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IE lang outside Europe closest to Eu lang

 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages Post Reply
Dtmon
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 Message 1 of 6
02 February 2015 at 12:23am | IP Logged 
I had to shorten the title. I am curious to find out which Indo European language outside of Europe( as in Persian or Hindi) is closest to a European IE language(as in French or Swedish). I am mostly interested in IE languages in the Romance,Germanic, and Slavic families. I am mostly interested in grammar but even languages that absorbed a lot of vocab interest me. Would I be correct in saying that Tajik fits this or is there something even closer?
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robarb
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 Message 2 of 6
02 February 2015 at 7:27am | IP Logged 
Well, the Tajik language is a variety of Persian, so it shouldn't be significantly closer to European languages than the
other two big varieties of Persian, Dari and Farsi. Tajik has more Slavic loanwords than the others, though.

It might also be worth considering urban varieties of Hindi which have heavy influence from English.

Then again, the "cheating" answer to your question would have to be Afrikaans.
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Ari
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 Message 3 of 6
02 February 2015 at 7:53am | IP Logged 
Answers that are likely not what yo're looking for:

* Afrikaans
* One of the languages straddling the European borders, like Russian
* A creole language with one or two European languages as its base
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vonPeterhof
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 Message 4 of 6
02 February 2015 at 7:03pm | IP Logged 
robarb wrote:
Well, the Tajik language is a variety of Persian, so it shouldn't be significantly closer to European languages than the other two big varieties of Persian, Dari and Farsi. Tajik has more Slavic loanwords than the others, though.
There's also the fact that Tajik employs a fully alphabetic and largely phonemic writing system, as opposed to standard Tehrani Persian which omits short vowels in writing and has several orthographic distinctions that aren't reflected in the spoken language (spoken Dari has preserved some of them).

As for loaned vocabulary, it's not just Slavic, but also from Greek, Latin and other European languages, borrowed through Russian. However, having just skimmed Tajik Wikipedia's article on Tajikistan I think I've noticed about as many if not more loanwords from Arabic as from European languages - in fact the lede only has one European word, the abbreviation km. Although if you can read Cyrillic and are familiar with a couple of Indo-European languages it should be easy for you to figure out what the Tajik word for "is" is just by reading the first two sentences (you might also get an idea about the word for "name", but that one doesn't appear to be in its default dictionary form here).
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robarb
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 Message 5 of 6
02 February 2015 at 8:07pm | IP Logged 
vonPeterhof wrote:
As for loaned vocabulary, it's not just Slavic, but also from Greek, Latin and other European
languages, borrowed through Russian.


Right, sorry.

vonPeterhof wrote:
However, having just skimmed Tajik Wikipedia's article on Tajikistan I think I've noticed
about as many if not more loanwords from Arabic as from European languages - in fact the lede only has one
European word, the abbreviation km.


You missed one: Осиёи "Asia," from the Latin, from the Greek. But the point stands, that Tajik (at least, the
formal Tajik that one uses to write on Wikipedia) is not particularly full of European loanwords.

If you go by the alphabetic and loanwords argument, you might look at Fiji Hindi, which writes in the Latin
alphabet and has more English (and Fijian) loanwords than standard Indian Hindi (although not necessarily more
loanwords than actual Indian Hindi as spoken in some places). It's a small language, though.

P.S. If you were to measure by descent rather than surface similarity, there are actually only two candidates: the
Iranian/Indian branch, whose members all split off from the European IE stocks at the same time, and Armenian.

Edited by robarb on 02 February 2015 at 8:11pm

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vonPeterhof
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 Message 6 of 6
02 February 2015 at 8:17pm | IP Logged 
robarb wrote:
You missed one: Осиёи "Asia," from the Latin, from the Greek.
True, I guess I should have added "excluding proper names"; although if those are included I guess "русу укроинӣву..." counts as well.


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