“Ahouse” sounds so much like an actual archaic word, but I can’t find evidence it was.
Yes, “home” and “zuhause” mean the same thing but they aren’t exactly the same, zuhause is a compound word. English also has compound words, for example “aboard” and “abed”. The English word isn’t “ahouse”; it is simply “home”.
samus12345@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Treeniks@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
True. I was more going on the idea of OP that it must confuse english learners. I often feel people who only know one language tend to forget that most latin languages tend to have similar quirks, often making such quirks in a foreign language rather natural.
wewbull@feddit.uk 6 months ago
In this case, it’s nothing to do with Latin. German is not a Latin language, and old (pre-Norman) English is closer to German than anything else. It’s the shared Germanic heritage which gives us this quirk.
mindlesscrollyparrot@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
Absolutely. The fundamental thing about the rules of grammar is that they’re more like guidelines. In fact, I think OP’s example is hardly the most confusing or inconsistent thing in English, which is not to say that the question isn’t a really good one. The quirks, similarities and differences are one thing that makes language-learning really interesting.