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

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

Postby IronMike » Thu Aug 23, 2018 6:04 pm

vonPeterhof wrote: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").


Most of this is due to an ambassador's rank. Internationally, ambassadors are always the highest ranking in an embassy, the direct representative of their country's leader, thus in English the addition of the words "extraordinary and plenipotentiary." This is codified in the Congress of Vienna/Vienna Convention, upon which all diplomatic rules are based.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: Have you noticed any surprising similarities between "unrelated" languages?

Postby vonPeterhof » Thu Aug 23, 2018 7:11 pm

IronMike wrote:
vonPeterhof wrote: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").


Most of this is due to an ambassador's rank. Internationally, ambassadors are always the highest ranking in an embassy, the direct representative of their country's leader, thus in English the addition of the words "extraordinary and plenipotentiary." This is codified in the Congress of Vienna/Vienna Convention, upon which all diplomatic rules are based.

Well, I can't be sure about those other languages, but since Japanese diplomatic terminology is part of my work I do know that the 大 doesn't stand for "extraordinary and plenipotentiary", since the full title of "ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary" is 特命全権大使. Although I guess it does have sort of a connection to the diplomatic hierarchy, since the only other Japanese diplomatic rank to use the character 使 is 公使 (usually translated as "minister" where I work, but apparently also translated as "envoy"), which is a step below the ambassador. In Middle Chinese 使 with the falling tone had the generic meanings of "messenger" or "envoy", as well as a verbal meaning of "to send someone as a messenger/envoy (usually abroad)", but I'm not sure when and where exactly 大使 was coined - it may have been part of a series of words deliberately coined in Meiji-era Japan to represent Western concepts (a lot of which later got borrowed to other East Asian languages), but it could just as well have existed prior to that to refer to the head of a mission.
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Re: Have you noticed any surprising similarities between "unrelated" languages?

Postby Daniel N. » Thu Aug 23, 2018 10:44 pm

Hashimi wrote:English kid vs Arabic gadi (little goat).
English eye vs Arabic ayn.


These two pairs infact might be related.
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Re: Have you noticed any surprising similarities between "unrelated" languages?

Postby Daniel N. » Fri Aug 24, 2018 9:08 am

Hashimi wrote:How come? English is Indo-European and Arabic is Afro-Asiatic.


There are words in IE that are suspected to be very ancient loans from Afro-Asiatic, at the PIE stage. One of them is the word for "seven", for example. Some names of animals and plants might fall into this category, even the word star.
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