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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Reading this, I come away with the impression that European languages today are evolving due to the influence of "Vulgar English" (the lowest common denominator of English spoken by the most people worldwide), analogously to how Romance languages like Spanish and French evolved in the past due to the influence of "Vulgar Latin."[a]

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[a] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Romance-languages

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You forgot the part when it was cool to speak French among higher classes, and thus it got spread into many European languages as well.

Languages change. I'm always amused that we get upset by that, but it's going to keep happening.

> Romance languages [...] evolved in the past due to the influence of "Vulgar Latin."

Minor correction: they are derived, not influenced by Vulgar Latin.

That's why so many words are different from Classical Latin, but similar between Romance languages. Like how Latin for house is "domus", but Romance languages use casa/casă/chez because common people referred to their house by the word "casa".

Weird twist: Slavic languages use words very similar to "domus" for "house", for example, "dom" in Polish or "дом" in Ukrainian.

That's дім, not дом, but of course it's "вдома" and "у домі" for reasons.

Also Ancient Greek, Albanian, Sanskrit, Ancient Iranian etc. Supposedly even "timber" (in English) is somehow derived from the the same root ..

Slavic is somewhat more conservative and still has a bunch of archaic proto-Slavic and even proto-Indo-European stuff in it. Even most of the basic swearwords are still readily recognizable from PIE, which I always found particularly amusing:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/x...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/p...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/j...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/b...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/g...

I agree! Nothing I wrote disagrees with that:

The phrasing "evolved in the past due to the influence of" has a more expansive meaning than "influenced by."

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