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Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

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Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#11

Post by Tade0 »

My experience as a Polish native speaker is that slavic languages are indeed close, with the differences usually boiling down to one of the two:

Borrowing a word and changing its meaning - e.g. Russian запомнить (zapomnit') - "to remember" sounds a lot like Polish zapomnieć - "to forget".

Creating a different word, but with the same idea - e.g. Slovakian vlak (train) a Polish pociąg (train). To a Polish person these two words sound as if the former was derived from wlec (to drag) and the latter from ciągnąć (to pull).

I spent two weeks in Ukraine and once I learned the alphabet, signs were mostly intelligible, even though some familiarly sounding words had a different meaning.

Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#12

Post by pjmlp »

dmca2 wrote: post #5
enriquto wrote: post #3

From 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.

I also miss the connections between Galician, Portuguese and Catalan.

Unless the way of reading the graph is a different one than what I am thinking about.

Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#13

Post by Tade0 »

thomasfl wrote: post #8

Norwegian 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.

Pardon for the potentially offensive remark, but to me it always looked a lot like German.

I had German in school for a total of six years and this had a side effect of giving me the ability to read a newspaper in Norwegian with a rough understanding what the text was about.

Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#14

Post by tropdrop »

Tade0 wrote: post #11

My experience as a Polish native speaker is that slavic languages are indeed close, with the differences usually boiling down to one of the two: Borrowing a word and changing its meaning - e.g. Russian запомнить (zapomnit') - "to remember" sounds a lot like Polish zapomnieć - "to forget". Creating a different word, but with the same idea - e.g. Slovakian vlak (train) a Polish pociąg (train). To a Polish person these…

Since all these languages were fathered by Slavic, I would think of it less in terms of a group of people "borrowing a word" from another and then "changing its meaning," and more like branches of a tree, the root a stable association between phonemes and concept.

So, for a word like zapomnit' (запомнить/zapomnieć) - we have prefix 'za' and root 'pomni-'. За is a preposition with meaning = behind. Помни- is a derivative of память (pamat') with meaning = memory.

Putting those two together, we have "behind memory." Now parse what those two sounds, "behind memory", can mean - does this phrase mean something that you fail to retrieve from the back recesses of your memory? Or is it something you stash into the back of your memory for safekeeping?

Russian speakers and Polish speakers seem to have arrived at opposite interpretations of this phrase. However, it is obvious that they started from the same place (behind + memory).

Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#15

Post by saiya-jin »

ignoramous wrote: post #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 come…

I wish there would be an easy solution to these 'seeds of evil'. Its easy for an outsider like you and me to say 'just forgive', because its the best and most sane thing to do. Unfortunately many human beings don't work like that, emotions often run the show.

And who knows, maybe it I experienced what they did, maybe I would be the same, or worse. I mean, if somebody raped and murdered my family in front of my eyes and laughed while doing it, forgiveness would be probably impossible for me.

The only advice that usually works - wait for few generations. Those scarred will take their wounds to the grave, and young usually don't want to carry too much of the burden of previous generations, which is good.

Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#17

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

Tade0 wrote: post #11

My experience as a Polish native speaker is that slavic languages are indeed close, with the differences usually boiling down to one of the two: Borrowing a word and changing its meaning - e.g. Russian запомнить (zapomnit') - "to remember" sounds a lot like Polish zapomnieć - "to forget". Creating a different word, but with the same idea - e.g. Slovakian vlak (train) a Polish pociąg (train). To a Polish person these…

If, as a Polish speaker, all you have really dealt with is Russian and Ukrainian, then you probably underestimate how different the Slavic languages are. Ukrainian and Polish are often considered mutually intelligible (at international events it is not unusual to see Ukrainians and Poles chatting with each other, each speaking their own language). Poles have already been exposed to a lot of Russian, either passively through media and literature or Communist-era schooling.

Yet there are plenty of Slavic languages that will completely baffle Poles. A Polish acquaintance with whom I traveled in the former Yugoslavia found that she could not even get the gist of television talk shows. Even within Poland, speakers of Polish admit to not understanding a single word of spoken Kashubian, even though Kashubian belongs to the same sub-branch of Slavic as Polish (Lechitic) and, on paper, does not seem so different from Polish at all.

Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#18

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

0-_-0 wrote: post #16

I long suspected that Hungarian was the most separate from the rest of the European languages.

Hungary’s lexical stock is indeed an unusual mixture of its Uralic inheritance, West Old Turkic loans, early Slavic loans, and Ottoman-era Turkish loans. At the same time, so much of the modern Hungarian language is the result of intellectuals creating calques on German terminology during the 19th-century language reform. (To the point that already knowing German will massively help learners to memorize Hungarian verbs.) This represented a big rupture in the language, and it is part of why pre-19th-century Hungarian looks so different.

Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#19

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

tropdrop wrote: post #14
Tade0 wrote: post #11

My experience as a Polish native speaker is that slavic languages are indeed close, with the differences usually boiling down to one of the two: Borrowing a word and changing its meaning - e.g. Russian запомнить (zapomnit') - "to remember" sounds a lot like Polish zapomnieć - "to forget". Creating a different word, but with the same idea - e.g. Slovakian vlak (train) a Polish pociąg (train). To a Polish person these…

Since all these languages were fathered by Slavic, I would think of it less in terms of a group of people "borrowing a word" from another and then "changing its meaning," and more like branches of a tree, the root a stable association between phonemes and concept. So, for a word like zapomnit' (запомнить/zapomnieć) - we have prefix 'za' and root 'pomni-'. За is a preposition with meaning = behind. Помни- is a derivat…

> За is a preposition with meaning = behind.

In the case of Russian, the za here is not a preposition literally meaning ‘behind’ but rather an already fully grammaticalized marker of inchoative aspect that one encounters in a number of other verbs like засыпать ‘to fall asleep’. Russian запомнить is analyzable as ‘start’ + ‘remembering’.

Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#20

Post by jfk13 »

Tade0 wrote: post #13
thomasfl wrote: post #8

Norwegian 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.

Pardon for the potentially offensive remark, but to me it always looked a lot like German. I had German in school for a total of six years and this had a side effect of giving me the ability to read a newspaper in Norwegian with a rough understanding what the text was about.

Yes, Norwegian (along with Swedish and Danish) does have a fairly close connection to German.

When I began German in school (at around age 13, iirc), the fact that I had already learned Swedish as a child (due to family roots) gave me a noticeable head start over the rest of the class. Many German words that would have been completely foreign to me as an English speaker were immediately understandable through Swedish.

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