Have fun figuring out how to pronounce them though.

  • Hegar@fedia.io
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    1 month ago

    In every language, most words that most people use are still used from a very long time ago, we just pronounce them a bit differently.

    *(H)óynos, *dwó, *treyes for example aren’t just uno, deux and tres, they are 1, 2 and 3 in English, French, German, Italian, Greek, Russian, Hindi, Farsi, Kurdish, Tajik etc. Literally the same word, just spoken by different groups of descendent speakers.

    Some languages have undergone sound changes that make certain words sound more or less similar to how we think they sounded in PIE.

    So even though though four, vier, quattuor and tessera sound quite different to us, they are all basically just how we say *kʷetwóres.

    • sudneo@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      1 in russian is один, I think it’s quite different from one/uno/un (especially since the о is pronounced а). 2 and 3 are instead extremely similar (два три). Does it actually still come from the same root?

      While not being competent in this subject, I found it very fascinatinf that ugro-finnic languages (which are not indoeuropean AFAIK) like Finnish or Estonian are so wildly different, so that 1 2 and 3 are üks, kaks, kolm (in Estonian), for example.

      • Hegar@fedia.io
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        1 month ago

        That example does sound quite different, but Wiktionary has it as from the Proto-Slavic *(j)edinъ, which is “ultimately from *h₁óy(H)nos.”

        Finnish or Estonian are so wildly different

        I know right?! I strongly remember the first Uralic language example I heard was the Finnish for merry christmas: hyvää joulua - it just sounded so different.