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Comment by __loam | Hacker News Reader

Finnish and Japanese are fairly similar but weirdly completely unrelated iirc.

My favorite little coincidence is that ending a sentence in "ne" turns it into a question in both Japanese and colloquial German, with exactly the same sense ("isn't it?").

A slight variation of that is even in colloquial English, with "no." As in "we should probably get going, no?"

And in Polish, where people often add a ", nie?" to the end of the sentence, with a similar result.

And in french with "non ?" at the end. Often pronounced "nanh" (english), "nan" (french). A more familiar form of "non".

On va prendre de l'essence d'abord, nan?

We're going to get gas first, right?

Trinidadian English: "ent?"

I think there's an innate human desire to modify the sentence to make it a question with as few additional sounds as possible.

English English: "innit?"

I wonder if "ent" evolved from "innit" under British colonization (or they both evolved from a common ancestor in British English).

Both probably from "is it not > isn't it" Canadian's have 'eh?' that serves basically the same function.

Americans (and I'd imagine the British) have "eh?" too, it's just not as common ("not bad, eh?"). Among Americans I feel like I've seen it more in casual written online conversation than in speech.

In some places pronounced "ennit?"

In Latin, adding the enclitic -ne to (generally) the first word of a sentence makes that sentence a yes/no question.

See https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1... , especially paragraph #332.

People have mentioned other languages (Polish, Latin, French, English) but the negation particles in all of those languages is from the same source (Proto-Indo-European "ne"). The Japanese one is entirely unrelated though.

Yeah and it's the same for German ne. Completely unrelated to Japanese.

Yes, that’s what I meant - all the languages that had already been mentioned are Indo-European, with the exception of Japanese.

Same in Russian, no? (or should I say ne?)

And in Portuguese, né?

Also Portuguese, where "né?" is understood as a contraction of "não é?" ("isn't it?").

I don't mean to say that this is a coincidence as far as the European languages go; negation words with N are often a shared inheritance from Indo-European

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

Always felt funny to me how the common japanese immigrant stereotype in Brasil includes ending every question with "né?"

Makes total sense now.

I've noticed a similar similarity between the particle "yo" in Japanese and adverb "ju" in Swedish, both used for the same purpose at the end of sentences.

A few more: Swedish:"tabberas"(eat everything) from Latin:"tabula rasa"(clean slate) <=> Japanese: "taberu"(eat).

Swedish:"må" <=> Japanese:"mo". "allowed to" Pronounced the same.

Expression: Swedish:"det går inte"(not possible, not allowed to), literally "that does not go" <=> Japanese:"ikemasen"(not allowed to), literally "can not go".

You can do that in English too.

Grammatically, they're vaguely similar. The vocabulary has zero overlap though, outside recent mutual borrowings from English.

how are Finnish and Japanese fairly similar? i'm curious what you see that would make them so.

The phoneme mix is uncannily similar.

Also Turkish and Hungarian. There are too many similarities between Uralic and Altaic languages that at some point in history they were considered a single language family by some experts (conveniently named Ural-Altaic). According to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages

"There is general agreement on several typological similarities being widely found among the languages considered under Ural–Altaic:

head-final and subject–object–verb word order

in most of the languages, vowel harmony

morphology that is predominantly agglutinative and suffixing zero copula

non-finite clauses

lack of grammatical gender

lack of consonant clusters in word-initial position

having a separate verb for existential clause which is different from ordinary possession verbs like "to have""

Lots of interestingly similar words between Japanese and Turkish. For example, yabanjin meaning barbarian in Japanese, and yabancı meaning foreigner in Turkish. The word for "good" is basically the same in both languages (ii/iyi), and the particle -de at the end of a word means "at" in both languages.

This is one of those traps the article cautions about. Yabanjin 野蛮人 is not native Japanese, but a borrowing from Chinese yemanren, which is a composite word (barbarian+person) and sounds nothing like yabancı ("yabanjuh").

It's actually even more complicated than that: yabanjin is a kan'on/Tang dynasty era borrowing, so it came from the Middle Chinese spoken in Chang'an/Xi'an around the 8th century, which would have been quite different from the modern Mandarin yemanren.

When I studied this subject in university I was shocked to find out many areas like this are not well understood due to lack of financial incentive to discover it. All that to say there's probably a reason Finnish and Japanese and Spanish are so similar but its not well understood by people in the industry of linguistics yet.

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