Groupings of languages which can all be traced back to a common ancestor language they evolved from, for instance the Romance languages are all descended from Latin.
5
votes
1answer
113 views
Is there a named common ancestor of Germanic and Latin besides “Indo-European”?
I was just answering a question about the origins of English and Latin and wanted to talk about their common ancestors but ran into a surprising problem.
So we know the majority of languages in ...
0
votes
0answers
20 views
How is English a Germanic Language if it has so many Latin Roots? [duplicate]
I grew up on the misconception that English is a romance language, after all it has so many latin roots, I don't even know what Greek languages are.
Why is English considered a Germanic language? And ...
1
vote
1answer
45 views
Are all languages related? [duplicate]
I originally posted this question on the Philosophy.stackexchange site
This question was prompted by this newspaper article saying:
Languages spoken by billions of people across Europe and Asia are ...
4
votes
1answer
155 views
Relationship between Turkish/Azeri and Japanese/Korean
How are Turkish and Azeri related to Japanese and Korean? Are there obvious similarities between them?
8
votes
0answers
110 views
What is the current understanding of the classification of indigenous American languages?
Inspired by this recent question on Greenberg's classification of African languages, I wonder about the current state of classification of the American languages. (By "American" I mean the indigenous ...
8
votes
1answer
157 views
What is the current understanding of Greenberg's classification of African languages?
In a reply to the criticism of his classification of the languages of the Americas, Greenberg (1989: 107) characterized his work on African languages as follows:
[...] my classification is clearly ...
3
votes
5answers
312 views
Plural “you” in different language families connoting respect
I recently found out that French has two different words for "you."
From here:
Tu is the familiar "you," which demonstrates a certain closeness and informality. ... Vous is the formal "you." It ...
10
votes
1answer
232 views
How can mutual intelligibility be measured?
What ways do we have of measure the mutual intelligibility of two given languages?
It's easy enough to realise if there is a degree of mutual intelligibility between your own language variety and ...
5
votes
1answer
328 views
Relationship between language similarity and ease of foreign language acquisition?
Inspired by this infographic, which lists a bunch of languages as either easy to learn, hard to learn, or medium. I noticed that all the languages in the easy category were either Romance or Germanic ...
5
votes
4answers
194 views
Why do some languages have more speakers than others?
I am interested in languages that are used as first languages.
Does it have to do simply with population growth/sustenance of the speakers of those languages? What are the theories put forward to ...
4
votes
2answers
167 views
Aramaic compared to Spanish
Is it possible to compare Aramaic to Spanish? If so, what are the differences and what are common? I have Spanish at school, and when I saw Passion of the Christ, I recognized lots of words (I don't ...
3
votes
1answer
216 views
Is the word, “problem,” new to non-English languages?
I've been listening to radio broadcasts lately where a person will be speaking German or Pashtun or Russian or whatever and a translator will be supplying an English rendition, in a format which makes ...
7
votes
4answers
303 views
Do linguists measure the relation distance between languages? How?
Sometimes, I read passages like:
Languages X, Y and Z in region A are closely related to each other, comparable to French, Italian and Spanish in Western Europe.
The discussion in the question ...
9
votes
2answers
181 views
Is there any case of a “convergent language family”?
As far as I know, language families originate from a process of divergent, tree-like evolution. All the languages within a family or subfamily can be traced back to the same proto-language, which was ...
23
votes
4answers
995 views
Do the Khoisan languages resemble the world's first language?
I have read somewhere that if there ever was a world's first language*, that language must have had very much in common** with the Khoisan languages. Arguments in support of this hypothesis are:
...
4
votes
1answer
206 views
Is there a general consensus on what modern language is the closest relative of Albanian?
I'm off to Albania tomorrow so starting to get more and more interested in the language.
It's one of the outliers on the Indo-European family tree. It's not hard to see a relationship but it's not ...
15
votes
3answers
596 views
Why do English verbs inflect so little, especially in regard to “person”?
Most Indo-European languages have verbs which endings change according to the person. I made a table with the most common (and close) languages and focussed on the category of person and the present ...
8
votes
1answer
215 views
Are there other pairs of languages that are as close grammatically despite not being in the same language family as Korean and Japanese?
Though there are many theories grouping Korean and Japanese in the same family, none of these are widely accepted by linguists.
Yet the grammars of these two languages are extremely similar in many ...
13
votes
4answers
918 views
How did Korean become a language isolate?
According to most linguists, Korean is a language isolate. Why doesn't it have any sister languages, like languages usually do? Why didn't it spread to other areas, or split into various languages? ...
4
votes
2answers
384 views
Distinguishing dialects objectively: lexical sets in non-English settings
The concept of lexical set is a useful technique for differentiating accents or dialects within a language. A lexical set is a set of all words/syllables that are pronounced with the same vowel. These ...
16
votes
3answers
905 views
Can Modern Hebrew be considered an Indo-European language?
According to this Wikipedia page
Zuckermann argues that Israeli Hebrew, which he calls "Israeli", is
genetically both Indo-European (Germanic, Slavic and Romance) and
Afro-Asiatic (Semitic). ...
