The Pitter Patter of Autistic Brain Cells

I booted up my Duo after a long period of inactivity to see how much Danish I’d forgotten, after having sung a few songs in German during my overheads. I don’t know by what metric Duolingo targets frequency of word occurrence, but dreng (boy) occurs frequently. Which made me think. In a book about something I learned the word stems from Old Norse for warrior/raider. Or something. As you’d expect, there are threads running between English, German and Danish which tie them together, their all belonging to the Germanic family and all. Obviously the Germanic tree is broader than those three examples, but I’ve only flirted with Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian and have never really penetrated their depths.

Hey now.

Anywho. It made me think of how biases are internalised in the evolution of language. A famous German word with philosophical padding is “drang” or, as we say, “stress.” One…