Indo-European

[chrysologus400]

A lot of what my wife and I do in school is learn languages, both ancient and modern. Although she also has to concern herself with Semitic languages (e.g. Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Syriac, etc.), I only have to concern myself with Indo-European languages (e.g. Latin, Greek, French, German, English, etc.). Of course, someday I may wish to learn

Comments

[smudgealot]

What does the dotted line to English mean? It's interesting because it seems that English also came from Germanic origins when we've learned that it came from Latin...

[chrysologus400]

The solid line shows the main origin of English, which is from Anglo-Saxon (i.e. Old English), which is from Germanic. This makes English very similar to German, which is also from Germanic, as you see.

The dotted line shows substantial influence/interference. So a bunch of Latin words and a bunch of French words worked their way into English. The book actually has another chart showing words that came from Latin into English, for instance, "maternal," "dual," "duet," "dental," "pedal," "cordial," and "fertile." It doesn't include such a list of French words, but I can think at least of one: "naive."

[periwinklepatch]

One thing that my cultural geography professor told me was that the Hungarian language isn't on the Indo-European language branch, and that word order doesn't matter, which I thought was really cool.

He could have been making it up, sure, but still!

[chrysologus400]

Apparently Hungarian is part of the Finno-Ugric family from Northern Eurasia.

Word order doesn't matter in Greek or Latin either, though Latin often uses the order subject-object-verb.