For those who are interested in languages

[Gillipig]

I came over this graph on wikipedia, it illustrates how the indo european languages are related.

Click image to enlarge.

If you can't make heads or tails of the image then here's a wrap up of what it'll tell you:
One of the things I noticed when looking at this graph, is that the saying that when something is like Greek to you, then it's foreign, has merit! Greek is an old ass language that separated from the rest of the european languages very early. Matter of fact is, it's so old, it separated from the rest of the european languages before we separated from the hindu and iranian languages! Our languages has more in common with Persian, Hindi and Sanskrit (Hinduism's holy language, and also used in Buddhism) than they have with Greek. I was surprised at this and I'd be willing to bet a lot of others are.
Of the Italic languages, Latin is most unlike the other languages, having separated from the branch earlier than the rest.
The language Latin should share the most with (judging by when the two last shared a common "ancestor language") is Sardinian, something I can honestly say I did not know. It's also fairly closely related to Romanian. And Sardinian and Romanian are very closely related.
Other than this there's not all that many surprises in the italic language section, Italian is closely related to Sicillian and Corsican, and Spanish and Portugese are closely related. Catalan is more closely related to French than it is to Spanish, which might come to some peoples surprise. And also, if you've ever caught yourself thinking which language Italian is more closely related to, Spanish or French, the answer is that it technically should be Spanish, but because of all the proto-languages Spanish has gone through since then, it might actually share more in common with French linguistically. But hereditary, more closely related to Spanish, and Portugese, probably even more with Portugese actually.
And now on to the Germanic languages. The surviving languages can be grouped into Scandinavian, and West German. I've done some research and the forefather to all Germanic languages, the "Proto-Germanic" language is thought to have originated in southern Sweden. From there (or "here" I might say) it spread west into Norway and south into Denmark and Germany, from there it went west into Northern France, Netherlands and eventually Britain, it also went east into Poland but that branch of Germanic languages did not survived into present time. Like I think most people did I expected the Germanic languages to have originated from Germany. But appearantly the word "Germanic" has got nothing to do with the orign of the language, it has got soemthing to do with where Roman's first encountered speakers of a germanic language. The reason we say Germanic languages is because that's what Julius Ceasar called the people who spoke it. He was the first to group these barbarians living on the east side of the river Rhine and beyond with a unified name. Renaming it to "Swedic languages" or "Norsic languages" would be a mess, but it would be an accurate mess . As for which languages is more closely realted to another, most of the large West Germanic languages split up at the same time, during the Great Migration era (roughly year 500 ad) so it's hard to say whether For example English is more closely related to Dutch than to German. Not much can be said other than that Scots and English are closely related but I think most of you could figure that out without a fancy graph . One thing that is hard to figure out without a fancy graph however is that Swedish is more closley related to Danish than it is to Norwegian. A Swede understands Norwegian and a Norwegian understands a Swede, both have trouble understanding a Dane, to make matters even weirder, a Dane will most of the time understand a Swede and a Norwegian. I didn't expect Swedish to be more closely related to Danish than Norwegian when I can conversate perfectly well with a Norwegian but can't understand a word of what the Dame says, but I suppose someone has to be related to them. (Fun fact, a study shows danish children have unusually hard to understand what their parents are saying, if that's not a hint that you should articulate more clearly then I don't know what is. When a Dane talks it litterally sounds like he's just randomly putting letters together. It's a strange thing. Here's a good video made by some danes to illustrate the problem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk)
Albanian has it's own language group, it separated from the Indo European language tree last. And could therefore be argued to be the most modern of the indoeuropean languages.
I didn't have time to write about the Celtic and Slavic language groups so if you want to understand their relations you have to read it yourself .

[Symmetry]

I really enjoyed reading your thoughts on the chart. I guess my objection to it would be that languages don't only diverge.

(Please put some para breaks in though)

[waauw]

When I first looked at this I thought it was way too long to read, but I have to admit, it was very interesting.

