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I've seen lots of movies on cable movie channels, that sound like they're in English, and are not subtitled, but I still don't understand most of what anybody is saying.
I think Russian and Portuguese sound a lot alike, because the predominant vowels and dipthongs are similar, and the distribution of consonantal phonemes is similar. There don't seem to be a lot of phonemes that are unique to one of those two languages.
For example, English cannot sound similar to a language that has a lot of guttural sounds, or glottal stops, like Arabic, or umlaut vowels like French or German, or tonal significance like Chinese. English cannot sound like Spanish or Italian, which never cluster consonants, or like Polish which always does.
A person who does not speak English would think that a Jamaican and a Pakistani and a Texan and a valley girl are speaking completely different and unrelated languages, because the difference in the lilt and flow and the relative purity of the vowels and the tonal inflections.
I think Russian and Portuguese sound a lot alike, because the predominant vowels and dipthongs are similar, and the distribution of consonantal phonemes is similar. There don't seem to be a lot of phonemes that are unique to one of those two languages.
I have been saying that for a very long time but nobody agreed with me. You're the first person I've actually seen say that too.
It's a fact that English is most related to Scots, and then to Frisian, and then to Dutch, but I don't really think it sounds much like any of those languages. To me it sounds quite a bit like Icelandic or even Danish.
Check this out, imo you can really hear the Germanicness of English.
English is High German with the assimilation of local and neighboring words; and of course, immigrant influences.
A good comparison is listening to The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English; it's almost indistinguishable from High German.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SoEdible
I've been studying German lately and keep coming across English similarities.
Except in sentence structure.
Word combos impress me.
Last edited by chielgirl; 03-27-2012 at 01:21 PM..
I've been studying German lately and keep coming across English similarities.
Indeed there are. The typical 'everyday' vocabulary in both languages easily demonstrate a common history.
Wasser - water
Feuer - fire
Weiss - white
Schwarz - black (related to the word 'swarthy')
Grün - green
Bein - leg (related to the word 'bone')
Zwei - two
Zehn - ten
Sterben - die (related to 'starve')
...and thousands and thousands of more examples. Read up on 'Grimm's Law' for more details on how this relationship is manifested.
I actually think that English sounds most like Afrikaans, depending on which dialect of English you're looking at of course. I think that, as other posters have said, Dutch is very similar to English, but I think Afrikaans sounds more like English than European Dutch does.
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