[HN Gopher] How likely are chance resemblances between languages...
___________________________________________________________________
How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)
Author : benbreen
Score : 47 points
Date : 2024-03-06 14:15 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zompist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zompist.com)
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I remember some anecdote of an Australian language, where the
| word for "dog" was pronounced more or less as in English, just
| "dog". At some point it was proven that the English word could
| not have possibly been transmitted to those people, it was just
| some sequence of phonemes that had been arbitrarily assigned to
| label the animal. I can't find a good link for this.
|
| Given enough languages spoken by enough people, seems inevitable
| that at least a few words will be coincidentally the same. Kodos
| and Kang, on the other hand...
| Tar90 wrote:
| It's probably Mbabaram.
|
| > When Dixon finally managed to meet Bennett, he began his
| study of the language by eliciting a few basic nouns; among the
| first of these was the word for "dog". Bennett supplied the
| Mbabaram translation, dog. Dixon suspected that Bennett had not
| understood the question, or that Bennett's knowledge of
| Mbabaram had been tainted by decades of using English. But it
| turned out that the Mbabaram word for "dog" was in fact dug,[2]
| pronounced almost identically to the Australian English word
| (compare true cognates such as Yidiny gudaga, Dyirbal guda,
| Djabugay gurraa and Guugu Yimidhirr gudaa, for example[3]). The
| similarity is a complete coincidence [...].
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language
| n4r9 wrote:
| That's cool! I googled around and found that this must be the
| Mbabaram language, an extinct language once spoken in East
| Australia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language#Word_for_%22...
|
| > The similarity is a complete coincidence: the English and
| Mbabaram languages developed on opposite sides of the planet
| over the course of tens of thousands of years. This and other
| false cognates have been cited by typological linguist Bernard
| Comrie as a caution against deciding that languages are related
| based on a small number of lexical comparisons.
| angiosperm wrote:
| The description of the Pleiades as "seven sisters" in Australia
| and Europe is a similar case. People used to think it meant the
| story had been carried so long, and so far. But 50,000 years
| seems to be too long.
|
| That said, it has been tens of millennia since a seventh star
| could be distinguished. People today count six, but it is
| described as seven most places.
|
| And, the story of the husband who visits the land of the dead
| and fails to retrieve his wife really was carried all the way
| to North America. That is probably "only" 15,000 years, from
| one of the later waves of migration.
| __loam wrote:
| Finnish and Japanese are fairly similar but weirdly completely
| unrelated iirc.
| TillE wrote:
| My favorite little coincidence is that ending a sentence in
| "ne" turns it into a question in both Japanese and colloquial
| German, with exactly the same sense ("isn't it?").
| metaxy2 wrote:
| A slight variation of that is even in colloquial English,
| with "no." As in "we should probably get going, no?"
| mbork_pl wrote:
| And in Polish, where people often add a ", nie?" to the end
| of the sentence, with a similar result.
| bombela wrote:
| And in french with "non ?" at the end. Often pronounced
| "nanh" (english), "nan" (french). A more familiar form of
| "non".
|
| On va prendre de l'essence d'abord, nan?
|
| We're going to get gas first, right?
| interestica wrote:
| Trinidadian English: "ent?"
|
| I think there's an innate human desire to modify the sentence
| to make it a question with as few additional sounds as
| possible.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| English English: "innit?"
| metaxy2 wrote:
| I wonder if "ent" evolved from "innit" under British
| colonization (or they both evolved from a common ancestor
| in British English).
| interestica wrote:
| Both probably from "is it not > isn't it" Canadian's have
| 'eh?' that serves basically the same function.
| metaxy2 wrote:
| Americans (and I'd imagine the British) have "eh?" too,
| it's just not as common ("not bad, eh?"). Among Americans
| I feel like I've seen it more in casual written online
| conversation than in speech.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| In some places pronounced "ennit?"
| jimbosis wrote:
| In Latin, adding the enclitic -ne to (generally) the first
| word of a sentence makes that sentence a yes/no question.
|
| See https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:tex
| t:1... , especially paragraph #332.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| People have mentioned other languages (Polish, Latin, French,
| English) but the negation particles in all of those languages
| is from the same source (Proto-Indo-European "ne"). The
| Japanese one is entirely unrelated though.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Same in Russian, no? (or should I say ne?)
| arrowsmith wrote:
| And in Portuguese, ne?
| schoen wrote:
| Also Portuguese, where "ne?" is understood as a contraction
| of "nao e?" ("isn't it?").
|
| I don't mean to say that this is a coincidence as far as the
| European languages go; negation words with N are often a
| shared inheritance from Indo-European
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-
| Eur...
| meepmorp wrote:
| how are Finnish and Japanese fairly similar? i'm curious what
| you see that would make them so.
| angiosperm wrote:
| The phoneme mix is uncannily similar.
| postexitus wrote:
| Also Turkish and Hungarian. There are too many similarities
| between Uralic and Altaic languages that at some point in
| history they were considered a single language family by some
| experts (conveniently named Ural-Altaic). According to:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages
|
| "There is general agreement on several typological
| similarities being widely found among the languages
| considered under Ural-Altaic:
|
| head-final and subject-object-verb word order
|
| in most of the languages, vowel harmony
|
| morphology that is predominantly agglutinative and suffixing
| zero copula
|
| non-finite clauses
|
| lack of grammatical gender
|
| lack of consonant clusters in word-initial position
|
| having a separate verb for existential clause which is
| different from ordinary possession verbs like "to have""
| kyazawa wrote:
| Lots of interestingly similar words between Japanese and
| Turkish. For example, yabanjin meaning barbarian in
| Japanese, and yabanci meaning foreigner in Turkish. The
| word for "good" is basically the same in both languages
| (ii/iyi), and the particle -de at the end of a word means
| "at" in both languages.
