What language is closest to English?

i agree, spanish was the first one that came to my mind also. but i think the reason it was not mentioned until your post is that everybody else was giving silly answers :mrgreen:

 

English is derivative from Indo-European. It stems from the gemanic branch but unlike German it does and will create new words by assimilation (yes your nice person will be laminated) of other vocabulary rather than by reconstructing new words from native words. Just take a look at German technical vocabulary. It looks like anagrams. The history of the English language is a amazing topic. From Indo-European through Old English, Middle English the great vowel shift to modern English there is much to be learned. Dyslexics like my self can learn much about our screwed up spelling conventions by delving into a study of the history of the language. Deep breath down off the soap box.

 

Re: A Bit Of History

Yup, Finnish is a Finno-Ugrian language and nothing like Swedish or Russian (west and east) which are Indo-European languages and still far from each other. Finnish is in the same league as Estonian and Hungarian, but has separated from the latter some 5000-6000 years ago, so doesn't exactly sound like that either *but* the two share a lot of lingual features which make them very different from most other European languages. Finnish is close to Estonian however. Early Finnish speaking people have lived in the area of Finland around 5000 years ago.

I'd also like to point out the fact that is rarely known: Finland is not a part of Scandinavia. The Scandinavian peninsula only consists of Sweden and Norway. To include Finland (and Kola), call it Fennoscandia. It's still okay to just say Scandinavia, at least when it comes to Scandinavian design.

Now that should mix you up :mrgreen:

 

Yeah, English is pretty cool, although perhaps I'm biased on this point. It's my first language, after all.

Here are some things I like about it....

No masculine or feminine or, for that matter, neuter nouns to worry about. The endings of nouns do not need to be changed according to the role they play in the sentence. Most verbs are easy to conjugate and the indicative mode is used most of the time (rarely does it use the subjunctive). It has an alphabet (I know I'd have problems with a symbol based language). The words mean the same, no matter what intonation you use.

Yep, it has some pretty nice features. On the other hand, spelling and pronunciation rules are a nightmare.

 

I agree with Daniel. Spanish, French and German seem to be the closest ones.

 

umm i think Kenyan and Nigerian are close...
oh wait... i guess that is english... but english with an accent!! ... does that count?

i dont see how you can determine what is closest anyway. England was colonized by the french, but their language isnt tied to french any more than its tied to anything else except american maybe.

and american isnt strictly english either. its a melting pot of languages because that is where the people who spoke it came from.

live in New Orleans and convince me that american isnt more like french...

but live here in WA State and tell me that the only true american language was spoken here centuries before columbus ever made it to this side of the pond.
(or magellen for our pond)

living here i find it normal for place names like

Enumclaw
Snoqualmie
Skoocumchuck
Nisqually
Skamokawa
Stillaguamish
Quillayute

but i be willing to bet that most of you around the country unless you have ties to the Pacific Northwest will claim these words are as foreign as any european language.
but then you be wrong. they are as american as anything else.

i also spent time in Michigan and Hawaii. go to those places and convince them that any european language is closer to what they have there.

go to California, Texas and Arizona and see the spanish influence.

i dont see many languages that are spoken today that were so isolated that they werent a combination of several different languages with the possible exception of China.

on a side note: one of the funniest things i have ever seen on TV happened a few years ago when a hapless reporter from the Today Show was doing a story about the Western Washington County Fair.

his attempted pronounciation of the city where the festival was held had me rolling on the floor. besides the fact that he never got close, he said it 3 different ways.

For those of you that dont know, the fair is held in Puyallup, WA... and no, its not pronounced the way its spelled.

 

I don't know anything about Nigeria.

Most Kenyans grow up speaking a tribal language, of which there are many in Kenya. If they go to school, the first language they learn is Kiswahili, commonly, but erroneously, called Swahili, a language invented centuries ago by Arab traders to communicate with the people of East Africa, and now spoken in several countries around and including Kenya. I think it is probably the official languege. English is most often the third language Kenyans learn, due to the influence of the British colonial period. Thus if you go to Kenya as a tourist (and it's a fantastic place to see animals) you will feel almost at home speaking English. Everyone in the tourist industry speaks it.

But there is no language called Kenyan. Rather, there is a multitude of Kenyan languages, none of them bearing any resemblence whatsoever to English.

 

welll i work with some one who was born and raised in Kenya and he says that English and something else i dont remember or can pronounce is the official language.

 

The other one would be Kiswahili.

 

that may be it... something like that...

actually the story about my co-worker is rather funny. we all knew that he recently came from Kenya. and i admired how quickly his english improved. when he first arrived, his accent was so bad, it was hard to tell what language he was speaking.

so i commented how impressed i was that he learned our language so fast. he commented

"well after 30 years, i should be getting the hang of it!"

apparently, english was the only language they taught in the school he went too. he can only speak enough of his local dialect to get by and cant read or write it at all. 90% of the newspapers over there are in english. he said the "tribe" language was made more difficult in that each town had their own variation.

 

I'm going to guess that he spoke his tribal language at home, studied English in school, but spoke Kiswahili as his normal language when not at home with his family.

Kenyans in the tourist industry speak English with an accent, but they are easy to understand. So if your co-worker's English was hard to understand, he probably did not use it on a daily basis.

Still, he had a strong grounding in the basics of grammar and an extensive vocabulary, making it easier for him to make progress than it would be for someone with no prior exposure.

 

oh he had a strong base in grammer... he is like working with my jr high school english teacher. he is constantly correcting everyones grammer...

 

kenmce said (more or less): "my understanding is that Frisian is the closest relative to English."

That's my understanding, too. According to The Languages Of The World Ancient And Modern (Stanley Wemyss, 1950) the following couplet works in both tongues: "Good butter and good cheese is good English and good Fries."

I've also heard English aptly described as a "Germanic language with a large Latin vocabulary."

And here's a bit more Frisian from the same book:

Hwent sa ljeaf hat God de wrald hawn, dat Er syn ienichstberne Soan jown hat, dat in elts dy't yn himleaut, net fordjerre, mar it invige libben hawwe mei.
Jn. 3:16

Perhaps that's close to what our language might sound like if not for the Norman invasion.

 

Ahm thinkin is probly suthern west virginnyan!

Relax, it's a joke on myself, kids!

 

What language is closest to English?

I don't know, but I know which one is farthest away....

....Perl

 

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Actually Old English had that, and sounded more like continental pronunciation. Since then we have had the Romans, Norman invasion, and the great vowel shift. Bada Bim Bada Boom you have Modern English. And the best thing is that it is still growing assimilating other languages and changing. The spelling and pronunciation rules are brutal because we froze those around the time of the printing press and a bit earlier but the language evolved. In middle English all of those leetters were pronounced Knee was (linguists forgive me) Kanaae and Marriage was Mary i aggge. Spelling was that of the districts around London. At that time there is a story of a traveling merchant going from London to France who is blown back on the coast. He is a English speaker. He goes to a farm house and asks for food and the lady of the house responds "I am sorry I do not speak french". The problem is that English became a merging of all the districts not just the area around London. Spelling did not. bummer.