Have you noticed any surprising similarities between "unrelated" languages?

[StringerBell]

Okay, so we all know to expect a lot of similarities between closely related languages like Spanish + Italian or Czech + Polish. But what about between languages in different families or ones that are totally unrelated?

I'm in the process of learning Italian and Polish. Since one is a Romance language and the other is a Slavic language, I wasn't really expecting to find any kind of similarities between the languages (and to be fair, they are really different), but every now and then I'm surprised to find something. This made me start thinking that perhaps there are interesting similarities between distant languages that one might not expect to encounter.

Here are some examples with Italian and Polish:

-Once in a while I find cognates between these two languages. Eventually I discovered that often when this happens, it's because the word originated from Greek (though not always). Now, every time I find a new cognate, I look up the etymology.

Some Italian/Polish cognates I've encountered:
ITALIAN: portafoglio POLISH: portfel ENGLISH: wallet
ITALIAN: medusa POLISH: meduza ENGLISH: jellyfish
ITALIAN: liceo POLISH: liceum ENGLISH: high school
ITALIAN: di panico POLISH: do paniki ENGLISH: panic
ITALIAN: valigia POLISH: walizka ENGLISH: suitcase


Additionally, I occasionally noticed some similarities in certain aspects of the grammar. For example, in both Polish and Italian, there are certain constructions where instead of "me" being the subject of the sentence who is performing the action "I like apples" the sentence is constructed so that the subject is the passive recipient of the action, "Mi piacono le mele" (The apples are pleasing to me) and "Podoba mi się ten kolor włosów." (literally: It is pleasing to me this hair color). Being able to understand this construction in Italian made dealing with it in Polish much, much easier.

Also, both languages have their own version of a reflexive verb construction (where the subject of the sentence both performs and receives the action). When I first started studying Polish years ago, I couldn't understand this at all and it was a major obstacle. Then, after slowly starting to understand how it worked in Italian, dealing with a different version of the same idea in Polish no longer seems confusing anymore - my knowledge of Italian greatly helped me in conquering my former foe.

Have you noticed anything interesting?

[Ani]

Well.. they are both IE languages..

Sometimes I'm excited to find similarities, but I'm not surprised to find them. My native English seems to be half French and half Icelandic. Russian is more different but there is plenty that's familiar either loan/cognate or grammar.

[Chung]

Okay, so we all know to expect a lot of similarities between closely related languages like Spanish + Italian or Czech + Polish. But what about between languages in different families or ones that are totally unrelated?

I'm in the process of learning Italian and Polish. Since one is a Romance language and the other is a Slavic language, I wasn't really expecting to find any kind of similarities between the languages, but every now and then I'm surprised to find something. This made me start thinking that perhaps there are interesting similarities between distant languages that one might not expect to encounter.

Here are some examples with Italian and Polish:

-Once in a while I find cognates between these two languages. Eventually I discovered that often when this happens, it's because the word originated from Greek (though not always). Now, every time I find a new cognate, I look up the etymology.

Some Italian/Polish cognates I've encountered:
ITALIAN: portafoglio POLISH: portfel ENGLISH: wallet
ITALIAN: medusa POLISH: meduza ENGLISH: jellyfish
ITALIAN: liceo POLISH: liceum ENGLISH: high school
ITALIAN: di panico POLISH: do paniki ENGLISH: panic
ITALIAN: valigia POLISH: walizka ENGLISH: suitcase


Additionally, I occasionally noticed some similarities in certain aspects of the grammar. For example, in both Polish and Italian, there are certain constructions where instead of "me" being the subject of the sentence who is performing the action "I like apples" the sentence is constructed so that the subject is the passive recipient of the action, "Mi piacono le mele" (The apples are pleasing to me) and "Podoba mi się ten kolor włosów." (literally: It is pleasing to me this hair color). Being able to understand this construction in Italian made dealing with it in Polish much, much easier.

Also, both languages have their own version of a reflexive verb construction (where the subject of the sentence both performs and receives the action). When I first started studying Polish years ago, I couldn't understand this at all and it was a major obstacle. Then, after slowly starting to understand how it worked in Italian, dealing with a different version of the same idea in Polish no longer seems confusing anymore - my knowledge of Italian greatly helped me in conquering my former foe.

