Hm, this is bery interesting. But there is no yugoslavian language, just serbian,croatian, slovenian, bosnian, macedonian and so on. We anno used the "serbian-croatian" dictionary when needed. But the...
Ah, hungarian, it is one of the most different on the continent. Well, it's similar to turkish which is a lot close to arabic. To my ears, turkish, hungarian and chinese have a lot of similar vowels.
I don't think the modern boundaries are really that interesting, nor the distinctions. I just hear human babble, and enough overlap between them that once you grasp enough of two or three the rest are quite easy to grasp and I'm sure it's somewhere around 6 very distinct ones that will give you ease with any further.
Latin, Nordic, Greek, Slavic, Turkic and Germanic. That's european languages in one big mess together.
The modern borders are very new. Most people don't even realise that Germany is barely 120 years old. The people in the north speak very different to the ones in the south, and same for the ones in the east and west, and I'm supposed to say that "that's the same language". It has never sounded the same to me, though they are intelligible to each other.
Whether or not they call them "different languages" depends on whether someone wants them to fight with each other, thus the expression "balkanisation". It's just propaganda.
Before WW2, europeans percolated across the continent freely. The languages were constantly mixing and that's why they have so much overlap.
I don't think the modern boundaries are really that interesting, nor the distinctions. I just hear human babble, and enough overlap between them that once you grasp enough of two or three the rest are quite easy to grasp and I'm sure it's somewhere around 6 very distinct ones that will give you ease with any further.
Latin, Nordic, Greek, Slavic, Turkic and Germanic. That's european languages in one big mess together.
The modern borders are very new. Most people don't even realise that Germany is barely 120 years old. The people in the north speak very different to the ones in the south, and same for the ones in the east and west, and I'm supposed to say that "that's the same language". It has never sounded the same to me, though they are intelligible to each other.
Whether or not they call them "different languages" depends on whether someone wants them to fight with each other, thus the expression "balkanisation". It's just propaganda.
Before WW2, europeans percolated across the continent freely. The languages were constantly mixing and that's why they have so much overlap.