
Lexical Distance Among the Languages of Europe - fforflo
https://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among-languages-of-europe/
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amelius
It's a pity that the Basque language is not in this graph.

From wikipedia [1]:

> The impossibility of linking Basque with its Indo-European neighbors in
> Europe has inspired many scholars to search for its possible relatives
> elsewhere. Besides many pseudoscientific comparisons, the appearance of
> long-range linguistics gave rise to several attempts to connect Basque with
> geographically very distant language families. All hypotheses on the origin
> of Basque are controversial, and the suggested evidence is not generally
> accepted by most linguists.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language)

~~~
kafkaesq
Or Yiddish and its variants.

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glup
This is for entertainment value only. There are many ways to get ratings of
language similarity (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_comparative_lingu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_comparative_linguistics)
for an overview) and this graphic is from a paper published before Bayesian
phylogenetic methods took over the field (I can't read the original Russian
though).

For more recent research, see the second two figures at
[http://language.cs.auckland.ac.nz/media-
material/](http://language.cs.auckland.ac.nz/media-material/)

~~~
ggchappell
Would you say that more recent methods allow us to talk about degree of
language similarity in a way that is objective enough and meaningful/useful
enough that the results are _not_ "for entertainment value only"?

~~~
glup
"Objective enough" isn't the issue, rather it's how confident we are in the
inferences. And yes, I would say that the new methods are preferable because
1) they do a better job of explicitly quantifying and representing uncertainty
2) they use more sophisticated source data/features.

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jedberg
And then there's Hungarian, my ancestors, way off on the side, where no one
really knows where it came from.

~~~
r0muald
There seems to be some agreement that Hungarian is one language of the Ugro-
Finnic family together with many others: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-
Ugric_languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages) but
you're right about unclear geographical origins.

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theoh
See also "the directed graph of stereotypical incomprehensibility"
[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1024](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1024)

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dewiz
No connection between Greek and Italian doesn't seem right. Many Italian words
are influenced by Greek, to the point that antique Greek is studied in some
schools.

~~~
yourad_io
And vice-versa: modern Greek has borrowed quite a few words from Italian, e.g.
Porta (Door).

The Greek-Dutch connection is a surprising one as well, I'm not sure what
they're basing it on.

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avodonosov
Graphics is useful, but the underlying data is imprecise: it shows that
Serbian is closer to Russian than Belorussian, which is just wrong.

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Symmetry
Is the reason English is closer to Danish because the Anglo-Saxons spoke
something like that or is it because of Vikings conquering parts of England
for a while?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danelaw](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danelaw)

~~~
douche
The Saxons, Angles and Jutes that invaded after the fall of Rome all generally
came from Denmark[1].

Most of the Norse who subsequently invaded in the 700-1000 were either Danes
or Norwegians[2], and settled in pretty large numbers in East Anglia,
Northumbria and Mercia.

Then the Normans, who were in large part Danes and Norwegians that had gotten
bought off with a piece of France came over in 1066.

I don't know how accurate this is, but in Bernard Cornwell's Uhtred series,
English and Danish are different enough that they aren't really mutually
intelligible.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angles#/media/File:Angles_saxo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angles#/media/File:Angles_saxons_jutes.png)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Heathen_Army](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Heathen_Army)

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franciscop
It's so funny that Spanish-Catalan-Italian are strong but Spanish-Italian are
weaker. As a Valencian (we also speak Catalan) I understand most of the
Italian I hear, but for most people in Spain it's not so easy

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billforsternz
I read somewhere that English is quite rare in that it doesn't have at least
one mutually intelligible near relative. If true, the diagram doesn't reflect
that.

~~~
glup
That seems like a weird assertion on the part of whatever you read, because 1)
it isn't clear what constitutes a separate, well-defined language (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum))
and 2) mutual intelligibility is a gradient, not a binary.

Many speakers of Standard American English have to turn on subtitles to
understand what's going on in movies from the UK (like Trainspotting). So
maybe we call a great many things English?

~~~
billforsternz
For what it's worth, I think I recall where I read it. "The Power of Babel" a
popular science linguistics book by John McWhorter. I'll see if I can dig up
the quote later and report back......

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billforsternz
I can't think of a fourth big Scandinavian language that abbreviates to BOK.
Swedish, Norwegian, Danish .... ?

~~~
Symbiote
Norwegian Bokmål, a written form of Norwegian.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokm%C3%A5l](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokm%C3%A5l)

~~~
madcaptenor
So "NN" is presumably Nynorsk, then.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nynorsk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nynorsk)

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mrdrozdov
Posted by Teresa Elms on 4 March 2008.

~~~
vpribish
yes.

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nsajko
I don't think there should be a link between Slovene and Albanian.

~~~
DonaldFisk
I don't know either language (they're distantly related), but I'm guessing
they might have borrowed words from each other. Swedish and Finnish are
completely unrelated, and are also linked, presumably for the same reason.

~~~
txru
If Albanian should be connected to any Slavic languages, though, it should be
connected with Serbian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian, the languages that it
neighbors, and which have exerted mutual cultural influence on each other. The
point the commenter above was making is that choosing Slovenian specifically
to be the linking language to Albanian in the _sprachbund_ is very arbitrary.

~~~
barry-cotter
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund)

A sprachbund (/ˈsprɑːkbʊnd/; German: [ˈʃpʁaːxbʊnt], "federation of languages")
– also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, diffusion
area or language crossroads – is a group of languages that have common
features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. They may
be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related. Where genetic
affiliations are unclear, the sprachbund characteristics might give a false
appearance of relatedness. Areal features are common features of a group of
languages in a sprachbund.

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jasperry
Interesting that Greek is so isolated, even though so many European languages
are derived from it. Maybe it's because Greek was essentially a dead language
that was reintroduced, so other languages had drifted far from it?

~~~
yoklov
Not sure that very many european languages are derived from it in any form
other than it's alphabet (and even then its fairly removed).

I could be wrong (this is well outside my area of expertise), but I think
maybe you're thinking of Latin?

~~~
umanwizard
He's probably getting confused by the fact that a lot of technical vocabulary
is borrowed from (ancient) Greek.

~~~
jasperry
I guess I did assume that since there are quite a few Greek roots in English,
that there was more direct influence.

~~~
DonaldFisk
No, you have to look at the core vocabulary. For example, most English words
are derived from Latin (often through French), but all its core vocabulary
(except for one or two words such as "very") is Germanic. So English is a
Germanic language. Its earliest written form is Anglo-Saxon, the language of
King Alfred.

Greek words in English are rarer, and are generally not core vocabulary, e.g.
"telescope", "bacteria", "paragraph", "angel".

There are Greek cognates, which found their way into both English and Greek
from their common ancestor Indo-European. These are harder to recognize.
Examples include ἔργον which is cognate with "work", and πέτομαι/πτερόν (I
fly/wing) which are cognate with "feather".

~~~
pavlov
It's fun to read everyday signs in Greece without understanding the language.
The words are familiar yet the meaning is lost in translation.

For example, I saw a truck labelled "ethniki metafora". Pretty sure it doesn't
literally mean "ethnic metaphor" though! (I think the proper translation would
be "national transport".)