As to what language english is closer to dutch or german. My native language is dutch and I can therefor understand quite a bit of german if I have to and my honest opinion is that the the english language is closer to dutch, than it is to german.
The german language still has the latin grammar forms(Nominativ, Akkusativ, Genitiv, Dativ), while english and dutch don't. In both languages it's rather about the order in which you put the words as to suffixes.

Even if you look at vocabulary you should notice that dutch and english have a lot of similar words. This is because the netherlands have always been a seafaring folk conducting trade with foreigners, thus being more exposed to foreign influences. Germany and it's ancestral nations on the other hand have always focused more on central europe(switzerland, austria, poland, ...) compared to the rest of the world.(excluding post-WWII Germany of course)

[Dukasaur]

Lot of interesting stuff there.

The modern nation of Albania is actually a colony. The original home of the Albanians is a tiny valley high in the Caucasus, politically part of Azerbaijan but close to Armenia. I was curious how close Albanian would rank to Armenian, and sure enough, although not extremely close they are in the same ballpark.

What you say about the Dane-Norwegian-Swede relationship is interesting, because I've found much the same thing when it comes to Czech-Polish-Serbo-Croat. In theory, Czech and Polish are close, and Serbo-Croat are farther away, but in practise I can often understand quite a bit of what Serbs and Croats are saying, whereas I don't have freaking clue when I listen to Poles speaking.

It's interesting that the various Italian languages are no closer to each other than they are to French or Catalan. There really was no reason except political expediency to weld the disparate Italian cultures into one country.

I was curious to see if Romansh would be put closer to the German languages or closer to the Italian. It seems the authors are firmly on the side of an Italian kinship for Romansh. Listening to it being spoken, one wouldn't think so.

[Lindax]

I'm missing Basque, Finnish, Welsh, to name a few. Or do these languages have another name that does appear on the chart?

Lx

[rishaed]

Like the Video!
Welsh is on the chart, can't say much about the other ones atm

[mviola]

Lot of interesting stuff there.

The modern nation of Albania is actually a colony. The original home of the Albanians is a tiny valley high in the Caucasus, politically part of Azerbaijan but close to Armenia. I was curious how close Albanian would rank to Armenian, and sure enough, although not extremely close they are in the same ballpark.

What you say about the Dane-Norwegian-Swede relationship is interesting, because I've found much the same thing when it comes to Czech-Polish-Serbo-Croat. In theory, Czech and Polish are close, and Serbo-Croat are farther away, but in practise I can often understand quite a bit of what Serbs and Croats are saying, whereas I don't have freaking clue when I listen to Poles speaking.

It's interesting that the various Italian languages are no closer to each other than they are to French or Catalan. There really was no reason except political expediency to weld the disparate Italian cultures into one country.

I was curious to see if Romansh would be put closer to the German languages or closer to the Italian. It seems the authors are firmly on the side of an Italian kinship for Romansh. Listening to it being spoken, one wouldn't think so.

My grandparents speak Ladin (The language right above Romansh in the list). Both of those languages take the Italian vocabulary and put a German spelling or pronunciation on the word.

I'm looking at the wikipedia page under the orthography section for Romansh and like 4/5 of the words have a very visible Italian link. I also know some German and those words look nothing like any of the German I know.

Edit: Even the Romansh word for German (tudas-ch) isn't related to the German word (Deutsch), it's related to the Italian word (tedesco). Interesting.

I'm curious to see if Ladin speakers would understand Romansh because it certainly looks like there is some mutual intelligibility. Maybe I'll ask my grandparents when I get back home.

[Agent 86]

Thanks Gillipig for your interpretations, I teach language and your insight was a great read

[john9blue]

red = dead language?

[darth emperor]

Nice chart, it's a pity it doesn't go for worldwide languages.

I was kind of surprised about the greek one, i thought the three of them were separated together (Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek). Also is kind of surprising that the indian languages, come from Pakrit and not Sanskrit.

