Russian-Germanic cognates

[gusl]

I just learned some Russian words from cozmic1, at KGB food + dance lesson event.

Here's my list of German-Russian cognates (no Latin, Greek words allowed).
kupi = kaufen (Dutch "kopen") (to buy)
raboto = arbeit (to work)
lyub = lieben (to love)

(I trust my readers to correct my Russian.)

It's kinda surprising how many cognates there are, since they are in different language families (the only known common ancestor being some branch of PIE). I vaguely remember reading that old Germanic borrowed heavily, and had little vocabulary of its own.

Comments

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

I believe there's also a Finnish cognate of "kaufen", like "kapistola" for "market", or something like that. But that doesn't clearly mean it's from borrowing, because the pater/pita/father sets and the like are about equally obvious across a range of branches of IE.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

It would seem to me that Germanic and Slavic are close branches of PIE... at least closer than Germanic and Italic.

The Italo-Celtic hypothesis suggests this. I guess I should emphasize that I'm talking about vocabulary (which spreads areally), rather than deeper structures, like grammar.

Maybe what I'm observing really is trivial... and I just didn't notice the areal cognates between Italic (my native "language") and Germanic because those seemed "natural" to me, e.g. dia = day/dag/tag. But maybe I falsely attributed these to heavy borrowing of Latin words in Germanic languages (when in fact, they are PIE words).

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Btw, Finnish is not IE. So it must be from borrowing.

[joyful-vydra.livejournal.com]

Regarding the correctness of your Russian, it's fine as far as I can tell; what you have is the root word of a family of words related to the same concept (i.e. "lyub" -> "lyubit" to love, "lyuboff" lover, "lyubimiy" favorite, etc.)

One of the earlier groups of Slavs were Germanic invader/settler/nomads, way back when; this would be the cultural group that (much) later founded Moscow, which was well-established in the days of Genghis Khan. For what it's worth.

The "rabot" root is more properly spelled "robot," incidentally, and that's no coincidence--the person to coin the term "Robot" spoke a Slavic language (Czech I think) in which the word means roughly serf or worker.

Another random note: the Russian word for "German" also means "idiot."