@callumburgess04

4 months ago

To everyone saying that because the grammar is alike in many of these languages, they must be related, I understand what you mean but what you’re saying is a misguided understanding of the differences between how languages in a language family relate to another and how languages in a sprachbund relate to one another. ​​⁠

Grammar actually is the one thing that gets shared like crazy in sprachbunds!!!! Fringe vocabulary, i.e. words that aren’t used super often in a language or are unique to that language, get shared a lot too. But core vocabulary, i.e. pronouns, verbs like be, have, go, want, eat, sleep, drink, run, etc., kin terms, and terms for nouns that are a vital element of that language’s culture or life (i.e. water, human, crops that are grown and traded and eaten by that language’s speakers, animals and fish that also follow those same parameters, directions, prepositions, and other basic terms) are almost never shared.

You can see this clearly in English. In 1066 the Norman French conquered England and for years and years the language of the nobility was French, so a sprachbund between the two blossomed. As a result, English grammar today is super different from Old English and its closest relatives Dutch and Frisian and German, and more similar in many ways to French.

In English today, we also have a ton of doubled vocabulary words for animals and meat. This is because the English would kill the animal and farm it, so the name of the actual animal stayed Germanic, i.e. cow/sheep/pig, but then they served it to the Normans and so the food name became French, i.e. beef/mutton/pork. And despite these relations with french words here, literally all of our kin terms (father, brother, mother, sister) and core nouns like water, cat, horse, be, know, have, eat, etc. are all still clearly derived from their Old English (fully Germanic) equivalents, not from French or Latin.

(Weirdly, English does actually get one pronoun, they, from Norse and not from its direct ancestor, but this is an exception and generally languages don’t have more than a few of these exceptions in their core vocabulary.)


Japanese and Korean, two languages within the Proto-Altaic hypothesis, are almost identical on a syntactic (structural) level. But their core vocabulary is 100% distinct and the sounds that certain core words do share cross-linguistically is much more likely a coincidence. Simply put, having 15-25% lexical similarities between languages and the vast majority of those similarities not being core vocabulary just proves that these languages aren’t related as part of a larger language family, but rather have just interacted a ton due to trade and war over centuries upon centuries. Hypotheses like this have a problem with just cherry picking out the words that work with their theory, when in reality looking at the entire languages would show that this hypothesis is based completely on blind faith.

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