The Catalan and french, is very true, the main reason that Spanish and Catalan are similar, is because of their connections in the same country. But before, (when each of them had a country on their own) Spanish country was always enemy of French country, while Catalan country was very friendly with the French country. Which is kind funny, of why Spanish and French hasn't influenced very much. (Not like English and French with their love-hate relation).

One of the things I noticed when looking at this graph, is that the saying that when something is like Greek to you, then it's foreign, has merit!

In Spanish instead of saying Greek, they say it with Chinese, which is more foreign, so in theory has more merit.

I'm missing Basque, Finnish, Welsh, to name a few. Or do these languages have another name that does appear on the chart?

Lx

They are not from the Indo-european language. Welsh is there.

red = dead language?

It seems so. Green alive, and white family group

[Lindax]

I'm missing Basque, Finnish, Welsh, to name a few. Or do these languages have another name that does appear on the chart?

Lx

They are not from the Indo-european language. Welsh is there.

Yeah, found Welsh. Anybody have any idea where Basque and Finnish came from, if they're not Indo-European?

Lx

[darth emperor]

I'm missing Basque, Finnish, Welsh, to name a few. Or do these languages have another name that does appear on the chart?

Lx

They are not from the Indo-european language. Welsh is there.

Yeah, found Welsh. Anybody have any idea where Basque and Finnish came from, if they're not Indo-European?

Lx

Basque no one knows for sure, there are many theories. And Finnish is from the Uralic languages. Like Hungarian.

[Symmetry]

I'm missing Basque, Finnish, Welsh, to name a few. Or do these languages have another name that does appear on the chart?

Lx

They are not from the Indo-european language. Welsh is there.

Yeah, found Welsh. Anybody have any idea where Basque and Finnish came from, if they're not Indo-European?

Lx

Basque no one knows for sure, there are many theories. And Finnish is from the Uralic languages. Like Hungarian.

Aye, I have a few Hungarian friends who say that Finnish is the closest language for them.

[Gillipig]

When I first looked at this I thought it was way too long to read, but I have to admit, it was very interesting.

As to what language english is closer to dutch or german. My native language is dutch and I can therefor understand quite a bit of german if I have to and my honest opinion is that the the english language is closer to dutch, than it is to german.
The german language still has the latin grammar forms(Nominativ, Akkusativ, Genitiv, Dativ), while english and dutch don't. In both languages it's rather about the order in which you put the words as to suffixes.

Even if you look at vocabulary you should notice that dutch and english have a lot of similar words. This is because the netherlands have always been a seafaring folk conducting trade with foreigners, thus being more exposed to foreign influences. Germany and it's ancestral nations on the other hand have always focused more on central europe(switzerland, austria, poland, ...) compared to the rest of the world.(excluding post-WWII Germany of course)

I can understand some German purely by being fluent in English and Swedish. Some words I recognize because I can speak English, others because I can speak Swedish. And I can read Danish and Norwegian because I'm fluent in Swedish. (can't understand what a Dane says though) The only large germanic language I can't understand at all is Dutch! I wonder why that is. And I wonder if learning to speak German fluently, would enable me to understand some Dutch.
I don't think you can understand the scandinavian languages just by knowing other germanic languages. Even if you're fluent in English, German and Dutch, you will probably still not be able to read Swedish helpfully. You need to be fluent in one Scandinavian language, and really only one, to understand them all. The scandinavian languages are no doubt closer to each other than the West German ones (West German includes among others English, Dutch and German). If you can speak one West German language and one Scandinavian, you can helpfully understand almost any germanic language. That's also why I think it's so interesting I can't understand Dutch.
I just have to say something about Icelandic as well. I can't understand Icelandic, I can read a little little bit of it, much less than German but I understand it better than Dutch. If I know what the subject is about, I can guess what it says. But if I'm just provided with a text in Icelandic I will be all over the place. It's a very interesting language, they don't borrow words like most other languages do, they would rather create a new word than to loan one. This is very useful when trying to find out when a word was created, because the Icelandics don't borrow words, if a word in English is similar to Icelandic, that probably means the word existed before the languages broke apart, and that was a long long time ago. Let's try it!
Consider the word "mother" in these different germanic languages:
Dutch:
moeder
German:
mutter
Danish:
mor
Swedish:
mor
Norwegian:
mor
Icelandic:
móðir