Have you noticed anything interesting?

A Wanderwort can pique my interest every now and then. These are words that resemble each other semantically and morphologically, and have been attested for several centuries, if not a couple of millennia, in languages that are only distantly related, if not unrelated. You could think of them as internationalisms or widespread loanwords dating from the Middle Ages or earlier.

Lesser-known examples to laymen that come to my mind are the following:

1) "book" ~ "scroll" ~ "document" ~ "paper"
Akkadian [kunukku] "a cylinder-seal"; Cantonese 卷 [gyun2] "reel of books; scroll; volume; examination paper", Erzya конëв [konyov] "paper", Hungarian könyv "book", Slovak kniha "book" (some of the ideas behind this etymology are found here in the entry of Proto-Slavonic *kъnjiga whence the Slovak kniha and the Polish derivative książka among others)

2) "daughter-in-law" ~ "sister-in-law" ~ "female relative"
Finnish käly "sister-in-law", Latin glōs "sister-in-law", Polish żołwica "sister-in-law" (archaic), Turkish gelin "bride; daughter-in-law"

3) "hop" (i.e. the ingredient in beer)
Hungarian komló, Ossetian хуымӕллӕг [x°ymællæg], Polish chmiel, Swedish humle, Tatar колмак [qolmaq] (see here for some discussion and more examples - no one has pinpointed if it comes from Germanic, Turkic, Iranian or Slavonic).

Controversial but still possibly thought-provoking are posited similarities between modern languages through a postulated Proto-Human language.

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A few vague grammatical similarities involving unrelated languages that I've noted during my studies are the following:

1) The case that's used to decline a direct object in an affirmative sentence differs from what's used in a negative one.

ENGLISH: "I'll send a message... Mmmm, on second thought, I won't send a message."
FINNISH: Mä lähetän viestin... Mmm, tarkemmin ajatellen mä en lähetä viestiä.
POLISH: Wyślę wiadomość... Mmm, po namyśle nie wyślę wiadomości.

In Finnish, a negated direct object is in partitive while one that complements an affirmative action (i.e. not negated) can be in nominative (imperatives and plurals of a set), accusative (personal pronouns only), genitive (as in the example) or partitive (especially true if the direct object is uncountable or is the complement of an action that isn't meant to be completed or which doesn't affect that direct object in totality). In Polish, a negated direct object is in genitive whereas when it's in affirmative it can be in accusative (which incidentally looks like the nominative form in many instances) or genitive (referring to masculine animate nouns).

A few other Slavonic languages show to varying degrees this division in declension of direct objects depending on affirmativeness. Slovenian and Ukrainian do something similar to Polish, but Czech and Slovak don't nowadays except in some set phrases (in the past they behaved more like Polish on this point).

2) There's a certain similarity between consonant gradation as found in some Uralic languages (I'll use Finnish in my examples) and certain consonant alternations in Turkish. As far as I know these phenomena developed independently of each other, but I think that they're still mildly interesting to someone who's familiar with the languages involved.

"street" (nominative singular) ~ "street's" (genitive singular)
FINNISH: katu ~ kadun
TURKISH: sokak ~ sokağın

"wing" (nominative singular) ~ "wing's" (genitive singular)
FINNISH: siipi ~ siiven
TURKISH: kanat ~ kanadın

"to call/telephone" (infinitive) ~ "I call..." (present (simple) tense)
FINNISH: soittaa ~ soitan...
TURKISH: telefon etmek ~ telefon ederim...

3) There's also a certain similarity between the suffixes for genitive used in several Uralic, Turkic and Mongolic languages in that they very often end with a nasal consonant (usually -n (-н in Cyrillic) but sometimes -ng in Turkic languages (-нг, -ң or -ӈ depending on the variant of Cyrillic used)).

