5 ms·
As someone with native command over Hindi and, unless it's spoken by folks from certain UK countries, English, who also spoke and read Sanskrit quite well durin
by shelled 5mo ago
As someone with native command over Hindi and, unless it's spoken by folks from certain UK countries, English, who also spoke and read Sanskrit quite well during school, I had a period of a few months when I went down the rabbit-hole of wonderful general linguistic history and the interrelation among them. I was shocked beyond imagination to see how we might actually have been more the same than different, if we go back far enough (not even prehistoric 'far enough') in each case (even the languages which are geographically distant currently). But then, of course, civilisation happened.
- walthamstow 5mo agoMy father in law is a Persian speaker. I was very surprised to learn that thank you (mersi) is the same as in French, and OK/indeed (baleh) is the same as in Spanish.
- bradrn 5mo agoPersian mersi is actually a direct borrowing from the French [1]. Not sure about the other one, but I guess it’s just a coincidence, as happens so often in language [2]. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%B3%DB%8C#Persian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%B3%DB%8C#Pers... [2] https://zompist.com/chance.htm https://zompist.com/chance.htm
- nephihaha 5mo agoArigato in Japanese is said to be a borrowing from Portuguese Obrigado (might want to verify that!).
- lproven 5mo agoNo, it's documented, as is tempura. It's like pancakes: you make them before the time of fasting. "The Time of X" in Spanish is "tempora X" and I would bet Portuguese is similar. There are loads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_words_of_Portuguese_origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_words_of_Port...
- nephihaha 5mo agoGura mie eu.
- card_zero 5mo agoIt's listed there under False cognates. > evidence indicates arigatō has a purely Japanese origin I remain suspicious, though. Maybe what happened was the popularization of an existing Japanese term under the influence of Portuguese Jesuits, since it sounded similar to obrigado?
- nephihaha 5mo agoPerfectly possible. I think I've seen evidence elsewhere of similar but unrelated words influencing each other. For example, round about where I live the Romany word "shan" is used meaning "mean" or "worthless", but it seems to have been influenced by the unrelated "sean" in Gaelic (also pronounced "shan") which means "old". So it's come to mean something worn out as well.
- BalinKing 5mo agoIn general, I think this phenomenon is called "phono-semantic matching": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phono-semantic_matching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phono-semantic_matching.
- rhplus 5mo agoEven more interesting is when words are borrowed back! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reborrowing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reborrowing For example, katsu from cutlet, is borrowed back into English to mean… cutlet. And when combined with “curry” as in “katsu curry” the journey meanders all the way through Tamil, Portuguese, Japanese and English, following sailors where they went.
- qingcharles 5mo agoJapanese is fascinating to me as a language freak for the enormous amount of borrowing. As an English speaker, as long as you can decode katakana (easy to learn) you can probably walk around the streets of Tokyo and read half the signs.
- tralarpa 5mo agoSpanish vale and English value have the same Latin origin. Persian bale is an Arabic loanword.
- nephihaha 5mo agoThe Lithuanian Swadesh list includes the following words and I was able to find numerous relatives to Gaelic. I could be wrong about some. Obvious similarities to Latin in some cases too, maybe loanwords. But one can see the Indo-European connections. Lithuanian and Celtic had no direct contact with each other AFAIK, although Celtic was in contact with Vasconic, Romance, Germanic and Slavic... And Lithuanian was in contact with Slavic and Germanic, maybe Finno-Ugric... Obviously numbers... Sniegas - Sneachd — Snow In — An(n) — In Najas — Nuadh — New Marios — Muir (genitive mara) — Sea Srūti (to flow) — Sruth (stream) Mirti (to die) — Murt/mort (murder) klausytis (to hear) – cluas (ear), cluinntinn (listen) sekla — sìol — seed Senas — Sean — Old Vyras - Fear (plural Fir)- Man (wer(e)) Dantas (tooth) - Deudag (toothache) Ugnis (fire) — Aigeann (fireplace) Raudonas — Ruadh — Red Dienas (day) — Di- (day in day names) – Day Pilnas — Làn — Full Kaire — Ceàrr — Left Dešinė — Deas — Right
- Bayart 5mo agoBaltic and the older layers of Celtic languages are known to be pretty conservative, if not archaic, within the context of IE languages. If you look at Old Irish the ressemblance will be blatant.
