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Besides being (mostly) from the same Indo-European family, all European languages have influenced each other over the centuries. I don't know enough about Alban
by rob74 3y ago
Besides being (mostly) from the same Indo-European family, all European languages have influenced each other over the centuries. I don't know enough about Albanian and Welsh, so I'll take Romanian - which is a Romance language, but also has plenty of Slavic, Greek, Hungarian etc. etc. loan words. That's why the author of the article says he's joking when he calls Albanian and Welsh "almost Romance" - loan words, even a lot of them, may make a language easier to learn, but don't move it to another family.
- xhevahir 3y ago> That's why the author of the article says he's joking when he calls Albanian and Welsh "almost Romance" - loan words, even a lot of them, may make a language easier to learn, but don't move it to another family. That's one of my problems with this article. Even if the author does briefly admit its facetiousness, a lot of readers will come away thinking that language families are about family resemblances, when they're really a matter of genealogy, pure and simple. That, and it comes across sort of like a Latinist's attempt to prove all roads lead to Rome, giving short shrift to Albanian (which occupies its own branch of the Indo-European family, with its own characteristics) and to English, which among other things is drastically analytic in comparison with the rest of the I-E languages. (I can't comment on the case of Welsh.)