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Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

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Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#31

Post by jajag »

dls2016 wrote: post #24
jajag wrote: post #21

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…

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.

That's part of it certainly, but I wonder whether a lot of technical terms and words were taken directly from Latin - which up until a few hundred years ago was the dominant language for education, law, diplomacy etc.

Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#32

Post by jajag »

jcranmer wrote: post #30
jajag wrote: post #21

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…

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 w…

I think you're right about many words coming to English directly from Latin during the renaissance and following periods, but it raises another interesting question - why did English take many technical words and terms from Latin, whilst German speakers - who presumably during the renaissance were consulting the same source material - coined their own Germanic words and terms instead?

Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#33

Post by gumby »

cbnotfromthere wrote: post #10
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.

Written norwegian is almost phonetic Your claim is literally absurd. http://www.learn-norwegian.net/pronunciation/pronunciation.h...

The chart you linked to shows a language with far less letter->pronunciation variance than English, so I don't quite understand your point.

Unless you're trying to say that several characters have different phonetic bindings than they do in English. This is true of most languages that use a variant the Roman alphabet as does English.

Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#34

Post by Myrmornis »

Curious. My personal experience is that as an English speaker the Romance languages seem much closer than German does. But the article places English in the Germanic cluster with a distance of 49 to German vs 56 to French. Yet for most English speakers I would guess that they find it easier to make some sense out of reading French than German.

Beautiful visualization and interesting data set.

Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#35

Post by gumby »

jajag wrote: post #21

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…

I use English, German and French every day and in my head they feel almost like a blend, with the three languages forming the vertices of a triangle. They share so much common history thanks to propinquity and invasion.

You can see that directly in English where we use Germanic words for animals in the field (Cow/Kuh, Swine/Schweine usw), while on the table we use the romance words (Beef/Boef, Mutton/Mouton etc). This is commonly believed to reflect that after the Norman invasion the aristocracy used French words in their homes while the conquered peasants retained their old language among themselves. And indeed in both German and French (and pretty much everywhere else) the same word is used in both contexts.

You can see how this can lead to the higher level words (law, religion etc) being in the non-peasant's language, even as the peasant language leaks into the creole (e.g. earl/carl vs compte).

Finally different languages use different approaches (at various times) to clone new words, hence the German Fernsehe ("distance see") in English is a Frankenmelange of greek and latin television (gk "far" + lt "see")

Don't forget that Spanish also had a strong admixture of arabic, hence words like algodon (lost the article to become 'cotton' in English).

Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#36

Post by tropdrop »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #23
tropdrop wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're not really arguing with me here - my point is that 'za' had a multitude of meanings prior to the split of West and East Slavic.

Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#37

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

tropdrop wrote: post #36
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You're not really arguing with me here - my point is that 'za' had a multitude of meanings prior to the split of West and East Slavic.

Yes, I am arguing with you here. Your misuse of terminology like “phoneme”, and your inappropriate suggestion that the meaning ‘behind’ has any role here, merited being called out so that other people reading this thread, who may not be familiar with Slavic diachrony or historical linguistics in general, know to ignore your points.

Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#38

Post by tropdrop »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #37
tropdrop wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not really arguing with me here - my point is that 'za' had a multitude of meanings prior to the split of West and East Slavic.

Yes, I am arguing with you here. Your misuse of terminology like “phoneme”, and your inappropriate suggestion that the meaning ‘behind’ has any role here, merited being called out so that other people reading this thread, who may not be familiar with Slavic diachrony or historical linguistics in general, know to ignore your points.

It is quite possible to be extremely knowledgeable about a field and dole out nuggets of wisdom in such a way as to inspire others to take more interest and share their ideas with you.

It is also possible to demoralize and silence newcomers by taking every opportunity to show how far you are above them, and how unworthy they are of your superior knowledge base.

One of those approaches leads to more productive thought and breakthroughs than the other.

Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#39

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

tropdrop wrote: post #38
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I am arguing with you here. Your misuse of terminology like “phoneme”, and your inappropriate suggestion that the meaning ‘behind’ has any role here, merited being called out so that other people reading this thread, who may not be familiar with Slavic diachrony or historical linguistics in general, know to ignore your points.

It is quite possible to be extremely knowledgeable about a field and dole out nuggets of wisdom in such a way as to inspire others to take more interest and share their ideas with you. It is also possible to demoralize and silence newcomers by taking every opportunity to show how far you are above them, and how unworthy they are of your superior knowledge base. One of those approaches leads to more productive thought…

You will find plenty of linguists who feel that misusing terminology and making inaccurate claims like you did does more harm than good. It would have better had those comments not been posted at all, but once they are posted, then someone has to call them out as flawed. Calling them out as flawed is not “showing how far I [or anyone else] is above” a particular poster. It is simply an attempt to help the community here out by encouraging readers to get their information from some other, more reliable source.

You’ll find that HN tends to react badly to inaccurate posting on any scientific field, and one of the great things about this venue is that there are many trained people in various sciences who can call out wrong as wrong.

Re: Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015)

#40

Post by timbit42 »

Myrmornis wrote: post #34

Curious. My personal experience is that as an English speaker the Romance languages seem much closer than German does. But the article places English in the Germanic cluster with a distance of 49 to German vs 56 to French. Yet for most English speakers I would guess that they find it easier to make some sense out of reading French than German. Beautiful visualization and interesting data set.

Old English came from Old German but after the Normans conquered southern England in 1066, English adopted many French words, making the Romance languages easier to learn.
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