the country side.
The use of Latin language grew; the Romanization began in the 5th century and lasted up the period of West Germanic tribes. At this time most traces of the Roman rule, economic and linguistic were destroyed (the period of West Germanic tribes). The Romans occupation of Britain lasted until the 5thcentury. In 410 the Roman legions were withdrawn. The withdraw of the Roman Empire was final and the Roman Empire was breaking up. After the Romans had left the British Isles. The Roman speech affected the British language and they had acquired from the Romans and from the Romanized Celts new lexical units and concepts. But they had contacts with the Romans while they lived on the continent before the migration to Britain.
Their ties with the Latin language were strengthened in later ages. They marked the influence of Latin on Old English. The Germanic invaders made 2 kinds of linguistic contacts:
with the spoken dialects of the Celtic grammar
·         with the Latin language
Germanic raiders began their attacks on Britain in the first half of the 5th century. And the conquest extended over a long period. The most part of Britain was colonized by the West Germanic tribes.
It lasted into the 6th century. The newcomers dispossessed soon other Germanic tribes, they came in clans and families. They migrated and the Germanic invasion was different from the Roman occupation. The invaders came from the western subdivision of Germanic tribes. They were Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.
The Jutes had been the first to arrive here from Jutland. 
The tribes of Ancient Germans in Scandinavian remained isolated. Only small group crossed the Baltic Sea and settled in Jutland.
They occupied the land in the South-East of Britain. This part of Britain became known as the Kingdom of Kent. 
Saxons came from low-land Germany. They settled on the both banks of the river Thames. And they became known as west-, east-, middle and south Saxons. All of them consolidated into the Kingdom of West Saxons-Wessex.
 Last came the Angles from the low basin of river Alba and Southern Denmark. They occupied the territory between the Wash and Hambour. They consolidated into the Kingdom - Mercia, Anglia and North Numbria (Northumbria).
The bulk of the population of England sprang of the newcomers, later under feudalism social differentiation and surviving Celtic tribes blended into one nation. The invader prevailed over natives and after the settlement Germanic dialects were spoken all over Britain with the exception of Wales, Scotland, Cornwall.
Chapter 2. Similarities between German and English.
2.1. English is a Germanic language
Perhaps the most crucial point to make is that English is a language which originally derived from West Germanic more than 2,000 years ago. Indeed, both the German and English languages are considered to be members of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, meaning they are still closely related today.
Given their shared origins, it should come as little surprise to learn there are strong resemblances between them. It is estimated that more than a third of English non-technical lexicons are of Germanic origin, as are many English words. Furthermore, the modern languages have both loaned words from Latin, Greek and French.
2.2. The two languages use the same alphabet
One of the most obvious similarities between German and English is the fact that both languages utilise the same 26 letters which form the Latin alphabet. This is a major plus point, as it makes it easy for English speakers to start writing in the German language straight away.
With the exception of learning rules regarding the additional umlauted letters (ä, ö and ü) and the Eszett or sharp S (ß), this transition is fairly simple. Certainly, it represents an advantage over an English speaker trying to learn a language like Mandarin, Arabic or Japanese, which utilise completely different writing systems.
2.3. Several German words are used in the English language
If you are able to speak English, chances are you already know some German words! The English language has borrowed a number of words from German and some of them are used fairly regularly. For example, the word 'rucksack' to describe a bag carried on a person's back, or the word 'angst', used in psychology to describe anxiety.
The use of German words in English is even more common when talking about food and drink. The word 'spritzer' (apple) is often used when talking about alcohol, while 'pretzel', 'strudel' and 'bratwurst' are all German too. Meanwhile, English has also borrowed the word 'delicatessen' to describe stores selling pre-prepared foods.
Over the years, the German language has also borrowed a number of English words too. This is especially prevalent in the worlds of technology, music, advertising and fashion, where English speakers should encounter a lot of familiar words and phrases while making the transition to German.
For instance, the words 'Computer', 'Designer', 'Album', 'Image' and 'Laser' have all been adopted from English, and English words are often borrowed when a craze starts outside of German-speaking areas. Examples of this include 'Skateboarding' and 'Aerobics', which are both recognised by German speakers.
In addition to the vast number of words which are shared between the two languages, German and English also feature many words that sound extremely similar. This is a major plus point when it comes to learning German from a starting point of understanding English, as it is often possible to guess what some words mean.
For example, the German word for 'house' is 'Haus', the German word for 'university' is 'Universität' and the German word for 'camera' is 'Kamera'. For an English speaker, it would be fairly easy to ascertain that the German sentence "Ich trinke Wasser" means "I drink water," even if they had never encountered these German words before.
German
English Russian
Das Haushausдом
Der Gottgodбог
Das Goldgoldзолото
Das Wetterweatherпогода
Der Busbusавтобус
Der Namenameимя
Der Freundfriendдруг
Die Handhandрука
Der Gartengardenсад
Die Familiefamilyсемья
Die Mausmouseмышь
2.4.German and English words often follow the same grammatical rules
For English speakers who are attempting to learn German, one of the features they will encounter is a similarity in grammatical rules. Perhaps the best example of this is with the way verbs change based on their tense and this can be demonstrated with the verb 'to drink', which is 'trinken' in German.
The English word changes based on tense, from 'drink' to 'drank' to 'drunk'. In German, for the same three tenses, you use the words 'trinkt', 'trank' and 'getrunken' and the same basic rule applies to most other verbs too. Therefore, an English speaker can often have a pretty good idea of German verb patterns from the very beginning.
seinbeед. ч. мн. ч. ед. ч. мн. ч
binsindamarebistseidareareistsindisare2.5. Both languages use Arabic numbering systems
Another advantage of learning German as an English speaker is that the two languages use the same Arabic numerals and numbering system. Much like in English, numbers are all comprised of sequences of the digits 0-9 and while these numerals have different names in German, the follow the same core principles.
This can perhaps be best observed by looking at the numbers from 10 to 20.
English: ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty.
German: zehn, elf, zwoelf, dreizehn, vierzehn, fünfzehn, sechzehn, siebzehn, achtzehn, neunzehn, zwanzig.
As you can see, the suffix 'teen' is replaced by 'zehn', but the basic pattern stays the same.
2.6. German and English are both popular global languages
English is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, but this status can sometimes hinder English speakers when it comes to their desire to learn a second language, especially if that language is deemed to have a lower level of global importance.
However, the German language is still thriving and is the single most widely spoken language in the European Union. It has official language status in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and various other countries, and is a recognised minority language in countries as diverse as Brazil, Kazakhstan, Namibia and Denmark.

Conclusion
To sum up the results of our work. So, we know that the similarity of German and English is due to the common origin of these languages, which were the basis for tribal dialects of the ancient Germans. During the analysis of linguistic phenomena we have seen specific examples that the German and English languages ​​have similarities not only in vocabulary but also in grammar. We hope that our work will help us further in learning a second language, and will be interesting to students who are learning English or German as a second foreign language.