• Nacktmull@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Wow, is that so!? Now “Baldwin” by my sources seems to in old West-Germanic: “brave, bold friend,” right?

    Exactly! In old-high-German “balde” means bold and “wini” means friend. So “Baldwin” is obviously a short form of “Baldewini”.

    And then, about the second part: [pic]

    Google translate is just being silly again, because “lein” does not mean “there” in German. Deepl correctly translates “Bienlein” as “little bee”.

    Once again, I find it kind of odd (but not rare), how the Germanic-French language English, has roots which don’t always refer to either of its parents, i.e. French & German. Like-- the Latinish “miel” / “mielo” and Germanic-ish “Honig.” It seems like they don’t apply here…?

    I`m not sure about that. “Miel” / “mielo” are from neo-Latin languages and have developed from the old-Latin word “mel”. Then “honey” on the other hand is from English, a Germanic language and was derived from “honag”, a word from old-high-German that referred to yellow / golden colour.

    Seriously, my French has been coming along so well these days that I’m wondering what language I might want to study next. Now obviously it’s going to take some time, but what about learning German? (I love the fact that it’s the main building-block upon English)

    They say German is one of the harder languages to learn but if you don´t mind that, sure why not!