The Icelandic word for mother somewhat resembles the others. More so the Scandinavian "Mor" but there's clearly a similarity even between "mother" and "móðir" That is a good hint that the word mother was created before all of these languages split up. Let's try "father".
Dutch:
vader (coolest name for father there is!!)
German:
vater
Danish:
far
Swedish:
far
Norwegian:
far
Icelandic:
faðir

Here the English word for father almost seems closer to the Scandinavian name for it and it would be hard to guess "vater" and "faðir" are different words for the same thing. But since "father" is relatively close to the Icelandic faðir one would have to assume, some version of the word existed in proto-germanic. Perhaps the word mutated so much in German and Dutch that it is no longer possible to see the similarities with it's distant cousins? vader and vater are quite similar to father, so it doesn't seem like English has loaned the word directly from a Scandinavian language, I find it more likely that English has kept an older form of the word while in Dutch and German the word has evolved.

I'm missing Basque, Finnish, Welsh, to name a few. Or do these languages have another name that does appear on the chart?

Lx

They are not from the Indo-european language. Welsh is there.

Yeah, found Welsh. Anybody have any idea where Basque and Finnish came from, if they're not Indo-European?

Lx

Basque no one knows for sure, there are many theories. And Finnish is from the Uralic languages. Like Hungarian.

Aye, I have a few Hungarian friends who say that Finnish is the closest language for them.

I had an Hungarian buddy when I was younger, I remember hearing him talk to his dad as a strange moment. They could be talking klingon for all I knew lol. It's very different.

Lot of interesting stuff there.

The modern nation of Albania is actually a colony. The original home of the Albanians is a tiny valley high in the Caucasus, politically part of Azerbaijan but close to Armenia. I was curious how close Albanian would rank to Armenian, and sure enough, although not extremely close they are in the same ballpark.

What you say about the Dane-Norwegian-Swede relationship is interesting, because I've found much the same thing when it comes to Czech-Polish-Serbo-Croat. In theory, Czech and Polish are close, and Serbo-Croat are farther away, but in practise I can often understand quite a bit of what Serbs and Croats are saying, whereas I don't have freaking clue when I listen to Poles speaking.

It's interesting that the various Italian languages are no closer to each other than they are to French or Catalan. There really was no reason except political expediency to weld the disparate Italian cultures into one country.

I was curious to see if Romansh would be put closer to the German languages or closer to the Italian. It seems the authors are firmly on the side of an Italian kinship for Romansh. Listening to it being spoken, one wouldn't think so.

Very true for Sardinian.Sardinian is closer to Romanian than Italian! Corsican and Sicillian seem to be closer to Italian than any of the other major language though since they're in the same subgroup.

[waauw]

I can understand some German purely by being fluent in English and Swedish. Some words I recognize because I can speak English, others because I can speak Swedish. And I can read Danish and Norwegian because I'm fluent in Swedish. (can't understand what a Dane says though) The only large germanic language I can't understand at all is Dutch! I wonder why that is. And I wonder if learning to speak German fluently, would enable me to understand some Dutch.
I don't think you can understand the scandinavian languages just by knowing other germanic languages. Even if you're fluent in English, German and Dutch, you will probably still not be able to read Swedish helpfully. You need to be fluent in one Scandinavian language, and really only one, to understand them all. The scandinavian languages are no doubt closer to each other than the West German ones (West German includes among others English, Dutch and German). If you can speak one West German language and one Scandinavian, you can helpfully understand almost any germanic language. That's also why I think it's so interesting I can't understand Dutch.
I just have to say something about Icelandic as well. I can't understand Icelandic, I can read a little little bit of it, much less than German but I understand it better than Dutch. If I know what the subject is about, I can guess what it says. But if I'm just provided with a text in Icelandic I will be all over the place. It's a very interesting language, they don't borrow words like most other languages do, they would rather create a new word than to loan one. This is very useful when trying to find out when a word was created, because the Icelandics don't borrow words, if a word in English is similar to Icelandic, that probably means the word existed before the languages broke apart, and that was a long long time ago. Let's try it!

