40
votes
Accepted
Is the Indo-European language family made up?
The claim cited in the quote is definitely wrong. The existence of language families is inferred from the data on extant and ancient languages, and there is a rigorous methodology used in this ...
- 31.1k
30
votes
Accepted
Does an affinity between languages necessitate that the speakers be ethnically related?
No,
this is not generally assumed. In fact, it is assumed that any human (of any ethnic background) can learn any language as first language or second language.
Large language families often cross ...
- 31.1k
23
votes
Are Semitic and Indo-European languages at all related?
If you really want to pursue this line of enquiry you need to compare proto-Afro-Asiatic with proto-Indo-European. You cannot just compare Arabic with English or Italian. Taking the etymology even a ...
- 24.6k
22
votes
Is Thai language related or a descendant of Sanskrit?
The script has nothing to do with the origin of the language. In fact, every script can be used to write any language. Usually a language adopts the script that is associated with the religion and/or ...
- 18.6k
19
votes
Is the Indo-European language family made up?
The Indo-European family is completely made up, yes. But not for the reason cited in that comment. And the fact it's made up doesn't mean it's not real.
Sciences often posit the existence of things ...
- 4,698
17
votes
Are Semitic and Indo-European languages at all related?
There's this controversial hypothesis about a genetic relationship between Indo-European and Semitic languages. The Wikipedia article that deals with it concedes that it "has never been widely ...
- 1,245
17
votes
Accepted
How to explain differences in mutual intelligibility?
The previous answers gave a lot of possible factors, including external ones. I'll give a single example where it clearly has a lot to do with quirks of the harder-understandable language: Danish.
The ...
- 446
16
votes
How does an original proto language produce its daughter languages?
A proto-language is a hypothesis - it's a theory about the history of a language family. A proto-language is a model of the closest common ancestor of the daughter languages, but which is not directly ...
- 6,337
14
votes
How does an original proto language produce its daughter languages?
The theory is that there is a community, whose members speak "a language" (one language). They go about life, roaming the plains of whatever, and their children learn that language. As long ...
- 83.4k
13
votes
Is historical linguistics still producing new results?
I am reminded of the famous story about how the young Max Planck was told by his professor to steer well clear of a career in physics, as there was nothing new to be discovered in that field.
In ...
- 24.6k
13
votes
What make Latin and ancient Greek into different subgroups in the Indo-European family of languages?
Latin and Greek are similar enough to clearly be related languages, but they really aren't that similar. Just a few incompatible divergences that must have happened very early in their development:
...
- 2,427
12
votes
Are Semitic and Indo-European languages at all related?
So, I've seen many answers to this question, but few which actually make reference to specific vocabulary of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Semitic. I'm not terribly acquainted with PIE, but I am ...
- 794
12
votes
How to explain differences in mutual intelligibility?
There are a lot of things factoring in here, the following list is by no means exhaustive
exposure to the other language: this is often asymmetric between the languages A and B, and more exposure ...
- 31.1k
11
votes
Does an affinity between languages necessitate that the speakers be ethnically related?
It does not, it only establishes that there was some communicative contact between the ancestoral populations (which before the interwebs was invented meant "living in proximity"). However, the notion ...
- 83.4k
10
votes
How to explain differences in mutual intelligibility?
Linguists would start with comparing social status of the languages. For example, there is a massive comprehensive asymmetry between Cantonese and Mandarin: more Cantonese speakers understand Mandarin ...
- 83.4k
9
votes
Is historical linguistics still producing new results?
There are very many things remaining to do in historical linguistics. If you set aside certain language families which have been "mostly figured out", there are still very many areas in the world ...
- 83.4k
9
votes
Similarities between Proto-Austronesian and Chinese?
First of all, Chinese is not an isolated language, but a member of the well-established Sino-Tibetan language family. Relationships beyond Sino-Tibetan aren't well established although the Tai-Kaddai ...
- 31.1k
9
votes
Why are mixed languages so rare?
I wouldn't say that mixed languages are particularly rare, we can observe them in language contact situations all over the world, as pidgins, creoles, and vernaculars of specific ethnic groups.
But it ...
- 31.1k
8
votes
Is historical linguistics still producing new results?
One of the most significant recent discoveries in historical linguistics is the first link between Eurasian and American language families: the Dené–Yeniseian languages.
A link between the Na-Dené ...
- 6,337
8
votes
Accuracy of automatic (machine) translation between two languages in same language family
Update for 2024: Not much has changed since 2022.
Update for 2022: Much has changed since 2019. I added updates at the bottom.
You're right to suspect that the accuracy between closely related ...
- 8,189
8
votes
What language was spoken in East Asia before Proto-Turkic?
As for the title question, the answer would be "many languages, including proto-Chinese". Focusing on the question in the body, the language spoken by the historical ancestors of proto-Turks, there ...
- 83.4k
8
votes
Accepted
Is agnosticism the current orthodoxy regarding linguistic macrofamilies?
I think the prior question should be, who gets to vote? The difference between agnosticism and dogmatic nihilism, as I interpret the concepts, is that the agnostician simply says "I don't know", and ...
- 83.4k
7
votes
Can Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian be considered linguistically distinct?
I grew up the in the former Yugoslavia, and the language I studied in school was called Serbocroatian, which was spoken in four out of the six republics of the union.
You were basically studying the ...
- 181
7
votes
Accepted
How are languages classified into families?
"Romance" is based on the historically-known fact that the languages descended from the language of the Romans, who spoke Latin. The classification "Germanic" is also ancient, ...
- 83.4k
7
votes
Are proto-languages necessary to divide languages within a family into groups?
Usually we are applying a tree model of language evolution, i.e., we assume that languages change over time producing splits into more and more branches, some of them becoming extinct, others to ...
- 31.1k
7
votes
Sumerian origin and language family
Sumerian & Elamite are both considered language isolates. They are not known to be related to any other language, or to each other.
Some try to connect Elamite with the Dravidian languages, and ...
- 9,880
6
votes
Accepted
Could English fracture into a family in the future
Sure, it's entirely possible. There are already quite a lot of different dialects of English, with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility. And you can certainly draw a family tree of them and their ...
- 69.6k
6
votes
Have other language families been mapped like Proto-Indo-European has?
Yes, there are very many researchers working to reconstruct proto-languages other than Indo-European. There are a number of languages that are not clearly related to any other language (e.g. ...
- 83.4k
6
votes
Accepted
Japanese is in its own lingustic family, but it sure seems to have a lot in common with Turkish
Japanese and Turkish are structurally similar, if you compare them to English, Spanish, Vietnamese or Arabic. They are somewhat more like Arabic, but I am guessing that you don't speak Arabic so you ...
- 83.4k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible