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

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Chung
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Re: Have you noticed any surprising similarities between "unrelated" languages?

Postby Chung » Wed Aug 08, 2018 5:12 pm

Hashimi wrote:
Jaleel10 wrote:Anybody know the reason why?


Maybe because more than 90% of these Indo-European peoples were right-handed, so they considered things on the right as the "right" things!


As far as I know, Korean, Mongolian, and Turkish don't subsume lexically the ideas of "right (location/direction)" with "(legal) entitlement" as in the original Indo-European examples. In other words, you don't use the same term to mean the non-left side/direction and the privilege to do something. The common thread here is that the respective terms referring to a legal or more abstract concept are borrowings rather than semantic extensions of the existing lexemes meaning "straight", "right" or "correct".

오른쪽 [oreunjjok] "the right(-side)" (< 오른 "right" + 쪽 "side")
권리 [gwolli] "right, privilege" (borrowed from Sinitic cf. 權利 [quánlì] "power and wealth; entitlement" (Mandarin))

баруун [baruun] "the right" (i.e. opposite of left) (coincidence or not, this recalls Korean 바르다 [bareuda] "to be straight" and 바른 [bareun] "correct" (earlier: "right-hand"))
эрх [erkh] "authority; right; will" (borrowed from Turkic cf. Turkish erk "power"; Uzbek erk "choice; freedom")

sağ "right (side); health" (< Proto-Turkic *sạg "healthy")
hak "right, privilege" (borrowed from Arabic cf. حَقّ [ḥaqq] "truth; reality; (legal) rights")

Furthermore, the Arabic term has cognates in other Semitic languages of similar meaning. That is to say they are distinct from those reflexes of the root meaning "opposite of left". For that we'd see reflexes of Proto Afro-Asiatic *yamin "right hand")
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Re: Have you noticed any surprising similarities between "unrelated" languages?

Postby vonPeterhof » Wed Aug 08, 2018 7:08 pm

Chung wrote:
Hashimi wrote:
Jaleel10 wrote:Anybody know the reason why?


Maybe because more than 90% of these Indo-European peoples were right-handed, so they considered things on the right as the "right" things!


As far as I know, Korean, Mongolian, and Turkish don't subsume lexically the ideas of "right (location/direction)" with "(legal) entitlement" as in the original Indo-European examples.

And even among Indo-European languages this is apparently far from universal. Just looking through translations on the Wiktionary page for right (as well as playing with Google Translate a bit), it seems like this isn't the case in Indo-Iranian, Celtic, Baltic, North Germanic, South Slavic, Greek, Albanian and Armenian languages, whereas among the non-IE languages of Europe it applies to Finnish, Basque and Hungarian (though I'm not sure if they use the exact same word or just cognates - appears to be the latter in the case of Hungarian), but not to Estonian or any of the Turkic languages (Maltese seems to have both Semitic and Romance words for the direction, the latter of which can also be used for the legal concept).
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Re: Have you noticed any surprising similarities between "unrelated" languages?

Postby Querneus » Wed Aug 08, 2018 8:12 pm

Egyptian Arabic: فصل faSl [fɑsˁl] 'classroom'
Cantonese: 課室 fo2sat1 [fɔ:˧˥ sɐt̚˥] 'classroom'

Old Chinese 屋 *ʔˤok 'house' (whence Mandarin 房屋 fang2wu1 'house', Cantonese 屋企 uk1kei5*2 'house')
Proto-Indo-European weyḱ-s 'settlement' (whence Greek (ϝ)οἶκος (w)oikos 'house', Sanskrit विश् víś 'house, settlement, community', Latin vīcus 'village; neighborhood', Old Persian viθ 'village; clan', Old Church Slavonic вьсь vĭsĭ 'village')

English he
Piraha hi 'he, she, it, they'



Note that it is very common across languages to have certain similar-sounding words for the most important concepts for babies because babies find them easy to pronounce. Some examples would be "dad" (Spanish tata, Mandarin 爹 die1 or 大 da4, Polish tata, Inuktitut ᐊᑖᑕ ataata), "papa" (Spanish papá, Mandarin 爸爸 ba4ba, Arabic أب ab or بابا baabaa, Indonesian bapak, Korean 아빠 appa, Zulu ubaba), "mom" (Spanish mamá, Mandarin 媽媽 ma1ma, Polish mama, Indonesian mama or mimi, Korean 엄마 eomma, Zulu umama) and the use of voiceless palatal affricates (ch-like sounds) for a word meaning "breast" (Salvadoran Spanish chiche, Japanese 乳 chichi, Latvian čiči, Hungarian csecs).

These tendencies are by no means universal, they're just tendencies. For example, Georgian has დედა deda for 'mom'.
Last edited by Querneus on Thu Aug 09, 2018 5:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Have you noticed any surprising similarities between "unrelated" languages?

Postby vonPeterhof » Wed Aug 08, 2018 9:04 pm

Ser wrote:For example, Georgian has დედა deda for 'mom'.

Yeah, as well as მამა mama for "father". Incidentally, Old Japanese had the word *papa meaning "mother" - its pronunciation has switched to haha in modern Japanese though, whereas the word パパ papa is used in the more internationally conventional way.
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Re: Have you noticed any surprising similarities between "unrelated" languages?

Postby Serpent » Wed Aug 08, 2018 9:58 pm

vonPeterhof wrote:whereas among the non-IE languages of Europe it applies to Finnish, Basque and Hungarian (though I'm not sure if they use the exact same word or just cognates - appears to be the latter in the case of Hungarian)
In Finnish oikea is an adjective meaning right in both senses. Right as a noun is oikeus which is literally rightness :) There's also oikein which is the corresponding adverb (only for the meaning 'correct'). Oh and normally -sti is the ending for adverbs, but oikeasti means very/really.
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Re: Have you noticed any surprising similarities between "unrelated" languages?

Postby Serpent » Wed Aug 08, 2018 10:02 pm

M23 wrote:While studying German I keep getting surprised by things every now and then being more similar to Spanish than English. For example, the words for a necktie:

German: Krawatte
Spanish: Corbata
cravat also exists in English, though it's outdated now :)
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Re: Have you noticed any surprising similarities between "unrelated" languages?

Postby Daniel N. » Thu Aug 16, 2018 10:43 pm

StringerBell wrote: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).


These two things are part of the general similarity/convergence of Romance and Slavic languages. The same would hold if you would take French and Croatian/Serbian - inverted subject/object with some verbs, "reflexive" particle with many uses etc.

Sometimes convergence produces identical endings, like Italian and Croatian/Serbian -i for noun plural, -mo for 1st person plural of verbs...

There is, however, a major "coincidence" that -m marks the first person form of verbs in many languages in Eurasia, seemingly unrelated. There are several hypothesis why it is so.
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Re: Have you noticed any surprising similarities between "unrelated" languages?

Postby Chung » Wed Aug 22, 2018 7:06 pm

A couple of similarities at (almost) opposite ends of Eurasia come to mind.

1) In Balto-Finnic languages and a few Sinitic ones, the verb "to know (a fact)" incorporates the noun translateable as "way". In fact, the verb in Balto-Finnic languages is a derivative of the noun "way" with the semantic shift concluded as moving from "[the] way" to "to know [the way]"

Estonian teadma (< tee "road, way"), Finnish tietää (< tie "road, way"), Karelian tieteä (< tie "road, way")

知道 [Cantonese: zi1 dou3, Mandarin: zhīdào] (< 知 "to know" + 道 "way; direction; method")

"I don't know"
Estonian Ma ei tea
Finnish En tiedä
Karelian En tie / En tijjä
Cantonese 我唔知道 [Ngo5 m4 zi1 dou3]
Mandarin 我不知道 [Wǒ bù zhīdào]

In Cantonese, 道 "way; direction; method" can be dropped as in 我唔 [Ngo5 m4 zi1] "I don't know".

2) In Northern Saami and Korean, the usual phrases* for taking leave account for whether you or the other person is leaving (outside certain colloquial expressions)

Northern Saami
- Báze dearvan! "Stay well/in a healthy way!" (addressed to one person staying behind) / Báhcci dearvan! (addressed to two people staying behind) / Báhcet dearvan! (addressed to more than two people staying behind)
- Mana dearvan! "Go well/in a healthy way!" (addressed to one person leaving) / Manni dearvan! (addressed to two people leaving) / Mannet dearvan! (addressed to more than two people leaving)

Korean
- 안녕히 계십시오 [annyeonghi gyesipsio] (polite and formal) / 안녕히 계세요! [annyeonghi gyeseyo] (still polite but not as formal) "Stay in peace!" (addressed to those who're staying)
- 안녕히 가십시오 [annyeonghi gasipsio] (polite and formal) / 안녕히 가세요! [annyeonghi gaseyo] (still polite but not as formal) "Go in peace!" (addressed to those who're leaving)

*While we native speakers of English can use somewhat similar ways for taking leave such as "Keep well!" or "Take care!", the preceding phrases in Northern Saami and Korean are about as unremarkable or "standard" as our taking leave with "(Good)bye!" or "Have a good day/afternoon/evening/night!".
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Re: Have you noticed any surprising similarities between "unrelated" languages?

Postby vonPeterhof » Wed Aug 22, 2018 10:37 pm

Chung wrote:In Northern Saami and Korean, the usual phrases* for taking leave account for whether you or the other person is leaving (outside certain colloquial expressions)

Setswana has the same system, with "Sala(ng) sentlê" being the interjection towards the one(s) staying and "Tsamaya(ng) sentlê" towards the one(s) leaving.

Another one I noticed recently was the word for "ambassador" in certain languages. The East Asian CJKV languages use words that are written in the Chinese characters as 使, with the combination of the characters most literally translated as "great envoy". Recently when applying for a Slovak visa I noticed that the Slovak word for "ambassador" was "veľvyslanec", which has the exact same literal meaning ("veľ[ký]" - great; "vyslanec" - envoy). Looking around Wikipedia and Wiktionary, I see that similarly structured words are used in a few other Slavic languages (Czech "velvyslanec", Slovene and Croatian "veleposlanik"), as well as several Uralic ones (Finnish "suurlähettiläs", Estonian "suursaadik", Hungarian "nagykövet") and a Turkic one (Turkish "büyükelçi").
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Re: Have you noticed any surprising similarities between "unrelated" languages?

Postby nooj » Thu Aug 23, 2018 6:33 am

Proto Indo-European *mer- for 'to die'.

Proto Semitic *mwt for 'to die'.

Which gives words in the daughter languages that look kind of similar if you squint. For example, Arabic موت vs Latin mors.
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