
“The Family Gene”
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4.8 17 votes
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This information is awesome! Thank you! :-)
Seeing the word genitive among its other word family members with all of the explanations made the article well worth the read. (One day I’ll be able to type that sentence in German and correctly.)
I’ll wait :)
I think it is a useful function of the dictionary, satisfies the nerdy part of my brain.
I wouldn’t equate naïve to stupid. Stupid is a permanent state of low intelligence, whereas naïvity is a temporary state of inexperience. You can be super intelligent but still lack experience in a certain area or situation.
I changed it to “lacking insight”. Does that work?
Yeah i think that fits better :)
Das ist super nützlich für mich! Ist das dein Lebenswerk? Du hast ein großes Herz. I’m trying to say you are very generous — not sure if that is the expression in German. And I just realized that “generous” is from the gene family! See, your dictionary is helping me make connections already! Ich finde die super-kurze Sätze, die hinter den Worte stehen, sehr hilfreich und nicht zu abstrakt.
Super, das freut mich wirklich zu hören :)!!
Lebenswerk.. naja, nur ein Teil davon :). Ich habe viel vor!
I love these deep dives into the origins of words and the relationships between languages. It’s a very useful feature for your dictionary, and very useful to me as an aide mémoire– just the way having studied Latin in high school helps me today with words in English. Thank you Emanuel for all your hard work and preparation!
Perhaps “indigent” comes from Latin “egere, egentus” = needy.
“oxygen” is indeed acid-GENerator, nicely revealed by its German translation “sauerstopf”
Oh I love the word origins and relationships!
More to come :)!
Very nice. Your tendency to delve into etymologies was one of the things that kept me returning to the site. Now I’m in danger of disappearing into the dictionary for hours (or maybe days) at a time. Even if none of it sticks I’ll enjoy myself. Thank you.
“Genetic engineering” somehow feels different knowing that the the two words are quite closely related..
I think the most valuable takeaway from something like this is an increased awareness and intuition. So your mind starts seeing possible connections by itself, because it has learned that they are “a thing”.
So even if you don’t remember one single family member, your brain will still walk away with some “excitement” (in the neural sense) and that’ll make it grow new connections.
Yeah, this sort of info is good – it provides links that can be useful in trying to get a sense of meaning for unknown words, and also hooks to hang memory on.
“Your network is your net worth” also hold true for vocabulary :)
I LOVE this kind of dictionary information. It opens new worlds!! And the short description? Es ist ausgezeichnet!!
Super, das freut mich!!
This language history keeps me very interested in both languages.
Awesome, happy to hear that :)
Very interesting! I guess you could also add genus, or is that just us using latin directly??
Interesting that genitive is also part of this family. Although I’m trying to avoid devoting any brainspace to the genitive case, suddenly it kind of makes sense why its called that. Perhaps this will help using it!
I think “genus” is just the more Latin version of grammatical “gender”. I’ve added it to the dictionary though.
There are so many words in that family. Too many to write them all down.
Yes! There was a lot here that I didn’t realize.
I swear I learn as much about English here as I do about German :-)
Interesting – I too learned much more about English once I started learning German!
This is awesome! Thank you!
I noticed the etymological bit the other day when looking at dicht :D
Love it!
On this one, you could also include the given names Eugene/Eugenia/Eugenie (“well-born”).
Wow, nice one!!
Great fun to browse but so distracting. It’s like, a “What was I talking about Hmm?!”
Hmmmm – how about utterances, grunts and common exclamations and reactions to surprises, etc.
I think the “hmm” was just meant as an add on :)
Haha, true. I didn’t think about that but yeah, I guess you can get lost a bit.
I think the proposed feature is valuable. Please keep it as part of the dictionary.
Will do. I’ll add more descriptions over time.
Thank you so much for sponsorship. Things you post are really helpful. Thanks again!
Welcome :)!