It's all relative

In February 2011, students started telling me they thought English was a "really difficult language to learn" and that German was "much easier". Comparing languages based on their perceived degree of difficulty for the learner is clearly a subjective and relative concept. In his fascinating book Through The Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages, on page 108, author Guy Deutscher makes the point that the relative difficulty of learning a given foreign language crucially depends on the mother tongue of the learner concerned. Most people would rightly assume that learning Italian is easy if your mother tongue is French, for example. But German and English also have many similarities. So in a bid to enthuse my disillusioned students, and thinking back to my 14-year-old self discovering similarities between the two languages; I designed a fun lesson on cognates – words used in different languages that derive from the same form.

So without going into the High German consonant shift (also called the second sound shift) or the first sound shift (also called Grimm's Law, after the linguist and editor of fairy tales Jacob Grimm), charts available online show that English and German are full of cognates. The most obvious of these are the ones whose spelling is essentially intact in both languages: hand (German: die Hand), finger (German: der Finger), ball (German: der Ball), salt (das Salz), pepper (der Pfeffer), light (German: das Licht). The list goes on and on but you get the general idea.

Now, my reason for drawing attention to the similarities was to show that in lots of ways, by sharing many of the same words, functions and ideas; many languages are not as different from each other as they seem. So you can imagine my delight at reading this morning that researchers in New Zealand looking into cognates – using analyses more commonly employed in evolutionary biology – have discovered that the origins of English, along with those of other languages in the Indo-European family of languages (comprising around 449 of the world's languages), were first present around 5000 years ago. The use of a family-tree theory about language is not new. The technique was first conceived by German linguist August Schleicher in 1853. Though having applied it in this new way using 207 cognate words, the team at the University of Auckland now believe that this Indo-European family is rooted in the Anatolian region of what is now Turkey, and as a result is actually around 8000 years old.

From a sociolinguistic perspective, we are aware that language is subjected to many different influences such as loan words from other languages, semantic shifts and cultural change. However, this new research suggests that cognates can be seen as 'linguistic DNA', such that cognates describing key concepts in the physical or natural world (such as body parts) are much more resistant to change over time. As a result, they may prove to be more reliable indicators of a language's origin.