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In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 (or 100%) would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words. There are different ways to define the lexical similarity and the results vary accordingly.
This list contains Germanic elements of the English language which have a close corresponding Latinate form. The correspondence is semantic—in most cases these words are not cognates, but in some cases they are doublets, i.e., ultimately derived from the same root, generally Proto-Indo-European, as in cow and beef, both ultimately from PIE *gʷōus.
The following conventions are used: Cognates are in general given in the oldest well-documented language of each family, although forms in modern languages are given for families in which the older stages of the languages are poorly documented or do not differ significantly from the modern languages.
The aim of the comparative method is to highlight and interpret systematic phonological and semantic correspondences between two or more attested languages.If those correspondences cannot be rationally explained as the result of linguistic universals or language contact (borrowings, areal influence, etc.), and if they are sufficiently numerous, regular, and systematic that they cannot be ...
The below table indicates the distribution of the dominant word order pattern of over 5,000 individual languages and 366 language families. SOV is the most common type in both although much more clearly in the data of language families including isolates. 'NODOM' represents languages without a single dominant order. [13]
Analytic languages encompass the Sino-Tibetan family, including Chinese, many languages in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and West Africa, and a few of the Germanic languages. Fusional languages encompass most of the Indo-European family—for example, French , Russian , and Hindi —as well as the Semitic family and a few members of the Uralic ...
The oldest Germanic languages have the typical complex inflected morphology of old Indo-European languages, with four or five noun cases; verbs marked for person, number, tense and mood; multiple noun and verb classes; few or no articles; and rather free word order. The old Germanic languages are famous for having only two tenses (present and ...
The Germanic languages include some 58 (SIL estimate) languages and dialects that originated in Europe; this language family is part of the Indo-European language family. Each subfamily in this list contains subgroups and individual languages. The standard division of Germanic is into three branches: East Germanic languages; North Germanic ...