Comment by Eliah_Lakhin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eliah_Lakhin | Hacker News Reader

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Perhaps, it would be more useful for students if foreign language courses start with explaining one thing that is well known to linguists, but maybe does not have enough recognition by a wide audience.

Most European languages are at some extent just dialects of the same common language[1].

And most of the words we use in distinct languages are (at some extent) just different pronunciations of the same vocabulary. This happened no just because of the borrowings between cultures, but because centuries ago these nations speak one single common language that has diverge in centuries into different dialects.

More over it is more or less researched how the words and the grammar rules have evolved from the proto-language up to it's modern form. So in fact we can (again, at some extent) translate many modern words to their ancient form, and then translate them back into another modern European language. Of course it is not always that simple process, and there is a lot of exceptions and difficulties, and the true borrowings too. But I think that understanding just some common ideas of linguistics could help in studying of foreign languages (from the same family of languages). At least maybe it will be more fascinating than just a pure memoization.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language

> [...], but because centuries ago these nations speak one single common language that has diverge in centuries into different dialects.

It's more complicated than that. First, it's more than just 'centuries ago'. Second, there weren't any nations back then. Third, it wasn't necessarily the case that a common language, proto-Indo-European, was spoken over a large area. There was just as much, and even more, diversity of languages back then.

It's just that the speakers of proto-Indo-European brought their language with them when they migrated and/or conquered. Just like the Romans later brought Latin with them and influenced what would later become French and Spanish. The people living 2100 years ago in what is not France did not speak Latin. The people living 600 years ago in what is now South Africa, did not speak Middle Dutch, even though people there now speak a language descendant from Middle Dutch.

>influenced what would later become French and Spanish

To be picky, also Italian, Portuguese and Romanian.

If you are native or fluent in any of these languages and also have a basic knowledge of Latin, you are usually capable of reading simple texts in any of the other ones, deriving the meaning of the "diverging" words by the rest of the sentences or by connecting the word with a different Latin root.

Paradoxically, the bigger issues come from "false friends" that - while not very common - can be deceiving.

> To be picky, also Italian, Portuguese and Romanian.

Well, and a lot more. Latin also influenced eg German and English etc, but less so.

Yes, language standardization is relatively recent with the advent of mass education and mass media (radio/tv/etc.)

If you're familiar with ancient and medieval European history, you're pretty much familiar with the origins of most of the European languages.

Areas that were part of the Roman Empire generally speak Latin dialects like Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. The exception being the eastern part of the Roman Empire which historically spoke Greek and still speaks Greek (except for the parts of the Roman Empire that remain Islamic).

Germany and Scandinavia speak Germanic languages because they were never Roman. Britain was only partially Roman and for significantly less time than France or southern Europe so it retained its Celtic languages except in the part conquered by the Anglo-Saxons (a Germanic tribe) who originally spoke a German language called Old English which was mostly mutually comprehensible with Old Norse (the language of a Germanic tribe called the Vikings who invaded England a few centuries after the Anglo-Saxons and were eventually converted to Christianity and assimilated). Then they were conquered by a French nobleman in 1066 and the English nobility spoke French for a few centuries before it fused with "Old English" into something that sounds somewhat like English.

Because of this, English speakers already know a significant number of words in both Germanic and "Romance" (Latin) languages, even moreso than for other Indo-European languages. But you still need to be careful not to trust a German offering you a "gift" (the German word for "poison" because, in German, it was a euphemism that lost its original meaning of English "gift"[0]).

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gift

> The exception being the eastern part of the Roman Empire which historically spoke Greek and still speaks Greek (except for the parts of the Roman Empire that remain Islamic).

Aren't there big chunks of the Eastern Roman Empire that now speak Slavic languages?

Also, the parts of the Eastern Roman Empire that currently remain Islamic constitute nearly the entire Eastern Roman Empire, including the capital.

I'm much less familiar with Eastern European history but that appears to be due to another wave of migration in early medieval Europe where Slavic peoples who originally lived further east moved into those areas after the Huns drove the Germanic tribes westward.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs#Migrations

That's an amazing piece of history I was not familiar with. I have recently travelled around the area between Belarus, Czech Republic, Lithuania and Austria and their history is obviously complex and interlinked, but I only saw in the museums the history starting from around 1000 years ago... I didn't consider that much of this region, which today includes mostly slavs, had not actually been populated by slavs just a few centuries before the history I was looking at (literally) which starts more or less with the Rus, Vikings (which apparently initially ruled Kievan Rus[1], despite the region being already slav at around the time ~800AD!), Bavarians and Balts to the north (which became the Grand Duchy of Lithuania later - which for some time actually extended to now-Russian Smolensk, covering most of today's Belarus and a part of today's Russia!)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus%27_people

But there's a word for "all of the Eastern Roman Empire, except for the parts that are not Greece". We just call that "Greece". Greek used to be the language of the Eastern Roman Empire, and it was almost completely extirpated; it is not a good example of persistence.

Depending on your political stance, you may be forgetting Cyprus.

But still it is big chunk of Europe.

I severely underestimated how long it would take for me to learn Japanese based on my experience of learning English while being a native Portuguese speaker. English felt like a very different language but underneath it is so much closer in comparison.

This is the basic idea behind the Language Transfer series of courses - https://www.languagetransfer.org/

Before I had clicked the link I thought you were not referring to Proto-Indo-European but to Standard Average European — how many of the European languages (particularly the western European languages) have peculiarities in grammar and syntax that are not explained by descent, but by areal features. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European

There's also the issue of drift [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_(linguistics)

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