They're in different language families from ours (ours is Indo-European). In ours, we've got a LOT of branches: the Indo-Iranian limb gives us Persian, Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Nepali, and a broad array of languages spoken from the Indus to the Brahmaputra. Iranians don't speak Arabic; their language, Farsi, descended from ancient Persian, is a distant cousin of ours. The Slavic limb gives us Russian, Old Church Slavonic, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, etc.; but not Hungarian (Magyar), which is in a different family altogether, as is Estonian, Finnish, and Basque. The Celtic limb gives us Welsh, Gaelic, Breton, Irish, Cornish, and Manx, and it's a member of that family that the people in Galatia spoke (in modern day Turkey), whom Saint Paul wrote his letter to. Darned Irishmen! Then there's the Hellenic branch, the Italic branch, the Germanic branch; even ancient Hittite was one of ours, so that old Uriah the Hittite would have spoken a language distantly related to our English and not at all related to Hebrew.
I don't know much about the languages of the far east. Chinese and Japanese are not related, I know that; and I guess that the same kinds of sound changes occurred in those families as have occurred in our family, because human beings are what they are, and if one sound is easy to confuse with another, it's going to be easy in China just as in Spain or Timbuktu. I know that most Indo-European languages have 2 liquid sounds (L, R, though HOW we pronounce that R can be all over the place), and Chinese and Hawaiian have only one (L), and Japanese has only one (R), so that it is very hard for a Chinese speaker to hear the difference between an American saying BALL and BAR, just as it's very hard for an English speaker to hear the difference between Chinese MA that can mean HORSE, SCOLD, or MOTHER, depending on how you pitch it.
As for the writing -- boy, the Chinese ideograms make that language most fascinating and most frustrating!
My father, first-generation Italian whose parents didn’t speak English, said his mother called a grapefruit, “portogallo”. Or maybe “portogiallo” I finally hazarded a guess that his mother identified the fruit as coming from Portugal? She herself was illiterate in her native Italian and my father always said that “we didn’t speak good Italian, just a dialect.” Any thoughts on that, Professor Esolen?
Hmm... The word for grapefruit in Italian is POMPELMO. But an alternate word for ORANGE -- a certain kind of orange, I think, is PORTOGALLO, as coming from Portugal. Can you tell me what part of Italy she came from?
That's it! It's why Englishmen couldn't hear the Welsh LL (unvoiced L: make an L but don't let your vocal cords vibrate), and instead heard it as FL, so that the Welsh surname LLWYD (GRAY) became, in their ears, either LLOYD or FLOYD...
I love learning the origins of words! I wonder if the far eastern languages have similar beginnings and how their written words came about...
They're in different language families from ours (ours is Indo-European). In ours, we've got a LOT of branches: the Indo-Iranian limb gives us Persian, Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Nepali, and a broad array of languages spoken from the Indus to the Brahmaputra. Iranians don't speak Arabic; their language, Farsi, descended from ancient Persian, is a distant cousin of ours. The Slavic limb gives us Russian, Old Church Slavonic, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, etc.; but not Hungarian (Magyar), which is in a different family altogether, as is Estonian, Finnish, and Basque. The Celtic limb gives us Welsh, Gaelic, Breton, Irish, Cornish, and Manx, and it's a member of that family that the people in Galatia spoke (in modern day Turkey), whom Saint Paul wrote his letter to. Darned Irishmen! Then there's the Hellenic branch, the Italic branch, the Germanic branch; even ancient Hittite was one of ours, so that old Uriah the Hittite would have spoken a language distantly related to our English and not at all related to Hebrew.
I don't know much about the languages of the far east. Chinese and Japanese are not related, I know that; and I guess that the same kinds of sound changes occurred in those families as have occurred in our family, because human beings are what they are, and if one sound is easy to confuse with another, it's going to be easy in China just as in Spain or Timbuktu. I know that most Indo-European languages have 2 liquid sounds (L, R, though HOW we pronounce that R can be all over the place), and Chinese and Hawaiian have only one (L), and Japanese has only one (R), so that it is very hard for a Chinese speaker to hear the difference between an American saying BALL and BAR, just as it's very hard for an English speaker to hear the difference between Chinese MA that can mean HORSE, SCOLD, or MOTHER, depending on how you pitch it.
As for the writing -- boy, the Chinese ideograms make that language most fascinating and most frustrating!
Thank you for all this info. And now I know why the waiters in Chinese restaurants of the past would ask us if we wanted Flyed Lice!
My father, first-generation Italian whose parents didn’t speak English, said his mother called a grapefruit, “portogallo”. Or maybe “portogiallo” I finally hazarded a guess that his mother identified the fruit as coming from Portugal? She herself was illiterate in her native Italian and my father always said that “we didn’t speak good Italian, just a dialect.” Any thoughts on that, Professor Esolen?
Hmm... The word for grapefruit in Italian is POMPELMO. But an alternate word for ORANGE -- a certain kind of orange, I think, is PORTOGALLO, as coming from Portugal. Can you tell me what part of Italy she came from?
That's it! It's why Englishmen couldn't hear the Welsh LL (unvoiced L: make an L but don't let your vocal cords vibrate), and instead heard it as FL, so that the Welsh surname LLWYD (GRAY) became, in their ears, either LLOYD or FLOYD...