DokPsy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
As an English speaker who’s dabbled in other Germanic and Latin languages, absolutely. I dislike Dutch specifically because it will either start to read like English or German then fall off the deep end real quick.
Portuguese (at least Brazilian) looks and sounds like a mashup between Spanish and French.
This is kind of to be expected when you look at the history of how these languages evolved. The reason Japanese and Mandarin would be so easily confused is that the writing system was imported from China and there are a lot of words that either still look like the parent words or very similar. The same for the Latin and Germanic languages as well as their related offshoots. The history of invasion, language mixing, adaptations, and standardization has produced languages that are in various levels of mutual understanding.
SilentStriker@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Even though there are words in both Japanese & Mandarin that are written similarly to one another or exactly the same but keep in mind pronounciation is different, such as 警察 (けいさつ) from Japanese but in Mandarin that’s pronounced as jǐngchá. Dutch and German are still different languages but are there also pronounciation differences including words that are spelled the same?
DokPsy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Not on the same level considering the difference in how the Eastern and Western languages are formed.
I’m generalizing a bit here into Western being Germanic or Latin based languages and Eastern being primarily Chinese.
Western languages typically use symbols that represent the component sounds of a language (phonemes) where Eastern languages use symbols for whole words or concepts (morphemes). So you would have a single symbol for house or tree instead of a series of symbols for the words.
This means that the word spelling would change in Western languages as the spoken language changes more rapidly and show a large difference between two closely related languages in their spelling for the same word.
Conversely, in Eastern languages, the spoken language is not as closely tied to the words used. (To translate into English as best I can: The character for house could be pronounced like house, home, building, cave, lean-to, castle, shed, etc depending on where it’s being said). So, you’d have, after a few generations, the same character pronounced two very different ways with two different meanings
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
Through through tough thought, I can’t think of any.