There are many thousands of German words that are cognate to English words, in fact a sizeable fraction of native German and English vocabulary, although for various reasons much of it is not immediately obvious. Yet many of them are easy to correlate, since the German words follow the rules of High German consonant shift, which is a German phenomenon and makes English stay closer to the protogermanic language, from which both, English and German, derive. These rules are: Most of the words in the following table have almost the same meaning as in English. Compound word cognates