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Comment by erminpour | Hacker News Reader

I can image the moment Sir William Jones realized Sanskrit and Latin had a common origin. "Wait a minute...these can't all be coincidences." It's pretty mid-blowing.

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My daughters are growing up bilingual in Persian and English. Totally fascinating to find the cognates; many are surprisingly close still (daughter/dokhtar, star/setare, cow/gav). It’s fun feeling like I could communicate basic ideas to a proto Indo European speaker based on those really distant cognates.

It gets complicated by the preponderance of French loan words, although they tend to be for newer concepts such as car, elevator, etc.

There do also seem to be some genuine coincidences, such as sock it/saket, both being a somewhat forceful way to tell someone to be quiet.

But yes, Persian people and culture in particular has fascinated me due to the ancient, but not prehistoric, traces of a shared identity with Europeans, in contrast with its neighbors. It’s not something that gets a lot of attention in popular culture

The romance languages are closer to the indo Iranian ones than the Germanic languages from what I understand.

Apparently -tamo is a superlative, and 'gautama' means 'the one who has the most cows'.

There are reconstructed languages loosely based on proto Indo European. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambahsa ## https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantean_language ## https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uropi

English: God gave us teeth; God will give us bread.

Lithuanian: Dievas davė dantis; Dievas duos duonos.

Sanskrit: Devas adadat datas; Devas dat dhanas.

And a fun extra one is that Lithuanian "gobti" is cognate with English "give"!

Another cool one, Svet in Russian and Schwet in Hindi, both meaning white/light and both being in names (Svetlana, Shweta)

I'm learning Spanish now after studying French and while I'm not fluent at all in Hindi or Marathi which I sometimes heard my family speaking growing up, the cognates are fascinating. The numbers are the most obvious. But even words like 'tu' (you) are the same in all the languages. Same with English and me as the first person.

Not to mention the verbs. Truly wild stuff to think no one noticed.

People noticed. They just didn’t come up with a theory of a common ancestor language. Or, in some cases, they assumed other European languages were originally heavily debased forms of Latin/Greek.

For a French, Spanish is not a particularly easy language. Italian is much closer to French, and easier to learn.

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