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<blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 3309194" data-attributes="member: 2205">English isn't just heavily influenced by Germanic sources--it is a West Germanic language, who's origins lie mostly on the coastline of what today are the low countries.&nbsp; Frisian is it's closest &quot;sister language&quot; but both Dutch and German are close genetic relatives as well.&nbsp; The reason lich and leiche are so similar is because they are cognates--the same word from the same source with different influences on them since the separation of those who went on to become German speakers and those who went on to become English speakers.If you look at texts for Old High German, Old Low Franconian and Old English, the similarities are even more pronounced and striking.Anyway, English also had a fairly long-running and influential contact with Northern Germanic languages, via the Danelaw and other formerly Viking settlements in Britain itself, and then from Norman French from--well, from the Normans.&nbsp; There's actually very little direct Latin influence, but since Norman French is of course a descendent of local vulgar Latin in northern Gaul, it had a pretty significant influence on the development of English--mostly in the enrichment of the vocabulary.&nbsp; English is somewhat unique--or at least unusual--in that while it accosted and took a lot of this French-based vocabulary and Anglicized it, it also tended to keep it's &quot;native&quot; vocabulary for the most part too, leading English to have one of the richest and most diverse vocabularies of any language in general use today.However, this particular situation is not one where that happened; the native word lic--&gt;lich (compare with Dutch lijk, German Leiche and Swedish lik did not really survive, and the Latin based one, corpus--&gt;corpse did.However, thanks to Clark Ashton Smith, who was an extremely well-read and very erudite writer with a command of the English language equalled by very, very few, the word entered the vocabulary of Weird Tales pulp fiction, which is likely where Gygax first encountered it, and it has taken on a second wind in fantasy at least.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Desdichado, post: 3309194, member: 2205"] English isn't just heavily influenced by Germanic sources--it [b]is[/b] a West Germanic language, who's origins lie mostly on the coastline of what today are the low countries. Frisian is it's closest "sister language" but both Dutch and German are close genetic relatives as well. The reason lich and leiche are so similar is because they are cognates--the same word from the same source with different influences on them since the separation of those who went on to become German speakers and those who went on to become English speakers. If you look at texts for Old High German, Old Low Franconian and Old English, the similarities are even more pronounced and striking. Anyway, English also had a fairly long-running and influential contact with Northern Germanic languages, via the Danelaw and other formerly Viking settlements in Britain itself, and then from Norman French from--well, from the Normans. There's actually very little direct Latin influence, but since Norman French is of course a descendent of local vulgar Latin in northern Gaul, it had a pretty significant influence on the development of English--mostly in the enrichment of the vocabulary. English is somewhat unique--or at least unusual--in that while it accosted and took a lot of this French-based vocabulary and Anglicized it, it also tended to keep it's "native" vocabulary for the most part too, leading English to have one of the richest and most diverse vocabularies of any language in general use today. However, this particular situation is not one where that happened; the native word lic-->lich (compare with Dutch [i]lijk[/i], German [i]Leiche[/i] and Swedish [i]lik[/i] did not really survive, and the Latin based one, [i]corpus[/i]-->corpse did. However, thanks to Clark Ashton Smith, who was an extremely well-read and very erudite writer with a command of the English language equalled by very, very few, the word entered the vocabulary of Weird Tales pulp fiction, which is likely where Gygax first encountered it, and it has taken on a second wind in fantasy at least. [/QUOTE]

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