What obscure thing you enjoy do you never get to talk about?
What obscure thing you enjoy do you never get to talk about?
Loosely inspired by how much people seemed to enjoy a similar question I asked on Games about unappreciated titles. But answers don't have to be media related (they still can be though).
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Linguistics. Did you know English and Bengali are related? They share an ancestor about 5000 years ago. Russian, Latin, Farsi, and Greek, and lots more are in that family too.
Do you know what languages are not related at all, absolutely 0% aside from borrowings, even though if you know a bit about em they seem like they should be? Japanese and Korean.
you might enjoy reading about Champollion and how he deciphered the hieroglyphic system.
The enormous differences between korean and japanese writing are interesting for someone who can read neither. Is it related to your factoid about the language's relations?
Their writing systems have their own cool histories. Japanese technically has 4 writing systems (kinda 5 if you count the original purely chinese-character based system). Korean used to have Hanja, a Chinese based system, but then some emperor just decided "nope, this sucks, I'm making a new thing", and came up with hangul. Imo hangul is one of the coolest systems out there.
Lithuanian is the closest living language to Proto-Indo-European, and has a lot of cognates with Sanskrit.
Baltic languages are awesome. I only wish I could master those case systems!
There are two ways to learn them, you can try memorising a bunch of tables or learn with a lot of direct practice. Probably a bit of both. I am a native speaker of Lithuanian but I don't even remember the cases, to be honest.
Interesting, I assumed most East Asian languages were originally formed from Chinese.
Chinese did influence a lot of east Asian languages, but it's more like the relationship between Latin and English - lots of borrowing and influence, but it's not an ancestor.