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How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

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Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

#21

Post by postexitus »

meepmorp wrote: post #16
__loam wrote: post #5

Finnish and Japanese are fairly similar but weirdly completely unrelated iirc.

how are Finnish and Japanese fairly similar? i'm curious what you see that would make them so.

Also Turkish and Hungarian. There are too many similarities between Uralic and Altaic languages that at some point in history they were considered a single language family by some experts (conveniently named Ural-Altaic). According to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages

"There is general agreement on several typological similarities being widely found among the languages considered under Ural–Altaic:

head-final and subject–object–verb word order

in most of the languages, vowel harmony

morphology that is predominantly agglutinative and suffixing zero copula

non-finite clauses

lack of grammatical gender

lack of consonant clusters in word-initial position

having a separate verb for existential clause which is different from ordinary possession verbs like "to have""

Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

#22

Post by _a_a_a_ »

interestica wrote: post #10
TillE wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite little coincidence is that ending a sentence in "ne" turns it into a question in both Japanese and colloquial German, with exactly the same sense ("isn't it?").

Trinidadian English: "ent?" I think there's an innate human desire to modify the sentence to make it a question with as few additional sounds as possible.

English English: "innit?"

Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

#23

Post by madcaptenor »

TillE wrote: post #8
__loam wrote: post #5

Finnish and Japanese are fairly similar but weirdly completely unrelated iirc.

My favorite little coincidence is that ending a sentence in "ne" turns it into a question in both Japanese and colloquial German, with exactly the same sense ("isn't it?").

People have mentioned other languages (Polish, Latin, French, English) but the negation particles in all of those languages is from the same source (Proto-Indo-European "ne"). The Japanese one is entirely unrelated though.

Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

#24

Post by throwaway290 »

TillE wrote: post #8
__loam wrote: post #5

Finnish and Japanese are fairly similar but weirdly completely unrelated iirc.

My favorite little coincidence is that ending a sentence in "ne" turns it into a question in both Japanese and colloquial German, with exactly the same sense ("isn't it?").

Same in Russian, no? (or should I say ne?)

Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

#26

Post by userabchn »

The similarities between the Irish language and Middle Eastern languages was one of the reasons why people thought there had been a mass migration from the Middle East to Ireland, and I think this was at least partly what led British Israelites to dig up Ireland's sacred hill of Tara looking for the Ark of the Covenant. Genetic studies later confirmed that there had in fact been a mass migration from the Middle East to Ireland.

Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

#27

Post by treyd »

userabchn wrote: post #26

The similarities between the Irish language and Middle Eastern languages was one of the reasons why people thought there had been a mass migration from the Middle East to Ireland, and I think this was at least partly what led British Israelites to dig up Ireland's sacred hill of Tara looking for the Ark of the Covenant. Genetic studies later confirmed that there had in fact been a mass migration from the Middle East…

Around when did this mass migration take place? Is there any reason posited as to why?

Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

#28

Post by samatman »

userabchn wrote: post #26

The similarities between the Irish language and Middle Eastern languages was one of the reasons why people thought there had been a mass migration from the Middle East to Ireland, and I think this was at least partly what led British Israelites to dig up Ireland's sacred hill of Tara looking for the Ark of the Covenant. Genetic studies later confirmed that there had in fact been a mass migration from the Middle East…

The migration wave you're referring to originated in Anatolia and spread across all of Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_European_Farmers

In most places, including Ireland, they were displaced, with some assimilation, by the Yamnaya people. Most of the male lineages were extinguished, the genomic contribution from the previous wave is mainly through the female line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamnaya_culture

It was the Yamnaya who brought Indo-European languages to Europe, and Ireland. Resemblances between the Irish language and Semitic languages are coincidental.

Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

#29

Post by kyazawa »

postexitus wrote: post #21
meepmorp wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how are Finnish and Japanese fairly similar? i'm curious what you see that would make them so.

Also Turkish and Hungarian. There are too many similarities between Uralic and Altaic languages that at some point in history they were considered a single language family by some experts (conveniently named Ural-Altaic). According to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages "There is general agreement on several typological similarities being widely found among the languages considered under Ural–Altaic:…

Lots of interestingly similar words between Japanese and Turkish. For example, yabanjin meaning barbarian in Japanese, and yabancı meaning foreigner in Turkish. The word for "good" is basically the same in both languages (ii/iyi), and the particle -de at the end of a word means "at" in both languages.

Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

#30

Post by metaxy2 »

_a_a_a_ wrote: post #22
interestica wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trinidadian English: "ent?" I think there's an innate human desire to modify the sentence to make it a question with as few additional sounds as possible.

English English: "innit?"

I wonder if "ent" evolved from "innit" under British colonization (or they both evolved from a common ancestor in British English).
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