| resolutebat wrote:
| This is one of those traps the article cautions about.
| _Yabanjin_ Ye Man Ren is not native Japanese, but a
| borrowing from Chinese _yemanren_ , which is a composite
| word (barbarian+person) and sounds nothing like yabanci
| ("yabanjuh").
|
| It's actually even more complicated than that: _yabanjin_
| is a kan 'on/Tang dynasty era borrowing, so it came from
| the Middle Chinese spoken in Chang'an/Xi'an around the
| 8th century, which would have been quite different from
| the modern Mandarin _yemanren_.
| resolutebat wrote:
| Grammatically, they're vaguely similar. The vocabulary has zero
| overlap though, outside recent mutual borrowings from English.
| angiosperm wrote:
| Yet, Ket in central Asia and Navajo in south-central North
| America are very closely related. Sadly, Ket is close to dead,
| with only dozens of mostly elderly still fluent. Some suspect it
| was carried in a migration from Alaska back to Asia.
|
| Languages used in British Columbia and Yukon are in the same
| family to those, but less similar. It is an example of a common
| phenomenon, where the extrema of a range retain older features.
| We see it also in far-west Celt and far-east Tocharian languages.
| It probably explains how rare genetic features are found in
| common in isolated South American, Australian, and Indian Ocean
| refugia, and nowhere between, and in pre-contact eastern US and
| western Europe haplogroups. Traces between get washed out by
| later influx.
| rafram wrote:
| May be related, not "are very closely related." There are some
| cognates between the two families. But no two languages that
| were separated for 10,000 years are very closely related.
| angiosperm wrote:
| They share grammatical peculiarities lost in intermediate
| languages. Navajo introduced to Ket elders say they are
| almost inter-intelligible.
| mcswell wrote:
| I have not heard that "inter-intelligible" claim, do you
| have a link/ citation for it?
| yongjik wrote:
| I'll bet a keg of beer that they are not in fact mutually
| intelligible.
| temporallobe wrote:
| Slightly off-topic, but there are some food ethnicities that have
| interesting overlaps, such as Indian and Italian.
| userabchn wrote:
| The similarities between the Irish language and Middle Eastern
| languages was one of the reasons why people thought there had
| been a mass migration from the Middle East to Ireland, and I
| think this was at least partly what led British Israelites to dig
| up Ireland's sacred hill of Tara looking for the Ark of the
| Covenant. Genetic studies later confirmed that there had in fact
| been a mass migration from the Middle East to Ireland.
| treyd wrote:
| Around when did this mass migration take place? Is there any
| reason posited as to why?
| samatman wrote:
| The migration wave you're referring to originated in Anatolia
| and spread across all of Europe
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_European_Farmers
|
| In most places, including Ireland, they were displaced, with
| some assimilation, by the Yamnaya people. Most of the male
| lineages were extinguished, the genomic contribution from the
| previous wave is mainly through the female line.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamnaya_culture
|
| It was the Yamnaya who brought Indo-European languages to
| Europe, and Ireland. Resemblances between the Irish language
| and Semitic languages are coincidental.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| My favorite little cross-language coincidence is how lots of
| place names up north end in 'vik'.
|
| In the old Viking world, there's Reykjavik, Keflavik, Grindavik,
| etc in Iceland. Then over in Norway, you've got Larvik, Malvik,
| Rorvik, etc. In Sweden: Vastervik, Valdemarsvik, Ornskoldsvik.
|
| Then in the new world, Greenland has Aasivik and Arsivik. The
| Eastern part of the Canadian north has has Aquiatulavik and
| Iqiattavik and Akulivik. Up in the Northwest Territories there's
| Aklavik and Inuvik. Cross over into Alaska and you'll find
| Utqiagvik and Kaktovik.
|
| To make it even more interesting, on Russia's north coast you'll
| find a Nordvik.
|
| Surely there must have been a prehistoric super-culture up North
| that founded all of these places right? Not so - in Norse, that
| 'vik' meant cove, and as a seafaring culture they had a lot of
| settlements on coves. In Inuit and related languages 'vik' means
| place, so that ended up in a lot of names. Oh, and the Russian
| Nordvik was just given a Norwegian name.
|
| So no, there almost certainly wasn't extensive linguistic
| exchange between Vikings and indigenous people of North America.
| Although, since L'Anse aux Meadows (the one place Norse are known
| to have been in North America) means Meadows Cove, I think it
| should be renamed Meadowvik.
| akavi wrote:
| I've always been amused by the fact that "chilly" in English is
| so similar to the synonymous "clli" (roughly "Chuh-ly") in
| Kannada (my family's mother tongue)
| xdavidliu wrote:
| my favorite is how the word ant (the insect) is "mah-yi" in
| chinese, while the word aunt (the family member) is "ah-yi" in
| chinese. There's tonality differences as well, but I wonder what
| the probability of that is, and whether there are other examples
| in english / chinese
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-06 23:01 UTC)