Which are more similar among Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages?

[Etelfrido]

On the other hand Slavic languages are quite conservative and many features that they have are not shared between them and the (modern) Germanic and Romanic languages. Starting with declension which is mostly not found in Germanic and Romanic languages with some exceptions, but is very common in Slavic languages.

I agree. Even in pronunciation there are obviously difficulties that a Romance speaker would face when learning a Slavic language, and the West Slavic branch in particular is infamous for its consonant clusters.

[rothaer]

[thatoneton]

I also think Slavic languages sound "clearer" than Germanic ones, though there are exceptions. I think Polish is one of the least clear ones, haha.

Well, probably depends on a person's point of view.

[thatoneton]

I could also be biased for being a native Speaker of Portuguese, a Romance language that many people say sounds Slavic. I don't know if other Romance language speakers share my thoughts.

It's true from what I have seen in a video, but it was especially the case when hearing it from a distance. Mostly sounded like Russian if I remember correctly

[Etelfrido]

You speak languages of the three groups, don't you? What do you think?

[rothaer]

You speak languages of the three groups, don't you? What do you think?

I'm somewhat surprised by thatoneton's pronounciation elaborations about Germanic languages being not in line with the letters and thus unclear.

To me French is the high score for this (with most letters per spoken sound) but on the other hand you have Spanish that is almost perfectly in line with the spelling, so what to assign to the Romance language group?

Also Polish is hardly following the letters in pronounciation if you consider rz, sz and cz.

But your question is about what people think so thatoneton's opinion remains relevant in any case.

What you say about lost genuses in Germanic languages I have to remark that that is a later development and does not apply to German. But okay, German must not be a proxy for the Germanic language family. Actually, German has distanced itself from Germanic commonalities by the High German sound shift (Low German has not).

With the Germanic sound shift (Verner's law) Germanic had also to my perception become indeed less defined in pronounciation with the development of the stupid English pronounced th and also with k > h. However, (High) German has regained some distinction in pronounciation compared to Germanic, I think, if you consider f. i. Thiudareiks > Dietrich.

Danish will be the ultimate bottom class in respect to distinct pronounciation. Swedes call it not a language but a throat disease.

I note some similarities between Polish and French that do share their strange nasal vocals. But that both languages are not representative for their respective language families. Nasals were present in proto Slavic but the French nasals must be some strange secondary development.

I fully accept the statement that German is particularly difficult to learn perfectly for a foreigner and also in Swedish - while the essentials are very simple - it's almost impossible to get rid of a foreign accent as in Swedish there is something like a langauge melody that can at all not be displayed with letters and hardly accessed by a foreigner.

I could elaborate much forth and back on this thread topic question but I would not come to a clear answer. At the end of the day it's somewhat arbitrary what weight you give to various particular commonalities and differences.

[Etelfrido]

I'm somewhat surprised by thatoneton's pronounciation elaborations about Germanic languages being not in line with the letters and thus unclear.

To me French is the high score for this (with most letters per spoken sound) but on the other hand you have Spanish that is almost perfectly in line with the spelling, so what to assign to the Romance language group?

Also Polish is hardly following the letters in pronounciation if you consider rz, sz and cz.

I see French as an outlier among Romance languages and I've been told Polish is generally seen like that by Slavic speakers. I have more difficulty electing the outlier among Germanic languages, as I can see strong points for at least English, Danish, Icelandic and maybe even German!

But your question is about what people think so thatoneton's opinion remains relevant in any case.

What you say about lost genuses in Germanic languages I have to remark that that is a later development and does not apply to German. But okay, German must not be a proxy for the Germanic language family. Actually, German has distanced itself from Germanic commonalities by the High German sound shift (Low German has not).

Maybe you're right, if I'm not mistaken Flemish, Icelandic, and Norwegian Nynorsk also preserve three genders.

With the Germanic sound shift (Verner's law) Germanic had also to my perception become indeed less defined in pronounciation with the development of the stupid English pronounced th and also with k > h. However, (High) German has regained some distinction in pronounciation compared to Germanic, I think, if you consider f. i. Thiudareiks > Dietrich.

