The Languages of Europe
The wide variety of languages spoken in Europe has long fascinated me and over the years I have collected dictionaries of almost every European language. I plan to put comparative vocabulary from all the major languages, living (e.g. French, German, Spanish, Russian, etc.) and dead (e.g. Latin, Ancient Greek, Old English, Gothic, etc.) and from virtually all the lesser-known ones (e.g. Frisian, Breton, Romansch, Luxemburgish, etc.) onto this website.
There are lots of ways to compare the different languages. You can select, for example, Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian and see their similarities and differences. You can also see an individual language evolving over time, e.g. modern English from Middle English (at the time of Chaucer) from Old English (at the time of Beowulf) and reconstructed Proto-Indo-European as it may have been spoken in Neolithic times.
The Basque language is very different from all the others. This is because it is the oldest language in Europe. It was being spoken in south west Europe before any of the other languages had arrived. Most of them belong to either the Indo-European or the Finno-Hungarian families and entered Europe from the east.
In the left hand column there are four scrolling menus. By clicking on the name of a language in each of the four menus , the selected standard vocabularies will be displayed in the corresponding four main screens. Rather than simply displaying word lists, I have attempted to give a flavour of the languages by providing a bit of grammar for each word, where possible.
Initially there will only be 26 words for each language until all the languages are in place, but from then on lots more vocabulary will be added.
Click
here
to start comparing the languages of Europe.
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