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Which Languages do we speak?

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Ignominious:
Is there much commonality across the Chinese and neigbouring languages like there is for romantic, Germanic/gothic and Scandic languages?

TheEvilDog:
Let's see, English obviously. Small bit of Irish, not enough to have full blown conversations but enough to just pick up on what people might be saying. Learned German in school, brushing up on that and learning Spanish. Smattering of French and Italian. And years ago, I tried my hand at learning Finnish. Nearly went insane do that.

Cornelius:

--- Quote from: Ignominious on 30 Aug 2017, 05:56 ---Is there much commonality across the Chinese and neigbouring languages like there is for romantic, Germanic/gothic and Scandic languages?

--- End quote ---

Intrestingly, Japanese and Korean are both in a separate category by themselves. Chinese and neighbouring languages do form a family, like the Germanic and Romance languages: the Sinitic languages include Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hokkien. On one remove, there is the larger Sino-Tibetan family, analogous to the Indo-European, containing Romance, Germanic, Slavic, and Indic families, that includes Thai and Burmese as well. I'm no sinologist, so I'm fairly sure I'm forgetting quite a few related languages.

In all, that would indicate that there is a certain degree of commonality, though with relative distances between the languages, much like is the case in our Indo-European group.

For those interested, here's a good idea of what the respective language groups look like:
(click to show/hide)

Blue Kitty:
Just english for me, but I wanna learn French and Japanese. My computer is filled with pretty much every single quick guide, walk through, or learning software I could get my grubby little hands on from the library, but I have yet to touch any of them.

My wife and I have a trip to japan coming up in 2018 so maybe that'll light a fire under me to actually learn some of the dang language so I don't look like a complete idiot

Akima:

--- Quote from: Ignominious on 30 Aug 2017, 05:56 ---Is there much commonality across the Chinese and neigbouring languages like there is for romantic, Germanic/gothic and Scandic languages?
--- End quote ---
Cornelius's post covers this comprehensively from a linguistic point of view, but there is the cultural complication of written language. Imagine if French, German, English, Spanish and Italian all shared a common written language, so that people could not understand each other's speech, but could communicate freely in writing. That is essentially the situation with Chinese languages. Cantonese and Shanghainese, for example, are mutually incomprehensible, but speakers of these two "dialects" can communicate in writing.

Owing to the immense cultural influence, over thousands of years, of China on its neighbours, many Chinese words were adopted into the languages of its neighbours, and Chinese writing was adopted by many neighbouring countries to write their own languages (however poorly it "fitted", linguistically). Japanese kanji, Korean hanja and Vietnamese chữ nôm are all examples that remain in use to varying degrees, despite being largely replaced (or at least supplemented) by writing systems better-suited to the languages in question. To someone who knows Chinese, these can be useful, since many characters have the same meaning as in Chinese, however different their pronunciation in the local language, but they can be "false friends" too, because sometimes their meaning has changed substantially over centuries.

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