Language Questions

Hi everyone! I'm new here, I opened my Reddit account today hoping to find a community just like this one! I was going to introduce myself, but then I found out that Reddit is anonymous so I'll just say I'm 20 years old. About two and a half years ago I started learning Spanish and completely fell in love with the language. During my learning process, my interest in the general field of languages grew. As part of it, I began pondering about some phenomena that didn’t make sense and have been looking for someone who can shed some light on them. Here they are: The letter “J” - All Latin-script languages use the same alphabet. To the best of my knowledge (correct me if I’m wrong), most consonants make similar sounds in all of them (for example, the letter “p” would make a very similar sound in English, Spanish, French, German, etc). The letter J is a remarkable exception. It makes completely different sounds in different languages. The “J” in English (/dʒ/) makes a distinct sound from the Spanish “J” (/x/) and a vastly different sound from the German “J” (/j/). What is the reason for this? Why does it happen with the letter "j" and not with other letters? Translation too perfect - This question is relevant to English and Spanish only, but I won’t be surprised if the answer contains interesting information about the development of more Latin-script languages. The Spanish word “perder” translates perfectly to “to lose” in English. Why does this surprise me so much? Because “to lose” has more than one meaning. Losing an object is one thing (meaning that one had the object and now doesn’t anymore, even though they didn’t mean to dispose of it), and losing a game is a whole other thing (meaning being the opposite side of the victorious one in a game). These two meanings have nothing to do with one another. As a matter of fact - In Hebrew, my native tongue, we use two different words for each of these meanings, as I’m sure many other languages do. This brings me to my question - how did this happen? If “perder” and “to lose” were similar (like many other English and Spanish verbs - such as “to move” and “mover”) I would figure that the two originated from the same verb, thus the perfect translation and the explanation of the same double meaning. But when the words sound so different I’m puzzled. By the way, “perder” isn’t the only case - “orange” in English translates perfectly to “naranja” in Spanish. I’m sure there are more examples. What is the explanation for this phenomenon? Not a coincidence - I didn’t think Spanish and Hebrew have any common roots (one is a Latin language and the other is a Semitic language), but I suspect I was in the wrong. I’ve found two “suspicious” similarities between the two which I don’t believe are coincidental. They are shown in the table below. If these words came from the field of technology (like “internet” or “phone”) I wouldn’t blink twice. Those words are similar in all languages because they were made up by humans in recent decades when the technology they describe was introduced to our lives. If the words didn't come from the field of technology but were similar in English I probably wouldn’t have paid attention to it as well (maybe I would have assumed the word is somehow international or I just wouldn’t think about it too much). But when the words indicate a connection between the development of Hebrew and Spanish, I can’t help but wonder how this came to be. ​ https://preview.redd.it/20a2lev1taua1.jpg?width=1599&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c283c3201f2be4f9a1c8bceafe3d8ac6b0077a7f If anyone can help me unravel the mystery of any of these questions, I’ll be thrilled. Whether you have resources that might be useful or an expert you can connect me to, I'll really appreciate any kind of help. In addition, I would love to hear about more strange phenomena about languages and their origins! Thank you very much in advance and have a nice week :) submitted by /u/MexicoIsTheDream [link] [comments]

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