Organically-Relate Languages vs. Synthetically-Related Languages

Language Learning Chinese
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I’ve learned something from studying organically-related languages if they languages are organically related, then lower-level vocabulary should be more in common than highly specialized vocabulary.

I started studying Hebrew during the pandemic, and now I’m studying Arabic. I’ve noticed a lot of the most basic vocabulary are the same: I, you, he, she, and, in, to, from, house, people, heart, love, God.

Contrast this with Chinese and Japanese, two organically-unrelated languages. Chinese and Japanese share 60% of vocabulary, about the same percentage as Hebrew and Arabic. But the shared vocab consists mostly of technical and specialized vocabulary, similar to English’s relationship with French.

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Stands to reason, eh? These relationships are one of the main ways linguists determine if languages have a common ancestor.

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Yeah I knew you need both common grammar and vocabulary to have the same ancestor.
What I didn’t know was that the level of the vocabulary matters too.

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Cool stuff. Historical linguistics rocks.

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