As someone with native command over Hindi and, unless it's spoken by folks from certain UK countries, English, who also spoke and read Sanskrit quite well during school, I had a period of a few months when I went down the rabbit-hole of wonderful general linguistic history and the interrelation among them. I was shocked beyond imagination to see how we might actually have been more the same than different, if we go back far enough (not even prehistoric 'far enough') in each case (even the languages which are geographically distant currently). But then, of course, civilisation happened.
The Lithuanian Swadesh list includes the following words and I was able to find numerous relatives to Gaelic. I could be wrong about some. Obvious similarities to Latin in some cases too, maybe loanwords. But one can see the Indo-European connections.
Lithuanian and Celtic had no direct contact with each other AFAIK, although Celtic was in contact with Vasconic, Romance, Germanic and Slavic... And Lithuanian was in contact with Slavic and Germanic, maybe Finno-Ugric...
Baltic and the older layers of Celtic languages are known to be pretty conservative, if not archaic, within the context of IE languages. If you look at Old Irish the ressemblance will be blatant.
My father in law is a Persian speaker. I was very surprised to learn that thank you (mersi) is the same as in French, and OK/indeed (baleh) is the same as in Spanish.
Persian mersi is actually a direct borrowing from the French [1]. Not sure about the other one, but I guess it’s just a coincidence, as happens so often in language [2].
Japanese is fascinating to me as a language freak for the enormous amount of borrowing. As an English speaker, as long as you can decode katakana (easy to learn) you can probably walk around the streets of Tokyo and read half the signs.
No, it's documented, as is tempura. It's like pancakes: you make them before the time of fasting. "The Time of X" in Spanish is "tempora X" and I would bet Portuguese is similar.
> evidence indicates arigatō has a purely Japanese origin
I remain suspicious, though. Maybe what happened was the popularization of an existing Japanese term under the influence of Portuguese Jesuits, since it sounded similar to obrigado?
Perfectly possible. I think I've seen evidence elsewhere of similar but unrelated words influencing each other. For example, round about where I live the Romany word "shan" is used meaning "mean" or "worthless", but it seems to have been influenced by the unrelated "sean" in Gaelic (also pronounced "shan") which means "old". So it's come to mean something worn out as well.
For example, katsu from cutlet, is borrowed back into English to mean… cutlet.
And when combined with “curry” as in “katsu curry” the journey meanders all the way through Tamil, Portuguese, Japanese and English, following sailors where they went.
I’ve long thought about how wonderful it would be to create a contemporary new hybrid language whose objective was to unify communication along the very common linguistic origins at least some language clusters have. The core challenge of course is that it would be contrived in a time when top down imposition does not work as effectively. It’s a dream I have nonetheless.
It would be a gargantuan effort just alone to devise a language that would unify historic language origins roots in a contemporary time. The objective would be to stop the death and eradication of languages, e.g., Welsh, German, or any of the numerous other smaller languages and dialects that are all under varying states and types of endangerment or extinction risk, but also prevent an ignoble, unstable, and inadequate language like contemporary English from dominating the whole world.
> The objective would be to stop the death and eradication of languages, e.g., Welsh, German, or any of the numerous other smaller languages and dialects
How is German, a langauge natively spoken in two nation states and quite a few neighboring regions, being eradicated?
Yes I’ve been having similar thoughts - how amazing would it be to have a common global tongue. Last time I looked, Chinese and the Spanish were the two most spoken languages, at least counting native speakers - there are other legit ways to measure this! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...)
What I’m personally curious about is the goal to prevent extinction of languages. Isn’t that fully at odds with the goal to unify languages? In a single language, we can’t possibly keep enough of even just the Germanic languages for anyone to feel like their language was preserved, and we’re talking about something that also has to work for all the wildly different language families is Asian, African, Slavic, Indian, and South American countries, just to name a few. I’m not sure it’s possible to borrow from languages in any way that preserves them. The thought I keep having is that maybe the goal to preserve languages is working against us. Yes it’s sad to lose some languages, but I think it was sad for the languages to split in the first place, and it would be amazing if there was a common language.
What about the idea of archiving all the languages we have, so the history is there, and then after that dropping the objective to preserve any of them? Still a gargantuan effort, but maybe being able to focus on unification and ignore preservation would help us get there? This is a hypothetical, of course, pie in the sky dreaming… but I share at least part of your dream. Language will continue to evolve as it always has, and maybe geopolitics will drive us toward one or a few languages being super common.
The official position of modern IAL advocates like Esperantists is that everyone should be bilingual in a local or family language as well as in the world language. There is someone on HN who has pointed out (I forgot exactly when) that this is actually not the historical tradition in Esperanto, but it's extremely strong nowadays.
I guess one thing that leads to divergent attitudes about multilingualism and language planning is people's different intuitions about whether bilingualism is easy or hard. Some people feel bilingualism is literally automatic (just have children regularly spend time in different language environments), while some people feel it's expensive or prone to failure modes where some children favor one language or another, suffer cross-linguistic interference (which might not harm their intelligibility at all in their own immediate environments, but might be at odds with language planning goals), or become less than fully fluent or less than fully literate in one or more languages.
I was taught the "bilingualism is automatic" view and I know there's a lot of scientific consensus behind it, but it also seems like the fine details are complicated: not all children and not all adults will be enthusiastic about achieving and maintaining equal fluency in languages they use in different contexts, or necessarily about following a national or international standard to maximize understanding with outsiders!