Here the English word for father almost seems closer to the Scandinavian name for it and it would be hard to guess "vater" and "faðir" are different words for the same thing. But since "father" is relatively close to the Icelandic faðir one would have to assume, some version of the word existed in proto-germanic. Perhaps the word mutated so much in German and Dutch that it is no longer possible to see the similarities with it's distant cousins? vader and vater are quite similar to father, so it doesn't seem like English has loaned the word directly from a Scandinavian language, I find it more likely that English has kept an older form of the word while in Dutch and German the word has evolved.

Yeah it goes the other way around too. I speak dutch and english and can understand quite a lot of german because of it, however I can barely understand anything from any scandinavian language if I heard or read it.
My german teacher once told me that he also taught dutch to germans and apparently they do understand dutch quite a bit. So if you were to learn some german, you will probably be able to understand dutch for a large part.

As for why the distance between dutch and english-scandinavian languages, I think the following youtube clip should be quite explanatory:



As you might have noticed in the clip. Britain and Scandinavia(most invasions between scandinavian countries themselves) have been less subject to foreign invasions, compared to Belgium-Netherlands. This probably resulted in the english and scandinavian languages to be able to evolve a lot more without foreign intervention or large foreign influence. The Benelux-area on the other hand has been subject to invasion by the germans and the french for large parts of history.

[Gillipig]

I'm missing Basque, Finnish, Welsh, to name a few. Or do these languages have another name that does appear on the chart?

Lx

Basque is thought to be part of the language group that occupied Europe before the indo-european language came here. With other words a native European language, and the only of it's kind. It's hard to put in words how special it would make that language. All other branches of this old european language have died out. They know europeans spoke some language before the arrival of indo-european language, but not which or what it would be like. And since Basque doesn't fit into any language group, they've concluded that it is probably of the otherwise extinct language group that occupied Europe before the indo-europeans. This also makes it impossible to confirm, because if it has no other relatives...then you can't make a group out of it. But it makes sense, they know it's not Uralic, it's not Indo-European, it's not an African language....there's just no other group it can belong to other than the original European language.

Finnish is Uralic, linguistics are still trying to work out how the Uralic languages (most notably Finnish and Hungarian) are related to the Indo-European languages. Waleish is a Celtic language and is somewhere on that huge image lol, I didn't have time to write a summary on the Celtic languages so it's not in the text.

[Lindax]

I'm missing Basque, Finnish, Welsh, to name a few. Or do these languages have another name that does appear on the chart?

Lx

Basque is thought to be part of the language group that occupied Europe before the indo-european language came here. With other words a native European language, and the only of it's kind. It's hard to put in words how special it would make that language. All other branches of this old european language have died out. They know europeans spoke some language before the arrival of indo-european language, but not which or what it would be like. And since Basque doesn't fit into any language group, they've concluded that it is probably of the otherwise extinct language group that occupied Europe before the indo-europeans. This also makes it impossible to confirm, because if it has no other relatives...then you can't make a group out of it. But it makes sense, they know it's not Uralic, it's not Indo-European, it's not an African language....there's just no other group it can belong to other than the original European language.

Finnish is Uralic, linguistics are still trying to work out how the Uralic languages (most notably Finnish and Hungarian) are related to the Indo-European languages. Waleish is a Celtic language and is somewhere on that huge image lol, I didn't have time to write a summary on the Celtic languages so it's not in the text.

Thanks.

