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LaRondo · #32 10-18-2010, 09:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hatterasguy

I never had any trouble in German class and I am bad at languages. German is Latin based like most other European languages and shares a lot of smiler terms and words with the others including English.

Technical compound words can sometimes be fun, they love compound words. In that respect English is a more precise language, we have actually words for technical terms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderkennzeichnungs-_und_Rindfleischetikettierungs%C3%BCberwachungsaufgaben%C3%BCbertragungsgesetz

http://www.spiegel.de/0,1518,,00.html
Someone who speaks German dig the article up, I'm not that good. I don't think the translation is wrong though, Christ is Christ its the same in both languages.

Answer

German is not a Latin based language. German is a West Germanic language
German is not a Latin based language because it is not a romance language. A Romance language is a language that is derived directly from Latin. They inlude Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. German does, however, have some words from Latin because the Germanic tribes interacted with the Latin speaking peoples when they overthrew Rome.
However, the great majority of Latin words in German were adopted from the time of the Renaissance onwards.
English is also a Germanic language. Many similarities can be seen between German and English, espcially with cognates. Sometimes, words only differ with a couple of letters.
Haus...House
Maus...Mouse
Hund...Dog (Hound)
There is a school of thought that says, by replacing German letter combinations with English letter combinations, you often come up with German words. See the examples above ("u" and "au" for the English "ou"). Although, this isn't always true, very often it works.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_German_a_Latin_based_language