Jump to content
Linguaholic

Indo-European links.


Hedonologist

Recommended Posts

How many similarities do you notice between Hindi and English, or any other European language for that matter.

Whilst it vaguely sounds closer to English than to Chinese or African Click languages I can't say I've noticed any definitive similarities in vocabulary or grammar, Which I assume there must be as English and Hindi are Both Indo-European languages.

I'm not linguistic expert so I don't know exactly what I'm looking for, but could anyone give me any pointers?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Study With Us on Discord for FREE!

I'm not a linguist so I'm not an expert.  But I will say you can definitely tell it is an Indo-European and there similarities to English. Many words are similar to Indo-European languages and English, for example: नाम (name), बद (bad) I think this comes from Persian but it's used when something is bad, for example बदसूरत  (badsurat) is ugly and बदनाम (badnam) means infamous. नाक  (naak) is the word for nose, which isn't very dissimilar word, दांत  (dant) is the word for tooth which is connected to dental, दस (das) ten which is connected to decimal and मन (man) means mind and is related to the English word. I'm not going to list them but there are tons of other words like this too, so you can definitely see a huge connection between Hindi and other Indo-European languages, you just have to get more into the vocabulary and you will start to see it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

You've asked for Indo-European links in your topic (although your post talks about Hindi), so I will take the liberty to choose from any Indian language. My mothertongue, Malayalam, shares quite a few words with Portuguese (I wonder why ;) ) - jenala (window), mesa (table), kasera/cadeira (chair), etc. My hypothesis is that these words described objects new to India around the time the Portuguese "visited" and so, we borrowed their words. Some of these words, I believe, even made their way up the subcontinent:

'mesa' is table in Tamil as well, and a few other languages have similar words, for example, in Hindi, it is 'mez'.

'kasera' to 'kursi'? Plausible, I would say.

I'm sure others can fill in with the words for these objects in their native tongues. I bet a few will be similar! ;)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You've asked for Indo-European links in your topic (although your post talks about Hindi), so I will take the liberty to choose from any Indian language.

Because Hindi is part of the Indo-European language family like Hindi. Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada are all Dravidian languages. Linguistically Hindi and English are related but not related to the Dravidian languages. That is why he asked for Hindi specifically. These aren't modern loanwords but words that have the same route in the Indo-European family. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...