Btw: I thought the Swedish could pretty much read Dutch. I know I can follow spoken Norwegian, but I can't read it. (I'm Dutch and speak Dutch, German, English, Spanish and French, and a little bit of Basque. Very interesting language).

Lx

[maasman]

It was a lot of fun going to Amsterdam over my semester break in Germany here and trying to read the words on the food we bought. Learning German and knowing English let us get a pretty good understanding of what it said which was fun.

[Gillipig]

I'm missing Basque, Finnish, Welsh, to name a few. Or do these languages have another name that does appear on the chart?

Lx

Basque is thought to be part of the language group that occupied Europe before the indo-european language came here. With other words a native European language, and the only of it's kind. It's hard to put in words how special it would make that language. All other branches of this old european language have died out. They know europeans spoke some language before the arrival of indo-european language, but not which or what it would be like. And since Basque doesn't fit into any language group, they've concluded that it is probably of the otherwise extinct language group that occupied Europe before the indo-europeans. This also makes it impossible to confirm, because if it has no other relatives...then you can't make a group out of it. But it makes sense, they know it's not Uralic, it's not Indo-European, it's not an African language....there's just no other group it can belong to other than the original European language.

Finnish is Uralic, linguistics are still trying to work out how the Uralic languages (most notably Finnish and Hungarian) are related to the Indo-European languages. Waleish is a Celtic language and is somewhere on that huge image lol, I didn't have time to write a summary on the Celtic languages so it's not in the text.

Thanks.

Btw: I thought the Swedish could pretty much read Dutch. I know I can follow spoken Norwegian, but I can't read it. (I'm Dutch and speak Dutch, German, English, Spanish and French, and a little bit of Basque. Very interesting language).

Lx

We don't, knowing English doesn't help me one bit and I know more English than most swedes. I'm surprised you can understand Norwegian just by knowing other none scandinavian germanic languages. Are you sure that you understand what they say or do you just think you do? lol, the Norwegians have loaned a lot of words from a lot of different langauges so maybe that's why you can follow it helpfully. They have loaned more words from English than we Swedes have, they have loaned more words from Danish than we have, they have loaned a lot of words from Swedish and they have probably loaned some Dutch words as well.
English hasn't borrowed a lot of modern day scandinavian words, but it has borrowed a ton of Old Norse words that came to England with the Vikings. Words like "anger", "slaughter", "ransack", "die", "club", "hit", "knife" and "thrust" probably come with little surprise that they are of Viking orign, but there are other words like "birth", "gift", "get", "law", "loan", "window", "fog" (a word we use a lot here), "guest", "hell" (inspired by the Norse Goddess of the land of the dead), "husband" and "they" that may be a bit more surprising. A lot of them are basic words that we use in everyday speech. Wikipedia has a list of words like this, it's not a complete list but it serves to give an idea of what type of English words have old scandinavian origin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_En ... rse_origin
I wonder how many English speakers knows exactly what the different parts of the word "smorgasbord" means. It's a modern Swedish word. And it's also a fairly starnge word. Let me brake it down for you guys.
In Swedish it's called virtually the same thing and means the exact same thing, "smörgåsbord", two dots over the "o" to indicate how it shall be pronounced and one dot over the "a" to indicate how that shall be pronounced, is all that differs. The word means "a luncheon or supper buffet offering a variety of foods and dishes" (taken from merriam dictionary). The first part of the word "smor" (smör) means "butter", the second word "gos" (gås) means "goose", and the last part "bord" means "table". That will give you "buttergoosetable", an insane word that makes little sense, but the thing here is that "smör" and "gås" means one thing seperated from each other, and another when combined. "smorgas" (smörgås) actually means "sandwich". So now you have the word "sandwichtable", we're getting closer now, "sandwich" and "table" when combined gets the meaning of "a variety of dishes placed on a table".
Smorgasbord's are the best thing about holidays like Christmas and Easter in Sweden, you'll have something like 20-30 different dishes placed on one big table and then everyone takes a plate and walk around picking the food they want.