Danish will be the ultimate bottom class in respect to distinct pronounciation. Swedes call it not a language but a throat disease.

Danish is really distinct but IMO North Germanic languages in general kind of sound like English, though as you said later Swedish has a unique intonation and I'd say that's the case for Norwegian as well.

I note some similarities between Polish and French that do share their strange nasal vocals. But that both languages are not representative for their respective language families. Nasals were present in proto Slavic but the French nasals must be some strange secondary development.

I've seen some Latin scholar claim Latin actually had some nasal sounds like for example words ending in -m, but many - not to say the vast majority - of nasal sounds not only in French but also in Portuguese were later innovations.

I fully accept the statement that German is particularly difficult to learn perfectly for a foreigner and also in Swedish - while the essentials are very simple - it's almost impossible to get rid of a foreign accent as in Swedish there is something like a langauge melody that can at all not be displayed with letters and hardly accessed by a foreigner.

I could elaborate much forth and back on this thread topic question but I would not come to a clear answer. At the end of the day it's somewhat arbitrary what weight you give to various particular commonalities and differences.

If I remember well in the accent thread your intonation in Norwegian sounded more noticeable than that of Swedish, at least to me.

Your opinion is that neither of the three branches of languages sound particularly closer to one than to the other, then?

[thatoneton]

I'm somewhat surprised by thatoneton's pronounciation elaborations about Germanic languages being not in line with the letters and thus unclear.

I may have not made myself clear enough, so I will try it here.

Basically in a Slavic language (say Polish for example, but it's similar in at least most other that I have heard) and a Romanic language, like Spanish or Italian (or likely other related ones, with French probably be the least like this), you pronounce letters "fully" meaning you pronounce a "full" sound for a letter that you're reading, and you do it clearly.

Wheres in a Germanic language it's typical to "eat" a part of the sound, basically speaking as if you have something in your mouth all the time. Instead of clear-cut, loud and characteristic sound, you have a "muddy" prounciation, which makes it impossible to speak a language correctly without putting much effort into basically "de-learning" your greatly trained, from a kid, tongue and mouth movement to pronounce a sound correctly.
Just listen to how that sounds



This is NOT a clear pronounciaton. What kind of letters are used there? Most of the sounds sound as if the person was talking in this "shadowy" way so as you are not discerning the individual sounds but make them "half-pronounced".
I am sorry if this is not as obvious for a Germanic language speaker as it is to someone that has to learn a Germanic language.

I apologize for a cringy song, I actually chose it solely on the basis of how short a video is.

Also Polish is hardly following the letters in pronounciation if you consider rz, sz and cz.

You completely misunderstood me here, what I meant was that each individual letter - one that is actually pronounced, is not pronounced fully, but rather in a "muddy", "shadowy" way.

I wasn't at all talking about the sounds that are written using more than one letter (i.e. a graphical sign) to symbolize one sound.

In Polish two consonant clusters are used to signify (in a writing form only) both a single sound not written other way, i.e. sz, cz, dz, dż, dź - in each case there could just as well be another sign used (another letter with a different symbol), and a sound that is now the same as another one that we use because of this sound's evolution rz-ż, ch-h and is retained to make a it more obvious why a word changes in a certain way.

In fact we could probably use one letter for some of these sounds, seeing how for example Czech has a letter Š where Polish has sz and English has sh, or Č where Polish has cz and English has ch. On the other hand German uses three letters - sch - just for this first one.

I note some similarities between Polish and French that do share their strange nasal vocals. But that both languages are not representative for their respective language families. Nasals were present in proto Slavic but the French nasals must be some strange secondary development.

As you have said here, with French it's likely a linguistic development of a kind that led to this, as nasal vowels were likely not passed from Polish to French. BTW and interesting thing is that Polish has supposedly only two nasal vowels, namely ę and ą.
The first one is a nasalized "e" sound, but the second one is actually misleading as it's not a nasalized "a", but insted "o". Basically being pronounced respectively: "eł" first letter
"oł" the second one
insted of "ał".