- mdp2021 5mo agoBrother! I hope you have have also studied a bit of Latin and Greek, to see the great similarities, and paths like that of "jñāna, gnō̃́sis, gnosco, knowledge". It is a very great thing that so many peoples now speak languages with clear common roots buried behind the deviations of use; and outmost interesting to recognize the plan and the deep thought in those radixes.
- anthk 5mo ago"Conocimiento, conocer" in Spanish (to know).
- wolfi1 5mo agoisn't Spanish some form of Latin (being colonized by Rome for centuries), what I would be interested in, if there are some Vandal leftovers in nowadays Spanish
- wolfi1 5mo agosorry, it was the Visigoths, not the Vandals
- anthk 5mo agoGuerra, perro, more that I can't remember, and a good chunk of names (in Spanish): https://muyinteresante.okdiario.com/historia/60526.html https://muyinteresante.okdiario.com/historia/60526.html Well, let's see: Perro, guerra, mes, pagar, ver, fuego, tierra, cima, perro, clero, altar, tribunal, rey... lots more. Tapa, dardo, ganso, ropa, guardia, sala, cama, barro, guijarro, zarza... more than anyone would think. Aspa, espía, brotar... and the -engo suffix. Visicothic and Celtic cultures are more ingrained in the North/Middle of Spain more than anyone would think despite everyone pictured it as a 100% Mediterranean culture. Rico/rich, fresco/fresh, Blanco/blank, ganar/win... is not a coincidence. Heck, tons of Medieval lore in the Castilles use a Gothic typeface... Engo/enco suffix in words, related to -ingos in Gothic. On names and surnames... Alonso, Alfonso, Guillermo, Fernando, Hernando, Hernández, López, -everything ending with -ez-, Leovigildo, Rodrigo and tons more.
- roysting 5mo agoI’ve long thought about how wonderful it would be to create a contemporary new hybrid language whose objective was to unify communication along the very common linguistic origins at least some language clusters have. The core challenge of course is that it would be contrived in a time when top down imposition does not work as effectively. It’s a dream I have nonetheless. It would be a gargantuan effort just alone to devise a language that would unify historic language origins roots in a contemporary time. The objective would be to stop the death and eradication of languages, e.g., Welsh, German, or any of the numerous other smaller languages and dialects that are all under varying states and types of endangerment or extinction risk, but also prevent an ignoble, unstable, and inadequate language like contemporary English from dominating the whole world.
- detourdog 5mo agoI’m sure you are aware of Esperanto. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
- lproven 5mo agoI preferred Interlingua... But these days, Slovio would help me more. I've tried Slovio on Slavs of about 10 nationalities. None had ever heard of it. All of then, no exceptions, could just understand it perfectly well, to their great surprise. https://www.interlingua.com/interlingua-en/ https://www.interlingua.com/interlingua-en/ https://www.slovio.com/ https://www.slovio.com/
- amdsn 5mo agoI find slovio to be jarring. It's like someone took vaguely slavic words and slammed Esperanto-inspired grammar onto them. Something like Interslavic at least has noun/verb morphology that is much more familiar to all Slavic language speakers. I could imagine myself actually speaking Interslavic, but not the case for Slovio. It's simply too strange. Straight from the Slovio website: >Slovio es novju mezxunarodju jazika ktor razumijut cxtirsto milion ludis na celoju zemla. >Slovio is a new international language that 400 million people on the planet understand I am a Russian speaker so the copula "es" being written is strange but obviously I speak other languages that use their copula in the present tense so that's not so bad, but to 100% of slavic speakers "jazik" (tongue/language) is masculine, yet the adjectives here are reminiscent of ones for a feminine noun in the accusative case which is doubly weird as that case would also make no sense here. The second half of the sentence isn't so bad aside from "ludis" (-s plural is alien to the entire family) and "na celoju zemla" (more confusion where my brain expects a different case form). It's just odd that it completely drops noun cases on the floor when almost all the Slavic languages still have healthy productive inflection systems.
- anthk 5mo agoIt's all about Proto-Indoeuropean. You can get tons of words from Latin and Sanskrit and compare them.
- btilly 5mo agoYes. There is a reason why a family of languages is known as Indo-European. For something completely different, try learning Mandarin.