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If you're familiar with ancient and medieval European history, you're pretty much familiar with the origins of most of the European languages. Areas that were
by bdw5204 3y ago
If you're familiar with ancient and medieval European history, you're pretty much familiar with the origins of most of the European languages.
Areas that were part of the Roman Empire generally speak Latin dialects like Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. The exception being the eastern part of the Roman Empire which historically spoke Greek and still speaks Greek (except for the parts of the Roman Empire that remain Islamic).
Germany and Scandinavia speak Germanic languages because they were never Roman. Britain was only partially Roman and for significantly less time than France or southern Europe so it retained its Celtic languages except in the part conquered by the Anglo-Saxons (a Germanic tribe) who originally spoke a German language called Old English which was mostly mutually comprehensible with Old Norse (the language of a Germanic tribe called the Vikings who invaded England a few centuries after the Anglo-Saxons and were eventually converted to Christianity and assimilated). Then they were conquered by a French nobleman in 1066 and the English nobility spoke French for a few centuries before it fused with "Old English" into something that sounds somewhat like English.
Because of this, English speakers already know a significant number of words in both Germanic and "Romance" (Latin) languages, even moreso than for other Indo-European languages. But you still need to be careful not to trust a German offering you a "gift" (the German word for "poison" because, in German, it was a euphemism that lost its original meaning of English "gift"[0]).
[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gift https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gift
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> The exception being the eastern part of the Roman Empire which historically spoke Greek and still speaks Greek (except for the parts of the Roman Empire that remain Islamic). Aren't there big chunks of the Eastern Roman Empire that now speak Slavic languages? Also, the parts of the Eastern Roman Empire that currently remain Islamic constitute nearly the entire Eastern Roman Empire, including the capital.
- bdw5204 3y agoI'm much less familiar with Eastern European history but that appears to be due to another wave of migration in early medieval Europe where Slavic peoples who originally lived further east moved into those areas after the Huns drove the Germanic tribes westward.[0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs#Migrations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs#Migrations
- timeon 3y agoBut still it is big chunk of Europe.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoBut there's a word for "all of the Eastern Roman Empire, except for the parts that are not Greece". We just call that "Greece". Greek used to be the language of the Eastern Roman Empire, and it was almost completely extirpated; it is not a good example of persistence.
- gampleman 3y agoDepending on your political stance, you may be forgetting Cyprus.
- brabel 3y agoThat's an amazing piece of history I was not familiar with. I have recently travelled around the area between Belarus, Czech Republic, Lithuania and Austria and their history is obviously complex and interlinked, but I only saw in the museums the history starting from around 1000 years ago... I didn't consider that much of this region, which today includes mostly slavs, had not actually been populated by slavs just a few centuries before the history I was looking at (literally) which starts more or less with the Rus, Vikings (which apparently initially ruled Kievan Rus[1], despite the region being already slav at around the time ~800AD!), Bavarians and Balts to the north (which became the Grand Duchy of Lithuania later - which for some time actually extended to now-Russian Smolensk, covering most of today's Belarus and a part of today's Russia!) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus%27_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus%27_people