Comment by dhosek

Having studied at various levels about half a dozen languages (mostly Indo-European but also Hebrew), it’s fascinating to see the various features that are common across them. Most IE languages (but not English) create families of verbs by prefixing them with prepositions (we get some of this in borrowed vocabulary such as attain, obtain, sustain, detain, etc.). Greek makes this most obvious since some of its verb inflections happen as prefixes which end up in the middle of these preposition-inflected verbs. The reflexive pronoun se/sa/si manages to stay pretty consistent across languages, although there are some interesting cases where in, Spanish, e.g., se becomes me/te/nos/vos in the first and second person, but in Czech remains se (with declensions).

Vocabulary is especially wild to watch mutate across languages with, e.g., brother recognizable in most languages once you know about mutation between b-p-f and th-t-d-* (the * indicating omission) and it’s almost the same word in most of the IE languages I know except Spanish (which lost it’s frater-derived noun for hermano which comes from the Latin germanus which is the root of the English germane among other words) and Greek ἀδελφός which etymologically means from the same womb.