One of the things that's surprised me from learning both Spanish and German is that whilst for a small, basic set of vocabulary, German and English are very similar (e.g. Haus, Schuh, Hund vs. Casa, Zapato or Pero in Spanish), the two languages diverge massively for higher level vocabularies whilst Spanish seems to converge (for example, importante, diferente, imposible vs. wichtig, anders, unmöglich). The net effect is that my Spanish comprehension is considerable better than my German - I can read a news article in Spanish and get a reasonably good gist of what it says; but I still find myself all at sea when reading even relatively simple phrases in German - typically wondering to myself what the hell verb is that?
Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
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Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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’.
Sure. However, for this simple illustration of how sound bites evolve in meaning over time, I think it makes more sense to look at the semantics of the phoneme "za" rather than the prefix's technical grammatical meaning (though your addendum is useful and correct).
Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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’.
Sure. However, for this simple illustration of how sound bites evolve in meaning over time, I think it makes more sense to look at the semantics of the phoneme "za" rather than the prefix's technical grammatical meaning (though your addendum is useful and correct).
> the semantics of the phoneme "za"
The thing is, the “phoneme” [sic] za has an array of meanings, and this was true already by the Proto-Slavic stage. Sure, one could recommend as a mnemonic device that a learner see Russian zapomnit’ ‘commit to memory’ as a compound of ‘behind’ + ‘remember’, but that isn’t the actual etymology of the word. It is a folk etymology.
Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
#24One of the things that's surprised me from learning both Spanish and German is that whilst for a small, basic set of vocabulary, German and English are very similar (e.g. Haus, Schuh, Hund vs. Casa, Zapato or Pero in Spanish), the two languages diverge massively for higher level vocabularies whilst Spanish seems to converge (for example, importante, diferente, imposible vs. wichtig, anders, unmöglich). The net effect…
My naive, first-order understanding is that English = German + French. But since the Renaissance, French became the dominate influence due to its use by elites/scientific community.
So it's not Spanish influence, per se, but its similarity to French as a Romance language.
Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
#25One of the things that's surprised me from learning both Spanish and German is that whilst for a small, basic set of vocabulary, German and English are very similar (e.g. Haus, Schuh, Hund vs. Casa, Zapato or Pero in Spanish), the two languages diverge massively for higher level vocabularies whilst Spanish seems to converge (for example, importante, diferente, imposible vs. wichtig, anders, unmöglich). The net effect…
You can thank the Normans and the Renaissance :)
Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
#26My 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…
I've been to Croatia and Slovenia as well and yes, expressions like "poslovni centar" were somewhat of a head scratcher.
My initial guess was that perhaps it was some kind of language school, so I asked a Croatian friend of mine and yeah - I was way off with my guess.
Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
#27I long suspected that Hungarian was the most separate from the rest of the European languages.
Most European languages are Indo-European. The exceptions are:
* Basque, a language isolate which is generally considered by many to be the sole surviving remnant of pre-Indo-European languages in Europe.
* The Balto-Finnic languages (not to be confused with the Baltic languages!), primarily Finnish and Estonian, of the Uralic language family.
* The Saami languages, another part of the Uralic language family, of the indigenous peoples of northern Scandinavia.
* Hungarian, yet another Uralic language, although this one seems geographically out of place.
* Depending on how you divide the borders of Europe, there are representatives of Turkic languages in Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan. There are also some Kartvelian languages and other language isolates in the Caucasian region (primarily Georgia)--note that Armenian is Indo-European.
Indo-European languages are though to originate from the steppe region on the North side of the Black and Caspian Seas, and then get diffused through various waves of linguistic migration into the rest of Europe. Uralic languages probably originate in the northern forest zones of Russia (eventually being pushed out of their homeland by the Slavic branch of Indo-European). At some point, the language migrated onto a steppe confederation which eventually settled in Hungary, which is why it seems out of place. About 1500 years ago, give or take, the steppe confederations shifted from Indo-European dominance to Turkic dominance, which is what prompts the rise of Turkic languages on the margins of Europe.
Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
#28I long suspected that Hungarian was the most separate from the rest of the European languages.
Most European languages are Indo-European. The exceptions are: * Basque, a language isolate which is generally considered by many to be the sole surviving remnant of pre-Indo-European languages in Europe. * The Balto-Finnic languages (not to be confused with the Baltic languages!), primarily Finnish and Estonian, of the Uralic language family. * The Saami languages, another part of the Uralic language family, of the…
> Depending on how you divide the borders of Europe, there are representatives of Turkic languages in Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan.
There are representatives of Turkic well within a mainstream definition of Europe: West Rumelian Turkish in the Balkans, Gagauz in Moldova, Crimean Tatar in Crimea, and (though perhaps now departing from the mainstream definition) several Turkic languages in European Russia north of the Caucasus such as Karachay-Balkar and Mishar Tatar.
Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
#29Also 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.
Can you point to any publications criticizing the Swadesh list as “Anglo-centered”? That is something I would be interested in reading about. Personally, I have viewed the Swadesh list as rather American Indian linguistics-centric, though its application was easily extended to other peoples around the world at a similar level of technological development.
Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)
#30One of the things that's surprised me from learning both Spanish and German is that whilst for a small, basic set of vocabulary, German and English are very similar (e.g. Haus, Schuh, Hund vs. Casa, Zapato or Pero in Spanish), the two languages diverge massively for higher level vocabularies whilst Spanish seems to converge (for example, importante, diferente, imposible vs. wichtig, anders, unmöglich). The net effect…
English is a Germanic language, except it greatly simplified its grammatical inflection, and then had its vocabulary infused with Romance stock first from the long-term use of Norman French as the prestige language of England and then from the proclivity for Latin (and Greek, but that's not a Romance language) roots in scientific coinage during the Renaissance and Modern periods. In terms of modern vocabulary, more words have a Romance root than a Germanic root. As a random factoid, the third-person plural pronouns in English actually come from Old Norse (courtesy of the Viking invasions, which resulted in a large portion of England being dominated by Danes instead of Anglo-Saxons until around the Norman invasion).