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T
he languages, from left to right, are English,
Latin, Japanese, Classical Greek, Portuguese, and Sanskrit. (Japanese, Greek, and
Sanskrit have been transliterated
—
written in the Roman alphabet.) You probably noticed some similarities
among all of the languages except Japanese. In fact, all except Japanese
belong to the Indo-European family. Latin (column B) and Portuguese (column
E) are the most closely related; Portuguese is one of the Romance languages
that's derived from Latin.
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U
sing the comparative method, linguists examine
words from two or more languages, concentrating on words that are likely
to endure over time. Numbers, personal pronouns, basic verbs such as
to be
, and basic nouns such as
milk
are the beginning of any
comparative study. Linguists look for similarities - but they also look
for regular differences. In the table, for example, notice that the
t
in the English "two"
and "ten" corresponds to
d
in the other Indo-European languages. It turns out that this change
from
d
to
t
is part of a consonant sound shift that distinguishes the Germanic languages,
including English, from their Indo-European relatives.
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