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Comment by xdennis | Hacker News Reader

> 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".

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

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...

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 ..

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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