Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
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Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
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Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
#2Interesting map.
The methodology probably wouldn't be comparable to Tyshchenko's, but there is an estimate for the lexical distance between Tocharian and the other Indo-European language families (10.2307/601651) - Tocharian comes out closest to Germanic and Greek.
Then again, Tocharian wasn't spoken anywhere near Europe when it was attested, so it isn't strictly within the scope of the map - but it's unclear how it got there. The most popular view, as far as I know, is that it was the second family to branch off of Indo-European, after Anatolian, but Adams showed that it shares some innovations with Germanic (the reflexes of syllabic resonants and the expansion of the singulative function of the n-stems to adjectives) and Greek (a locative dual *-oisi, represented in the Tocharian B genitive dual), and Eric Hamp placed Tocharian in a 'Northern Indo-European' subgroup with Germanic, Balto-Slavic, and Albanian.
Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
#3From my experience, it does not make a lot of sense to me. Spanish is much closer to portuguese (being nearly mutually understandable) than to italian or catalan. Occitan and catalan are extremely close, but here they appear unrelated.
Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
#4Also using Wikidata links, you’ll get support for many more languages. It is also much easier to process by bots to get more relevant statistics on many more terms than the very anglo-centered and too limited Swadesh list.
Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
#5From my experience, it does not make a lot of sense to me. Spanish is much closer to portuguese (being nearly mutually understandable) than to italian or catalan. Occitan and catalan are extremely close, but here they appear unrelated.
Spanish-Portuguese has a solid line while Italian-Portuguese and Portuguese-Spanish are dashed, so the chart agrees with you.
I don't think the spatial potions represent anything, other than allowing the grouping and giving a rough guide at a glance.
Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
#6From my experience, it does not make a lot of sense to me. Spanish is much closer to portuguese (being nearly mutually understandable) than to italian or catalan. Occitan and catalan are extremely close, but here they appear unrelated.
in fact between Italian and Spanish (Castilian Spanish) there is an indirection: the common link to Catalan.
Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
#7I'd love to see something like this for the Scots Doric dialect I spoke as a child (not in school, obviously)
e.g. Using fit, far, fan, fa for What, Where, When and Who not to mention loons and quines for boys and girls.
Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
#8Norwegian is among the languages most closely related to english. Everybody who would like to learn a second language besides english, can easily learn norwegian. Only drawback is that there are fever people speaking norwegian than there are inhabitants in new york city. Written norwegian is almost phonetic.
Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
#9/offtopic
> It has been a while since the Croats and Serbians have decided that they do not speak the same language and this is accurately depicted above but the Bosnians and Montenegrin also decided that they have their own language.
So much animosity, I did not always quite comprehend why until I met a Kosovar in London during the Championships in 2018 and revealed to them my astonishment over Novak Djokovic's comeback, and they said 'I'd rather kill a Serb' [0] (than be in awe of their accomplishments). I could almost feel their hatered but I implored them to forgive and move on. That interaction prompted me to look up the history on WW2 in the Balkans [1] and the subsequent Yusgoslav Wars and I could see why [2][3] this tragedy of epic proportions among a group only separated by differences in religion has come to pass: It boiled down to how a few were able to sway the many [4][5][6].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Serbian_sentiment
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ustashe
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srebrenica_massacre
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Horseshoe
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18433883
Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
#10Norwegian is among the languages most closely related to english. Everybody who would like to learn a second language besides english, can easily learn norwegian. Only drawback is that there are fever people speaking norwegian than there are inhabitants in new york city. Written norwegian is almost phonetic.
Written norwegian is almost phonetic
Your claim is literally absurd.
http://www.learn-norwegian.net/pronunciation/pronunciation.h...