[Corpora-List] English is close to Sandinavian languages

[Leon Derczynski]

Danish has many phonemes that simply aren't in English, but also
borrowed a large number of words from English. In fact, colloquial
Danish often includes whole phrases of English; many product names,
marketing efforts and other utterances encountered daily are taken
completely from US and British English. So, I wonder to what extent
this result is not a result of historical Danish influence on English,
but instead a result of modern English's influence upon Danish.

On 30 November 2012 14:41, John F Sowa <sowa at bestweb.net> wrote:
> On 11/30/2012 8:37 AM, Yuri Tambovtsev wrote:
>>
>> English may be closer to Scandinavian languages. In fact, I applied the
>> method of Chi-square to the Germanic languages and found that Danish is
>> very close to English by the distribution of phonemes in the speech
>> sound chain.
>
>
> That qualifier "by the distribution of phonemes" is critical.
>
> By vocabulary, for example, French and Italian are more closely related
> than either is to the Spanish and Portuguese group.  But by phonology,
> French and Italian are very different; so are Spanish and Portuguese.
>
> There are also questions about the core vocabulary vs. borrowings --
> such as borrowing from Italian into French or borrowing from Arabic
> into Spanish and Portuguese.
>
> In your analyses, do you relate the various measures of closeness
> to historical events?  Geographical location?  Migrations?  Wars?
>
> For example, Galician evolved from an early version of Portuguese,
> but it has been strongly influenced by the national boundaries.
> How are the historical developments correlated with changes in
> the measures of closeness?
>
> John
>
>
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-- 
Leon R A Derczynski
NLP Research Group

Department of Computer Science
University of Sheffield
Regent Court, 211 Portobello
Sheffield S1 4DP, UK

+45 5157 4948
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~leon/

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