My father's family (in New York) stopped speaking German in his generation, so I'm not a native German speaker, as my grandfather was. I've been sad about this, especially with the intuition that I could "easily" have been a fluent native German bilingual speaker "for free" with no adverse consequences to my English proficiency. But maybe that's not literally true (maybe my English would have been more idiosyncratic and less standard, maybe I would have lost interest in German as a child and become bad at it, maybe I would have divided my reading time between languages and ended up with a slightly smaller English vocabulary?).
That is a more reasonable position than trying to imagine or push a single language. And yes, acknowledging it’s not everywhere necessarily, it does seem like multilingualism is fairly automatic out of necessity in much of the world. As an American, I’m sad that the US scores so poorly on multilingualism. I’m very impressed when I travel how many people speak multiple languages. There are so many places where even entry level jobs require 2 or 3 languages.
Yeah, I know people's intuitions are also different there, as almost everyone I've met from Europe speaks 2-4 languages fluently and doesn't consider this exceptional. That makes multilingualism feel very attainable, because it's socially normal. From the U.S. point of view this is amazing, because it's taken for granted there, where it might be a celebrated achievement here.
What I know less about is how much time or effort that multilingualism took, whether peer pressure forced some reluctant kids to stick with languages they were otherwise less interested in, and whether there are any hidden costs.
An example could be replacement of some native vocabulary by English vocabulary (which is happening in many languages). This is a benefit for many people who work internationally, but it probably harms intergenerational understanding on some topics. For example, a Brazilian friend of mine gave a computing history lecture where he noted that Brazilians briefly used Portuguese vocabulary for computer engineering in the 1970s before it was supplanted by English loanwords. That change might mean that older speakers would understand younger speakers less well on some technical topics, or that younger speakers would have a harder time reading older technical documentation. From the point of view of monolingual Portuguese speakers, the internationalization of that vocabulary might not seem like a pure advantage.
I also know that some majority language speakers in Finland (who probably expect to speak English with non-Finnish speakers) greatly resent having to spend a lot of time studying Swedish, the "other national language", if they don't anticipate using it in their day-to-day lives.
In that case, it feels to some of them like the government is requiring them to be multilingual in a specific way that isn't their own preference or that doesn't align with their existing sense of ethnolinguistic identity. It doesn't seem like it's doing any kind of long-term harm, but I guess having any mandatory school subject that you don't enjoy can be pretty unpleasant, and maybe give you a more negative experience of formal education in general.
Some of the Swedish minority there doesn't prefer a future in which Finnish speakers only speak English to them (a phenomenon that already exists and that I think is growing over time). Even though it's officially legally protected, the practical status of their local minority language is being eroded by international culture.
I also have a native Finnish-speaking friend who enjoyed learning Swedish as a foreign language as a child, and ended up moving to Sweden and becoming a university lecturer (who usually teaches in Swedish). Foreign language learning can always be a benefit to anyone of any background.
To again brainstorm trade-offs, it's possible that that outcome is a bit disagreeable to her family back in Finland (who might have preferred her to stay closer to where she grew up, which might have been more likely if she had been more monolingual).
I've tried Slovio on Slavs of about 10 nationalities. None had ever heard of it. All of then, no exceptions, could just understand it perfectly well, to their great surprise.
I find slovio to be jarring. It's like someone took vaguely slavic words and slammed Esperanto-inspired grammar onto them. Something like Interslavic at least has noun/verb morphology that is much more familiar to all Slavic language speakers. I could imagine myself actually speaking Interslavic, but not the case for Slovio. It's simply too strange.
Straight from the Slovio website:
>Slovio es novju mezxunarodju jazika ktor razumijut cxtirsto milion ludis na celoju zemla.
>Slovio is a new international language that 400 million people on the planet understand
I am a Russian speaker so the copula "es" being written is strange but obviously I speak other languages that use their copula in the present tense so that's not so bad, but to 100% of slavic speakers "jazik" (tongue/language) is masculine, yet the adjectives here are reminiscent of ones for a feminine noun in the accusative case which is doubly weird as that case would also make no sense here. The second half of the sentence isn't so bad aside from "ludis" (-s plural is alien to the entire family) and "na celoju zemla" (more confusion where my brain expects a different case form). It's just odd that it completely drops noun cases on the floor when almost all the Slavic languages still have healthy productive inflection systems.
You are both more involved than I am. I only brought up Esperanto because it seemed as if there was no awareness of effort in this type of language development.
Brother! I hope you have have also studied a bit of Latin and Greek, to see the great similarities, and paths like that of "jñāna, gnō̃́sis, gnosco, knowledge".
It is a very great thing that so many peoples now speak languages with clear common roots buried behind the deviations of use; and outmost interesting to recognize the plan and the deep thought in those radixes.
isn't Spanish some form of Latin (being colonized by Rome for centuries), what I would be interested in, if there are some Vandal leftovers in nowadays Spanish
Perro, guerra, mes, pagar, ver, fuego, tierra, cima, perro, clero, altar, tribunal, rey... lots more. Tapa, dardo, ganso, ropa, guardia, sala, cama, barro, guijarro, zarza... more than anyone would think. Aspa, espía, brotar... and the -engo suffix. Visicothic and Celtic cultures are more ingrained in the North/Middle of Spain more than anyone would think despite everyone pictured it as a 100% Mediterranean culture.
Rico/rich, fresco/fresh, Blanco/blank, ganar/win... is not a coincidence.
Heck, tons of Medieval lore in the Castilles use a Gothic typeface...
Engo/enco suffix in words, related to -ingos in Gothic.
On names and surnames... Alonso, Alfonso, Guillermo, Fernando, Hernando, Hernández, López, -everything ending with -ez-, Leovigildo, Rodrigo and tons more.
