Did you all know that the word ear is in the word hear? Pretty ironic. I'll bet this goes over well.

Probably a coincidence. But it's an interesting observation.

In German, it's hören and Ohr. But it doesn't work out in French: écouter and oreille. Nor does it work in Spanish: escuchar and oreja. I have a feeling it doesn't work in any of the Romance languages.

If only TDI would come by this thread and give us the Dutch/Flemish words, and Sputnik the Danish words, and Plazma the Swedish words. We need a more Germanic presence here.

So? I find it much more ironic that the words "live" and "evil" are reversed spellings.

Or that Evian is naive spelled backwards.

Or that god is a backward dog.

Escuchar means "to listen," from Latin auscultare. "To hear" is oír, from Latin audere.

Because of Grimm's Law, the H in "hear" represents a K in Indo-European, so it's probably related to Greek akouein and the English derivative "acoustic." "Ear" is related to Latin auris, whence we get "aural." (The diminutive auricula is the source of the French and Spanish words.) The similarity is coincidental.There are lots of free online dictionaries. This one looks pretty good: http://www.freedict.com/onldict/dut.html.

Dutch is oor for "ear" and horen for "hear," very close to German as is often the case. Swedish is öra and höra. The Danish words are almost the same, with E instead of A, and spelling the umluted O with that slashed "Crazy O" that I can't get on this browser.

Oops, you're right.

I also got the French wrong. They say entendre. But this is weird, because the Spanish cognate, entender, means "to understand". I guess semantic drift is responsible?

For questions of English etymology, I like the Online Etymology Dictionary.

It traces "hear" in English back through West Saxon to the Proto-Germanic khauzjianan. It traces "ear" back through the Germanic languages as well, back to some PIE root aus, relating to perception. It's not clear from the listings whether khauzjianan and aus are directly related, though clearly the word for "hear" and the word "ear" took very different etymological paths over the course of time.

I always wondered how they say "hear" in French. If Latin audere condensed into Spanish oír, it would probably have vanished into nothingness in French. I always assumed a double-entendre was a "double understanding." That makes more sense than "double hearing."No doubt. It's a reasonable drift, like German knecht for "farm hand" and Danish kvinne for "woman". An etymology would help. I've never found an etymological dictionary of any other language, online or off.

I don't really have anything intelligent to say, other than it is the same in Danish, incase you're interested.

Hear = Høre
Ear = Øre

EDIT: Oh and Fraggle, it's spelled "kvinde" in Danish. Not to be anal, but I just figured you'd want to know, with your enormous knowledge in linguistics.

ive never thought otherwise, comming from east london ive never even heard somebody pronounce it with a H, its always been "come ere" to me.

peace.

Yeah, those are characters I can read but not post. (My quote of your post will come out garbled.) The Swedes spell AE and OE with a dieresis (umlaut) instead, taking pity on folks like me. Aha, I found it. Kvinne is Norwegian. Is the D pronounced in Danish? It has so many silent letters.That's "Cockney" dialect, right? We're told that in England dialect is as much a function of social "class" as region, and that Cockney is specific both to London and to the classes that we Americans call the "working poor" and the "unemployed poor."

Edit: The quote didn't come out garbled? Let's try some other "special characters." Croatian ? - Czech ? ? ? ? - Danish œ - Esperanto ? ? ? ? - French â ë - German ß - Polish ? - Portuguese ã õ - Romanian î ? - Swedish æ - ? Turkish ?

Looks like some languages are more "special" than others.

No it is not, we pronounce it like the Norweigians spell it. :p

Here are the Swedish votes hrrm...words: Höra, öra (hear, ear).

Go Sweden!!

Ja.

Got those already in post #6, but thanks. Swedish is the easiest Scandinavian language to access because it has the most speakers and is a player in the world economy.

Interesting, they're even different in Lojban, the supposedly logical language:

dictionary link

aural (pertaining to something heard) tirna (tin): x2 of: x1 hears x2 against background/noise x3; x2 is audible; (adjective-) x1 is |
aural (pertaining to the ear) kerlo (ker): x1 is a/the ear [body-part] of x2; [metaphor: sensory apparatus, information gathering] [(adjective-) x1 is |]
aural kerlo (ker): x1 is a/the ear [body-part] of x2; [metaphor: sensory apparatus, information gathering] [(adjective-) x1 is |]

Your quote looks fine to me.

Yes, it seems I have access to the character sets of the "major" European languages: French, Spanish, German, Italian, Swedish, and Portuguese. But not Danish, Norwegian, Romanian, the Slavic languages, or any non-Roman alphabet.