Indo-European Language Similarities

Comments discuss similarities between European languages like English, German, Russian, and others due to their shared Proto-Indo-European roots, Germanic or Romance branches, and occasional mentions of non-Indo-European languages like Finnish.

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Keywords

AND PIE wikipedia.org languages language european english romance latin vocabulary hungarian german french

Sample Comments

jacobush Aug 10, 2017 View on HN

It's all Indo-European. What's a few vowel shifts between friends.

JaDogg Dec 18, 2024 View on HN

Both speak Germanic languages, close enough?

dunefox Nov 13, 2023 View on HN

Both languages being in the Indo-European language family, that's not very surprising.

Awesomedonut Nov 6, 2025 View on HN

Isn't English a Germanic language though?

civilian Aug 27, 2020 View on HN

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. All those languages are proto-indo-european, voters! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language

jagger11 Jun 23, 2018 View on HN

Russian, German and English have the same language root (PIE), the same for Finnish and Hungarian, so it's not an accident.

yesenadam Sep 3, 2018 View on HN

Well, they're both Indo-European - evolved from the same language.

kazinator Dec 9, 2016 View on HN

Any cognates (even distant ones) in any Indo-European tongues?

jjtheblunt Jun 13, 2022 View on HN

is there a cognate in an indo-european neighboring language, perhaps by loanword?

mantas Mar 8, 2018 View on HN

Point in case - proto Indo European language. It's clear most of European languages (except pre-Indo-European, like Finnish, Estonian, Basque..) have common parent language. For example, look at numbers. All those languages have awfully familiar numbers. If you speak one language, you can recognise most numbers in other languages rather easily. Yet they evolved into very different languages in different regions.