"deity" ~ "deity's"

FINNISH: jumala ~ jumalan
MEADOW MARI: юмо ~ юмын
TURKISH: tanrı ~ tanrının
UZBEK: tangri ~ tangrining
MONGOLIAN: бурхан ~ бурханын

4) In some Uralic and Turkic languages, nouns are declined in the genitive when linked to certain adpositions (i.e. pre- and postpositions)

"under" (static), "house" ~ "under a/the house" (i.e. "house's underside-in")

FINNISH: alla, talo ~ talon alla
NORTHERN SAAMI: vuolde, viessu ~ viesu vuolde
TURKISH: altında, ev ~ evin altında
UZBEK: tagida, uy ~ uyning tagida

[brilliantyears]

I think it's fairly easy to feel like there is a 'surprising' similarity when in reality English is often the odd one out At least 3 of the words also exist in Dutch in some shape or form, so as a Dutch native speaker I wouldn't have been surprised...

Some Italian/Polish cognates I've encountered:
ITALIAN: portafoglio POLISH: portfel ENGLISH: wallet DUTCH: portefeuille
ITALIAN: medusa POLISH: meduza ENGLISH: jellyfish
ITALIAN: liceo POLISH: liceum ENGLISH: high school DUTCH: lyceum (although fair is fair, we usually say 'middelbare school')
ITALIAN: di panico POLISH: do paniki ENGLISH: panic DUTCH: paniek
ITALIAN: valigia POLISH: walizka ENGLISH: suitcase

But that doesn't mean I haven't encountered some pleasant 'surprises' myself I love finding familiar words in other languages, and thankfully I find plenty in both Russian and Japanese

[tarvos]

Lyceum has a different meaning in Dutch, although it's usually appended for certain high schools; I think only havo/vwo schools can be called a lyceum.

[brilliantyears]

You are right, but I also disagree at the same time Our high school system is entirely different from most countries. There is not even a correct translation of 'middelbare school' that covers everything, except perhaps 'secundary education'.
So no, lyceum is not literally, exactly, 'high school', but it's related and therefore not surprising.

[zenmonkey]

There is a whole facebook group dedicated ONLY to linguistic coincidences. That is to say, coincidences in languages that are not based on common root etymologies.

For example - Tibetan word druk ('dragon')(written) is similar to words in indo-european languages like 'drake' (an old English word for 'dragon,' derived from latin draco), as well as 'dragon' itself. Pheontically they aren't similar ...

[Serpent]

Technically borrowings from the same source aren't cognates. In the IE languages, cognates are generally basic words like mother/matka/madre You take them for granted until you get to a language where they look completely different

Lyceum also exists in English Normally liceo/liceum can indeed be translated as high school, but it's not exactly a direct equivalent.

I'm not sure what you mean by di panico/do paniki. They aren't really fixed expressions (from what I know), and they use different prepositions.

Anyway, yes, I definitely love this kind of thing I was so excited the first time I heard the word walizka

[Cavesa]

I think it's fairly easy to feel like there is a 'surprising' similarity when in reality English is often the odd one

This.

Also, Polish and Italian are not so distant and not only linguistically (really, the title of the thread made me imagine combinations like Polish and Mandarin, or Mandarin and English). Let's not forget Europe has always been a dynamic place. People have always been travelling, always living next to someone, it may have been more usual to know a foreign language or several in the 17th century than in the 20th, and it was more about a community or a social sphere being bilingual than isolated individuals, which mattered. A part of the Polish and Italian natives were even compatriots at times. The languages and populations were not isolated. And there were several lingua francas as the time went, most importantly Latin. Of course there are similarities.

[Denzagathist]

My favorite coincidence is a single lexical resemblance between Turkish and Japanese. The word for 'foreigner' in Turkish is yabancı, which is literally yaban 'savage' plus the human suffix -cı, to yield something like 'savage person' in literal translation. The primary meaning has evidently shifted over time from 'savage/barbarian' to 'foreigner', but I have always been uncomfortable with this word because of its etymology.

So I was amazed when I learned the Japanese word 野蛮人 (yabanjin), which actually means 'barbarian'. It, too, is composed of a word meaning 'savage, barbaric' (野蛮, yaban), plus the suffix for humans, 人 -jin. The only major differences in pronunciation between the Turkish and Japanese words are the final vowel (/ɯ/ vs. /i/) and that the Japanese word has a final /n/.

As far as I know, these are unrelated. The Japanese word is a loanword from Chinese, and the Turkish word seems to come from Persian. I suppose it is possible that either Persian or Chinese influenced the other at some point, but I have no knowledge of it.