The reason is that it has evolved from nasalized a into o but the graphical form has been retained. It's interesting though that there are regions of Poland where it is still pronounced as "ał", resulting in someone saying "wyłączyć" as "wyłanczyć" instead of "wyłonczyć".

[rothaer]

I see French as an outlier among Romance languages and I've been told Polish is generally seen like that by Slavic speakers. I have more difficulty electing the outlier among Germanic languages, as I can see strong points for at least English, Danish, Icelandic and maybe even German!

Absolutely and caused by the (High) German sound shift.

Danish is really distinct but IMO North Germanic languages in general kind of sound like English, though as you said later Swedish has a unique intonation and I'd say that's the case for Norwegian as well.
If I remember well in the accent thread your intonation in Norwegian sounded more noticeable than that of Swedish, at least to me.

True, but me doing it by far doesn't imply that I do it perfectly in the mentioned sense!

Your opinion is that neither of the three branches of languages sound particularly closer to one than to the other, then?

Yes, however, it would be a somewhat arbitrary thing to decide.

[rothaer]

I may have not made myself clear enough, so I will try it here. (...)

I got it. And yes, I said I'm acceptible about that and also "But your question is about what people think so thatoneton's opinion remains relevant in any case.".

I noted as well that in German you practically often say "is" while is written ist and "panza" while is written Panzer. What is(t) maybe not known to a foreigner is that in very correct German, in "theater language" and when the official news are spoken it is pronounced in line with the spelling, so "ist" and "panzer". Now, hard to say what kind of German one should refer to. However, while the very correct German to my conviction does not support your "complaints", the practically spoken German does.
As a native German speaker you are absolutely not aware of not pronouncing in line with the spelling in everyday's speech because you THINK you say "ist" and "panzer". And also the native German speaking adressee does 100% perceive you to have said "ist" and "panzer" while you in fact just said "is" and "panza". To realise the latter fact would to my conviction suprise both German communication partners.

(...) In fact we could probably use one letter for some of these sounds, seeing how for example Czech has a letter Š where Polish has sz and English has sh, or Č where Polish has cz and English has ch. On the other hand German uses three letters - sch - just for this first one.

True and as a rationalist the latter thing to me is dissatisfactory. As a partial excuse it can be said that essentially all German "sch" was once pronounced "sk" which also is in line with the etymologies (f. i. Schule from Latin scola, rasch (means quick) from Germanic rask and this is also how it's both written and pronounced in Swedish). The Dutch airport Schipol is also today pronounced "skipol".
In Swedish you even have the conscious "linguistic policy" to in spelling stick to the historical spelling in order to somewhat display the origin/etymology. This has led to that there are multiple spellings for something that today is an identical sound, see f. i.:

Spoiler!

Det finns ett tjugotal olika stavningar för sje-ljud i svenskan, något beroende på hur man räknar. En del är vanliga, andra ovanliga.

I äldre svenska ord finns sj (sjö), sk (skön), skj (skjorta), stj (stjärna), ssj (hässja). Dessutom kan stg uttalas med sje-ljud i bl.a. östgöte.

I senare inlånade ord förekommer: ch (chef), che (apache), g (geni), ge (garage), gi (religiös), j (jour), sch (schimpans, dusch), sh (shunt), sc (crescendo), si (division), ssi (mission), ti (station), sti (suggestion).

Translation:

There are about twenty different spellings for the sje sound in Swedish, depending on how you count. Some are common, others uncommon.

Older Swedish words include sj (sjö), sk (skön), skj (skjorta), stj (stjärna), ssj (hässja). In addition, stg can be pronounced with the sje sound in e.g. östgöte.

Later borrowed words include: ch (chef), che (apache), g (geni), ge (garage), gi (religiös), j (jour), sch (schimpans, dusch), sh (shunt), sc (crescendo), si (division), ssi (mission), ti (station), sti (suggestion).

BTW and interesting thing is that Polish has supposedly only two nasal vowels, namely ę and ą.
The first one is a nasalized "e" sound, but the second one is actually misleading as it's not a nasalized "a", but insted "o". (...)

Yep, hence the name Dombrowski as a Germanised form.