I had a test and the question was "Which of the following languages did not evolve from the Indo- European language called Sanskrit?" and you to to chose out of these: a. Hindi , b. English, c. Greek, and d. Arabic. I choses English because it came from Latin, but I got it wrong and the teacher sayed it was Arabic. Is she correct?
2007-03-02 13:14:08 · 8 answers · asked by Tara 3 in Society & Culture ➔ Languages
Maybe you misunderstood her question (or she is totally wrong). English is a Germanic language. Arabic is not Indo-European at all, the others are but did not neccessarily derive from Sanskrit (afaik, Hindi is the only one that is directly related to Sanskrit.)
2007-03-02 13:25:57 · answer #1 · answered by Ammy W 2 · 1⤊ 1⤋
Ammy's right. Indo-European split into Indo-Iranian branch, which evolved into languages like Sanskrit, Hindi, and Farsi, and the European branch, which includes most of the languages of Europe. Sanskrit is more like a distant cousin to English and Greek than anything else (they're related, but very distantly). Also, English didn't come from Latin - as Ammy says, it's in the Germanic family of Indo-European, whereas Latin's in the Italic family (Greek is in the Hellenic, if you're curious). However, a lot of English words (60% is always the figure I hear, though I've not done any real research into the topic) are derived from Latin because of the influence of Norman French on English in the early part of the 2nd millenium AD and from the great wealth of Latin words brought into the language by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Syntactically, though, we've got much more in common with German, and if you've ever tried to read old English, there's no confusing it with a Romance language.
2007-03-02 21:55:29 · answer #2 · answered by ithyphallos 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Ammy is right. English did not descend from Sanskrit, but it's related to Sanskrit because it's an Indo-European language. Arabic is the only non-Indo-European language in the list.
2007-03-02 22:19:16 · answer #3 · answered by drshorty 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Yes. Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton discovered the common root of Hindi, English, Latin, Greek, Gaelic (Irish and Scottish), German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish., etc. in the 19th Century and a later linguist coined the term "Indo-European" to describe the language group.
Arabic is a semitic language (akin to Aramaic and Hebrew).
2007-03-03 01:59:53 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
She's right. Arabic didn't come from Sanskrit.
Greek is closely related to English too, so if you thought Greek had a bit of Sanskrit in it, best not to choose anything it's related to.
2007-03-02 21:20:30 · answer #5 · answered by ? 6 · 3⤊ 0⤋
English has evolved from many languages, we are sort of a "melting pot" for languages... Scandinavian, German, Spanish, a little of everything... the word "ship" was originally "skip" but we have softened the hard "sk" sound to "sh" over the years... but a skipper is still the master of a ship, and we also have a "skiff" a small boat... the word "kindergarten" is German... rodeo, mosquito, Mesa Verde, Los Angeles are all Spanish words... English sort of "borrows" a word here and there as we need it, or change one to what we do need...
2007-03-02 21:33:43 · answer #6 · answered by buckaroo_57 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
English is origins of brittish...especially it came from Latin,German,French and Spanish....!
2007-03-08 02:31:36 · answer #7 · answered by Raja.R 3 · 0⤊ 1⤋
this is stupid question with no right answer, all you can do is check you text book and try to guess what the teacher means.
2007-03-03 08:33:19 · answer #8 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 2⤋