Brothers and cousins
Have you ever thought about similarities between languages? It is a funny topic. Many times when I talk with someone who has a different mother language from mine I’m took by surprise and suddenly find some identical or quite similar word.
Have you ever heard about Language Family? Language Family is a kind of genealogy of a language. My language, Portuguese, comes from the French/Iberian group in the Indo-European family.
As you can see in this map, Portuguese has the same origin, or proto-language, as French and Spanish and such languages are pretty close to Italian as well. If you go further I your investigation, you will realize that English, German and Dutch are “cousins”. And Russian, Polish, Czech are relatives somehow. We say “e-mail” – from English, “toilette” – from French, “alcohol” from Arabic and many other words with Latin or Greek origin. Beside this fact, this phenomenon called globalization (can I say phenomenon?) makes our languages even closer. Gazeta, piano, global, orthography, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia (fear of long words, though the irony), are common words in many languages.
But I wonder there is something beyond language families and globalization. How Chinese people have been saying “mama” and “papa” since ages ago at the same time we have been saying it here, on the other side of the world? Here is a reasonable question and an impossible answer.
