The High German Consanant Shift

Given a historically English word (that is, not a loan word), you can apply a few simple rules to get a German version of that word. English /p/ corresponds to German /f/ or /pf/, and English /t/ corresponds to German /z/ ot /tz/, to name a couple of examples. Sometimes, the word that you get will be it's German cognate. So, given the English word "apple", pronounced /æpel/, we might expect the corresponding German word to be /æfəl/ or /æpfəl/. Don't worry about the weird letters - that's just the IPA way of writing the vowels in "apple". In this case, /æpfəl/ is pretty close to the correct German "Apfel" (m), which is the German word for "apple". If you try this, be warned that a German cognate won't exist for many, or most, English words. In addition, the vowels are harder to predict, so I would reccomend sticking with the consonants. Either way, if you are learning German, this is a great way to remember German cognates!

For more information on this kind of sound change, see Wikipedia. The Wikipedia page is geared to shift from proto-Germanic to High German languages (like German), so keep in mind that there were also sound changes happening in English during the same time.

For some more examples of coganates, going English → German:

• apple → Apfel (m)
• fish → Fisch (m)
• sleep (Old English: slæpan) → schlafen
• too → zu