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Is there any significance to the fact that English and German seem to have almost all their interrogatives start with "w", while Romance languages like French and Spanish, mostly have "qu" interrogatives? Am I correct in guessing that the "qu" comes from Latin? And if so, does it strike anybody else as ironic that all those "w" interrogatives in English are "qu"estions?
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Carpal Tunnel
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There's a whole set of rules about this. Question starts with a Qu because it's of Romance origin.
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Did the Grimm brothers have anything to do with codifying the rules you mention? Also, if German has Frage, and Dutch has vraag, what happened to the Englisc equivalent that was displaced by question? I would have thought we might at least have ended up with a Germanic/Romance pair like freedom/liberty, brotherhood/fraternity, that sort of thing.
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In English there are many cases where there are three tiers of words meaning essentially the same thing.
Germanic/French/Latin
ask/question/interrogate
goodness/virtue/probity
better/improve/ameliorate
rider/cavalier/equestrian
None of the words have supplanted the others, they just get used with different frequency and have taken slightly different meanings. Interrogate has a more sinister meaning than question which in turn is more formal than ask.
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Huh? Ich bin übergefragt. But seriously  , this is a question for William the Conqueror and his hordes. Now if you'd like to hear my theory on the Great Vowel Movement, I'll send it to you in private.
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Yes, in a word. The proto-Indo-European interrogatives began with /kw-/, and they were all related because they were all essentially case-forms of a single word: kwis? 'who?' contained the active ending /-s/, and kwid? 'what?' had a neuter element /-d/ instead.
Other interrogatives 'why?', 'how?' etc. are originally oblique cases 'for what?', 'with what?'.
The normal sound-changes applied in the different branches.
Latin /kw-/ became /k-/, inherited in all its descendants (qui, que, che etc.).
In Germanic it became /hw-/, and yes this is Grimm's Law. The brothers were the first to lay out the regularity of the sound changes. These have become /w-/ in most varieties of English (still /hw-/ in Scots and older American) (and /h-/ in who, how but I'm not sure why), and /v-/ in German (wo, was, wie). It's still a cluster in Icelandic (hvadh).
The /kw-/ became /t-/ or /p-/ in Greek depending on the following vowel: tis, ti, pu, pote.
Now 'query' and 'question' come from a Latin verb root quaes-, which I would guess is from the interrogatives, i.e. originally meant 'to say "what?"', but I can't confirm that.
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Dear AnnaStrophic: "Great Vowel Movement, I'll send it to you in private."
If that isn't a private joke, why not share it with all of us. Glad you didn't make a typo on the middle word.
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Grimm's Law
Excellent reply, Bro. Nick, as we have come to expect of you. You touched on Grimm's Law. Since few people have ever heard of it, we might explain that the brothers Grimm were not just storytellers. They were philologists, among the first serious ones in German studies and the tales resulted from a long research project. What they were really after was information on how German was used and what it's grammar and vocabulary were in various areas, which involved various usages and dialects. They figured that the natural well of the language was to be found in the old folk tales that had been passed down from remote antiquity, so they went out to collect them direct from the lips of all these old gammers in all sorts of remote places. The publication of the tales, and their resultant popularity, was really a by-product of their research. One of the things they learned is that languages change over time and there is a regular progression of how consonantal changes occur, as Nick described. The codified description of how these changes occur is Grimm's law. (Should be Grimms', but that's too much to expect of publishers.) One other note on the tales -- they have been thoroughly bowdlerized to make them more acceptable as children's tales. In the original versions, there are few you would want to read to small tots.
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-- they have been thoroughly bowdlerized to make them more acceptable as children's tales. In the original versions, there are few you would want to read to small tots
Oh, do tell! We are all mostly grownups here (in age anyway.)
Or wait until the children are asleep, if you will ... but an example or two, please?
wow
Need I say "in English, please?"
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What the stepmother wanted to do to Hansel and Gretel was not nice, to say the least. And the father being wimpy enough to go along with it was not very reassuring.The witch wanting to eat Hansel was not nice either. Could scare hell out of any kid really thinking about the story.
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