turk, turkic, turkmen, turkomen

pork and beef would be two. The words for the animal aren't french but the word for the meat is which is significant.
There is some debate with a lot of words as to whether they came from Latin or Old French but I don't think you can possibly say that no common words come from French.
NY I said I might be misremembering. What is the difference between Spanish and portuguese? Ostrogoths? I could wikipedia it but I trust you more

jeffy!
they're two daughter languages of latin like any others; you could look for explanations for their differences in cultural contacts, but that some such thing would be true for any two romance languages (languedoc and languedoil, e.g.) i'd emphasize tho' that there is a continuum of romance languages stretching from portugal to trieste, with romanian isolated for historical reasons (wiki has a simplified chart here and a simplified map here) and that accidents of power lead us to think in terms of 'spanish' (actually the language of castille) or 'french' (actually the language of paris) or 'italian' (actually the language of florence) to the exclusion of the many other dialects, some of which differ from each other for no bigger reason than that they were spoken in different valleys and just diverged over time (still true of romansch languages).

man, just being able to follow threads like this makes me feel intellectual. Although I speak only English (and American English at that) I'm fascinated by language. Out of curiosity, who on this thread speaks the most languages? My money in on Devrim.

Also, Chomsky's linguistics, I've heard they've been pretty much disproved? This true?

yes.

I speak English and French. I used to be able to read old French and Occitan but I'm not sure if I could any more, or at least not well.

You win. I speak four, one of them not so well.

Devrim

could you type up some here, comrade? say, the first sentence or two of the c. manifesto?

Portuguese is seperated from Spanish by two drunk castillian farmers who wandered over the mountains 700 years ago.

No

I am pretty sure that an English speaker could have conversation with a Norwegian, each using their respective languages, if the English speaker kept to simple topics and avoided the Norman French component of the English vocabulary. So try this; take a plane to Oslo and try saying "shall we cross over the way" or shall we go and drink some beer (ale)" and a sympathetic Norwegian who says "skal vi krysse over veien" and "skal vi ga og drikke ol" should understand you. What I find so fascinating is that English retained its Germanic character even after centuries of Norman domination and toally reject the creolisation theory. For creolisation to occur, the two groups speaking different languages have to be in close contact and want to communicate, but the vast majority of English serfs had no direct contact with the Norman nobility. English changed because of its internal dialectic, and some of these same changes can be observed in modern Dutch and German, where the long vowel "i" is diphthongised to "ij" and "ai".
As for the Turkic languages their closeness is fascinating. Some linguists regard Turkic as a branch of a hypothetical "Altaic" family which would include Mongol and Tungusic, others reject this on the grounds that the number of cognate words are too few in number. If anyone is interested I would refer them to the "Nostratic" hypothesis which would include Altaic in a superfamily or phylum with Indo-European.

They aren't that close. They are divided into different groups. Turkish is mutually intelligible with Azeri, and Gagauz, and maybe with some of the nomad dialects.

The pan-Turkists were quite embarrassed when after the fall of the Soviet Union, people visiting the ex-Soviet Turkish republics had to take interpreters with them.

I am not sure about the super family, but I understand that their are grammatical similarities.

You can find the odd similarity with German (Was ist das? Das ist mein haus). It shows the links. It doesn't mean that an English man and a German can sit together each talking in their own respective languages, like for example Czechs and Slovaks can, or Turks and Azeris can, and have any sort of real conversation.

Devrim

That's very true, while at the same time, I've been in groups with lots of Swedish or Dutch people, and when they've switched to their respective languages for a while, thought they were still speaking English and that I was having trouble hearing them properly (with other people talking and/or background noise obviously, but still). You can also get quite far reading languages with some German or Latin roots even if you've never studied it (although it's easier if you've studied one of French, German, Spanish or Latin in addition to English I suppose).

Yes, I see that Catch. I know what you mean about the sounds. The northern languages certainly have similar rhythm to English. I don't think the Latin ones are the same though there is some common vocabulary as you point out.

There is a big gap between the two concepts. For a talk talking to an Azeri is like an Englishman talking to somebody from Somerset (complete with funny accent).

I think Turkish may be as close to things like Kazakh as English is to German (i.e. not that close).

I just had a look at the pronouns in Kazakh on Wiki (the only thing I could understand as most of it was in Cyrillic), and they are familiar, and understandable. It doesn't make the language mutually comprehensible though.

Devrim

Wow, old thread came back. I missed it the first time. Slavic linguistics and language acquisition being an area I know well, I'll add something :

About the ability of people to understand each other depends equality on their languages abilities in terms of their ability to use their own language, the range of their vocabularies in their native languages and their own experience in learning and using foreign languages.

There are, quite simply, people who have a natural talent for listening and being able to interpret new lingustic items. This natural talent is different than a cultivated talent which comes with study and experience. Most, but not all, people can improve the second with behavioural moderation, practice and exposure.

People who fall into these categories have a much greater ability to understand speakers of related languages. This is not limited to native speakers. In fact, non-native speakers of a Slavic language who made some effort to learn it to a good level may have an easier time understanding a second Slavic language than some native speakers, since they had to practice many skills in order to acquire the first.

That said, you can find Slovaks who can understand some Polish with ease and others who are lost. It also depends on things like speed and complexity. With reading, it depends on the text. We have lots of Czech and Slovak readers of our website in Polish, but few attempt the more difficult texts.

Sometimes the ability to understand a Slavic language relates to the extent of your vocabulary; if you can understand older Polish, you can find more similarities and recognize words in some other languages. Also, if you know a second Slavic language, you may be able to catch the sense of a third: if you know Russian and Polish, it should, in most cases, be easier for you to understand at least written Belarussian or Ukrainian.

Slovak is indeed closer to Polish than Czech. There are some mountain dialects of Polish that contain similar elements and mountain dialects of Slovak; those people who live in close proximity find it easier to communicate. It's logical.

Some Russians can understand Serbian and Bulgarian to some small extent, even though this is a separate regional group. If a Russian were very good in Russian and knew older forms of Russian or Old Church Slavonic, s/he would find this easier.

There are a couple of artificial pan-Slavic languages, the most popular being SLOVIO. It doesn't have anywhere near the support that Esperanto has, and doesn't seem to be getting anywhere, except in Pan-Slavist circles (and linguistic circles as a novelty).
http://www.slovio.com

An other factor though is exposure. To put it quite simply the Czechs were exposed to a lot more Slovak than the Poles. I remember one Czech guy I met when I worked there who said he found it very easy to understand the Poles. He had grown up near the boarder with Polish TV.

I would imagine that despite the closeness adult Czechs would be better at understanding Slovak than adult Poles.

Devrim

That wouldn't be a very good test, though, since almost everyone in Norway speaks English...