Usually, it's easy to tell whether a word has Latin or German ancestry. Water ("wasser") clearly comes from German, whereas aquatic ("aqua") clearly comes from Latin.
But what's harder for me to tell, at first glance, is the ancestry of the words "mother" and "father". The Latin equivalent is "mater" and "pater", and the German equivalent is "Vater" and "Mutter".
Both the Latin and German equivalents are extremely similar to the English as well as to each other. This leads me to ask a couple questions.
- Why are the Latin and German words for "mother" and "father" so similar?
- Is the ancestry of "mother" and "father" Latin or German?