Colleges and universities have an issue with silos. The mindset is that everything ought to fit into one of them.
They will (depending on the particular college) accept a double major. But the mindset is that, whatever the two majors, they must have some kind of synergy. Thus someone may have an undergraduate double major in chemistry and biology, and the faculty will nod sagely and say "aiming for biochemistry in grad school" (there being no undergraduate program in biochemistry). They can wrap their heads around that.
But I had a double major in Mechanical Engineering (fluid mechanics) and in Cultural Anthropology. Drove the professors in both majors nuts. In their minds, there must be some synergy there somewhere. They were seriously frustrated that, apparently, I could see it but they could not. The idea that I just found two disparate subjects which both interested me? Simply inconceivable, apparently.
2025-10-30 08:09:20
It seems like the assumption of a shared language base actually rests on two factors: race, and a largely shared script. Neither of which really impact language.
For race, only consider Swedish, Hungarian, Spanish, and Ukranian. The Europeans who are native speakers of those languages are all the same race. But the languages are not related.
As for a shared script, note that the Latin script is used not only for all of the languages of Western and Northern Europe, but for the hundreds of languages of pretty much all of Sub-Saharan Africa, not to mention Vietnamese. The linguistic overlap is basically nonexistant (barring loan words, of course).
Sure, it would be convenient if learning Japanese was relevant to learning Korean or Chinese (either Mandarin or Cantonese, or one of the other "dialects" -- actually distinct languages rather than real dialects). But while all use related scripts, the spoken languages, as you discovered, are quite different. Just to state the obvious, Chinese is a tonal** language, which Japanese is definitely not. (I'm not familiar enough with Korean to know which, if either, it resembles.)
** In case anyone here is unfamiliar with the term, the only example in English is the use a rising tone in the last syllable of a sentence to indicate a question. The meaning of the word isn't changed. In contrast, Chinese uses 5 (IIRC) different tones to differentiate unrelated words. See the chart here for examples.
Colleges and universities have an issue with silos. The mindset is that everything ought to fit into one of them.
They will (depending on the particular college) accept a double major. But the mindset is that, whatever the two majors, they must have some kind of synergy. Thus someone may have an undergraduate double major in chemistry and biology, and the faculty will nod sagely and say "aiming for biochemistry in grad school" (there being no undergraduate program in biochemistry). They can wrap their heads around that.
But I had a double major in Mechanical Engineering (fluid mechanics) and in Cultural Anthropology. Drove the professors in both majors nuts. In their minds, there must be some synergy there somewhere. They were seriously frustrated that, apparently, I could see it but they could not. The idea that I just found two disparate subjects which both interested me? Simply inconceivable, apparently.
It seems like the assumption of a shared language base actually rests on two factors: race, and a largely shared script. Neither of which really impact language.
For race, only consider Swedish, Hungarian, Spanish, and Ukranian. The Europeans who are native speakers of those languages are all the same race. But the languages are not related.
As for a shared script, note that the Latin script is used not only for all of the languages of Western and Northern Europe, but for the hundreds of languages of pretty much all of Sub-Saharan Africa, not to mention Vietnamese. The linguistic overlap is basically nonexistant (barring loan words, of course).
Sure, it would be convenient if learning Japanese was relevant to learning Korean or Chinese (either Mandarin or Cantonese, or one of the other "dialects" -- actually distinct languages rather than real dialects). But while all use related scripts, the spoken languages, as you discovered, are quite different. Just to state the obvious, Chinese is a tonal** language, which Japanese is definitely not. (I'm not familiar enough with Korean to know which, if either, it resembles.)
** In case anyone here is unfamiliar with the term, the only example in English is the use a rising tone in the last syllable of a sentence to indicate a question. The meaning of the word isn't changed. In contrast, Chinese uses 5 (IIRC) different tones to differentiate unrelated words. See the chart here for examples.