Why is Dutch so close to English?

mummra   Mon Jun 14, 2010 11:54 pm GMT
If you check Wikipedia (and google for that matter for independent proof for those who don't like wikipedia for absolute truth) there is the nostratic hypothesis that speculates a link between many language families:

Uralic
Altaic
Kartvelian
Afroasiatic (usually included)
Dravidian (usually included)
Elamite (sometimes included)
Sumerian (sometimes included)
Nivkh (sometimes included)
Yukaghir (not always considered)
Chukotko-Kamchatkan (not always considered)
Eskimo-Aleut (not always considered


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages

Korean and Japanese are very controversial-some place them in the Altaic language family, but most consider them language isolates (languages with no living relatives). If Korean and Japanese do indeed belong to the Altaic family like some experts suggest, then that makes them distantly related.

Hokkienese is a chinese language, and thus it's part of the Sino-tibetan group and seems to be unrelated to the Nostratic group.

Ultimately though, who knows? Although an original language is probable, and any theory that tries to relate all modern languages with each other makes sense, it is impossible to reconstruct with any degree of accuracy. The huge success in the reconstructuction of Proto-Indo-European has made us too hopeful I think.

This is just a theory, however, and impossible to prove, due to the timescales involved.
Tigra   Tue Jun 15, 2010 12:39 am GMT
mummra, thanks.

isn't Proto-Indo-European also supposed to be in this hypothesized Nostratic family?
mummra   Tue Jun 15, 2010 10:17 am GMT
Duh-Yes it is part of the family, not sure why i didn't include it. Apologies for the lapse.
minstrel   Sun Jun 20, 2010 7:32 am GMT
> Hokkienese is a chinese language, and thus it's part of the Sino-tibetan group and seems to be unrelated to the Nostratic group. <

Tibetan: ge (mountain ridge)
Hokkienese: keh (Peh-oe-ji: pronounce as ge + "h = glottal stop"; mountain ridge)
Anglo-Saxon: gē, gēa (district, country, region, territory)
Frisian: ga, goa

Burmese: lak (claws by hand)
Hokkienese: lak (claws by hand)
Old Danish: lak (arrest by hands, law)
English: law

The Germanic languages and Hokkienese seem to share a same layer of Sino-Tibetan family; Tibetan and Burmese are members of this language family.

In Asian, there only has the Tibetan and Hokkienese using the "ge" (ridge) and "keh" (ridge) to name the mountains as the placenames.