2 February 2014

"The nature and genius of the German language"

This is the name of a mammoth tome published by philologist Daniel Boileau in 1840.

Can't say I've read it all but, at one point, he draws attention to the fact that words in German are often cleverly formed by uniting two known ideas.

Listening to the radio, I heard "nun ein Ausschnitt von...", literally a "cut-out". And now, an excerpt from...

In English, we have "excerpt", formed from ex- (out of) and carpere (pluck).

Any German speaker would recognise the two stand-alone words aus and Schnitt. It's harder to spot "carpere"...


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