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i feel like when i started to learn a bit of portuguese, which is mostly intact vulgar latin, that a circle closed because SO MANY WORDS were related between portuguese and slavic languages, i literally did not realise that half of what you call "slavic" is actually latin and the slavic words are probably obscure things in the shadows of the language, colors, rather than forms

after spending so much time in bulgaria and former yugoslavia it was shocking to me listening to people bantering in portugues, like, my god, they have the same set of phonemes, just a different way of using them and numerous similar words, like "tu" in yugo is basicaly the same meaning as "tu" in portuguese (it's an informal "you", similar to voce, they abandoned the genderless version in formal speech you have to say "minha senhora" or "senhor" for you most of the time, which is gendered

there definitely is a certain point at which you may not be fluent in many languages but you have enough basic building blocks that you can catch the gist a lot of what a person is saying, by tone, by phonemes and syllables, and other things

enough to say that generally, you guess right about the intent of an expression when you take it all in at once

Sacred Peak 1y ago

yeah it's all inter mixed and they (european and northern Indian) all trace back to Proto-Indo-European.

there are a ton of tricks between English and French to cheat. Like words beginning with G in French is typically coming from German (which then makes it English readable) and in German are spelled with a W.

guerrier (warrior)

guêpe (wasp)

Guillaume (William, yeah lol)

^ means something is missing here. typically it's an S as in forêt.

when I retired I went back and did a double major in linguistics and French language/history. I'm a total nerd.

I can mostly read Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese because of French. As you say once you know how..

🤙🤣

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Discussion

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

yeah, the phonetics/writing links between things in east european languages and west are hilarious though... like the russian/bulgarian use of B, which is pronounced V, for things that are B in some other western/central european, and vice versa... and like, portuguese uses V in place of V all the time, this green fucking brainwashing shit "responsavel" and the word for foldable "dobravel" and when i saw "dobravel" i thought... oh, double, as in fold one into two, and then i thought "dobre" as in "good" as maybe relating to "double" and then further, relating it back to the fact that early arabic and hebrew did not have vowels at all, and i made a funny little series of posts the other day about how intelligible text is without the vowels being distinct

it's quite hilarious, and yes, indian, european,once you have enough pieces of these two patterns you can decipher a lot of others

i feel that east european is the most interesting because they most obviously blend the eastern and western languages so much, but i didn't realise how western it actually was until i learned fully western lol

Sacred Peak 1y ago

B and V and linguistically a minimal pair. They are articulated identically other than method of articulation. Both are bilabial, voiced. That's why there are these synchronicities. It's drift/preference but close to its parent sound.

berry / very identical other than the first sound and that sound only varies in one aspect.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

yeah, they are similar sounds, but also, when you see the different variants

in serbo-croatian they use "u" in place of what is written "B" in bulgarian/russian and pronounced V

the relation between U and V is in text, not in voice

Sacred Peak 1y ago

oh you're talking scripts and writing. yeah that part is interesting as well.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

yeah, it's nutty, like, people were clearly acquiring spoken language from text in eastern europe, i can't figure any other way around that conclusion

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

also, some dumbass today was trying to throw intellectual authoritarianism around on the subjcet of language and i'm like

"dude, language is full of naive things because people are stupid and subjective" this to me is a case in point, the U/V phoneme and its identical meaning in western balkans vs bulgarian/russian/ukrainian/etc (i don't know what the border was, i think it predates prussia)

Sacred Peak 1y ago

yeah. there are lots of misconceptions. first year linguistics (2 classes) could and should be taught in mid high school or something. it obliterates all the 'stuff people just say that isn't real but everyone thinks is real'.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

bad information travels around, unfortunately, and it's helped a lot by people who have delusions of authority or that their memory borrows authority from authority somehow

i've had several long persisting ideas in my mind utterly destroyed by later facts and it takes a strong sense of self to recover from that, some things that were close to my constellation of thoughts that defined me, it was like having a huge structural piece fail

so i'm used to it

but most people live out their whole lives never facing this. sucks to be them... i feel better knowing i revised my model

Sacred Peak 1y ago

yes. well. it's been like this for at least 2600 years. that I know of. People don't change, human nature is nature. See through it and wake up or drown in it and lose you.

🤙😇

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

yeah... some of the things you gotta let go of to get there are hard

but once you get over the grief of losing your illusions you are happier

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

oh yeah, the modern regime of bullshit has been in effect for about 2500 years

that's why, mysteriously, most of the great spiritual masters appeared 2500 years ago

chuang tzu

guatama siddhartha

and i personally believe that Jesus also was in this time, not merely 2000 years ago but contemporary to buddhism and taoism's origins

i mean, if you were God, and you threw out two ballers and then some fake council of false christians decrees that jesus was born at a date 2000 ago from today that no contemporary historian of that time (AD 0) concurred with

well fuckdedooo of course it's bullshit

jesus was before then, obviously, at least, and the other thing about jesus is he quoted Enoch extensively and they tried to ban that book too

read Enoch if you want to really fall down a rabbithole

according to Genesis, Enoch existed before the Flood so yeah

Sacred Peak 1y ago

I think your conclusion is likely it happened some times or even often. until IPA was created there was no neutral way to express phonemes. with IPA is you know what the sound of the symbols are you can say it so you can say anything written in IPA without even needing to know the meaning.

I imagine long ago this was not transmitted unless they had direct contact.

If you like the history part, take a look at when there was a partial Arab colonization of Europe coming up from North Africa through Spain (dark ages(ish) time) they had a linguistic, mathematics etc mini Golden age there while a lot of the rest of Europe was in decline and it was multi ethnic and multi religion. Some Jews fleeing from the eastern Mediterranean ended up in Spain.

it's a not often looked at piece. it's also why modern Spanish contains words with Arab origins.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

yeah, it's quite fascinating, and just completely unravels any nonsense about cathederals even mattering

the people sed wat dey sed