Question

What are some languages that are similar to each other?

Answer 1

Just to name one example there is Spanish and Italian. They are romance languages. Romance languages is largely derived from latin. The pronunciation sounds more gentle than those of a different family of languages. For example "amor" in Spanish is the same as "amare" in Italian. Both mean love and they are very similar in spelling. Here I attach more information about the different types of languages and how they are connected. It's a pdf of classification of human languages from UCLA.

Answer 2

The far eastern languages are very similar to each other.
I'm talking about Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, etc.

These languages are all familiar in the way that similar words are used to describe the same thing, or situation.

For instance, whether we're speaking Chinese, Vietnamese, or Japanese,
when we want to say "I have a cold,"
it always translates to the same thing, in English: "I've caught a wind."

That's how far eastern Asian languages like to describe having a cold.
They say "I've caught a wind."
(If you want, I can explain why this is.)

Answer 3

@InYourHead While some Asian phrases are similar, and many have been handed down from Chinese to the others, there are some striking differences in the Pacific Asian languages as well. The set you listed, "Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean" are known to have different roots and only similarities due to trade and other locational influences. Only two of those, Japanese and Korean, are considered similar by linguists, I would not call the whole set similar. For example, the pronunciations between Japanese and Chinese are radically different, even though the base writing system used is the Chinese one. The placement of verbs, subject, and objects are also very different in some of those four. In contrast, if you look at Thai, Lao and Shan you will find them to be very similar Asian languages.

In Europe, the Romance family of languages are basically all from Latin. Their grammar is surprisingly similar as are many words. Ci and Oui in Spanish and French for example. Or "Como se va" vs. "Como esta" as another set. As mentioned before, Italian is close to these, and there are many mingled forms like Basque.

Answer 4

This makes clear just how similar the Romance set it:
http://ielanguages.com/romance_phrases.html

These are not just the same stock phrase all coming from Buddhist teachings or saying that spread by conquest and trade. These are phrases with almost the same pronunciation to many of the words! Phonetically, the languages are similar enough that people in different countries can get an idea what the other person is saying!

That is not true between say Japanese and Chinese!

In fact, even in writing the Chinese characters, there are serious differences between Japanese and Chinese that can cause terrible misscommunications. There is a Chinese soup that translates to Japanese as Dirty Bath Water and I saw an example that in Japanese is supposed to mean something like "please be patent while waiting" that in Chinese means something along the lines of "leave now or else!" but I did not know the characters so I can't tell the exact translation.

Answer 5

You're right. Honest to you, I would have gone on to say that same: that phonetically and scripturally, Chinese is different from Japanese and Korean.

I was raised in a Vietnamese household, I was heavily exposed to Chinese customs, and I studied Japanese for four years.
Because of this, I know well enough to agree with you.


I still would like to stick to it, that certain word choices and phrasings are very similar among all four languages that I pointed out.

Languages tell us much about the cultural values from which they were born.

No matter what Asian language we speak, we can see evidence of common values that tie together each culture.


But again, yes I'm well aware that Chinese is different from Japanese and Korean.

Answer 6

I'm a public military school German student and I can easily say that German, Spanish and English are very much alike. In three years of German I've learned snippets of many other languages because of how closely the etymology has been linked. Just a thought.

Answer 7

@WhiteClaw018 English is a largely Germanic derivative. If I recall, Swedish is the one that is closest to English... but it might be Norwegian. One of the ones from that area. Still, the differences are huge.

If someone says Einhundert einundzwanzig to an English speaker, they might get the Ein part as one and would likely get hundred just fine, but "swan-sig" as twenty is going to mistify them.

Contrast the numbers in Spanish, French, and Italian:
http://www.library.yale.edu/cataloging/music/foreign.htm

Answer 8

@e.mccormick
You are right in that English is Germanic derivative, but then we have to think about from where all languages came into being, we cannot assume that we all had our own languages from the very beginning, etymology suggests that we shared a common start. But, of course that is the first thing we learned in my language class was the history of language.
In my classes we also compared Spanish and Italian to German and what we saw was more grammatically similar to the way that we decipher numbers.
Take 21 in German, einundzwanzig, literally translated is one and twenty, in Spanish it is viente uno, again literally the word twenty and the word one creating 21, and in English we say twenty one. It is interesting in the way that our minds process the words that we see each day.
All in all the exchange between the languages and how we figure them out is fairly interesting in my opinion.
Mostly I responded to see what others would think because my own knowledge is a bit narrow when it comes to languages.

Answer 9

Word order is one of those places where it shows how most every language use one of two orders:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order

Even though there are several possible orders, those two are almost 90% of languages.

Answer 10

the Celtic languages are similar to each other though many have now died out. Ones still Spoken are Welsh , Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic. Ones that have died are Cornish and Manx..
I speak a little Welsh and there are some similarities between Welsh and French. eg
Eglwys and Eglise ( church) and Ysgol and Ecole (school).

Answer 11

Breton is very similar to Welsh too.

Answer 12

right - Welsh has developed from Breton. Its a Brithionic celtic language

Answer 13

Some of the middle eastern languages are similar too. Such as Egyptian and Arabic.

Answer 14

@RandomSnow Very good point! And for the same reasons as the Latin base ones. Same basic roots in a limited geography. So there was drift, but not a huge volume. To be clear, in your example, the roots are not Latin! I mean the process that happened, not the specifics.