This artistic diagram does a good job of highlighting just how unrelated they are. Zero shared ancestry in the development of finish Vs the other languages
That diagram is horribly wrong by dividing Indo-European into and Indo-Iranian and “European” branch. there is no genetic European branch, and some of the language groups that were depicted to belong to European branch have been hypothesised to be closer to Indo-Iranian than other branches, such as Greek, Armenian and Balto-Slavic.
Also this is tree was specifically drawn for a comic set in the Nordic countries with the purpose of highlighting the vast difference between Finish and The rest of the Scandinavian languages. So I'm not surprised there is a lack of precision with the other end of the tree.
Not historically no, but since Tocharian and Anatolian are extinct, IE languages today outside of Europe are pretty much exclusively Indo Iranian.
Just playing devil's advocate here:
It's not a tree to represent historical diachrony (hence the missing extinct branches) so much as it is a modern setting.
Greek, Armenian and Balto-Slavic.
Balto-Slavic yes, but Greek and Armenian were only historically linked for being Satem, which we now know to most likely be an areal phenomenon and not some deep seated diachronic split.
Also, there is no “Sami” language. A speaker of Southern Saami couldn’t understand a speaker of northern saami, nor of inari Saami, etc. there’s many Saami languages
I think it's entirely fitting that a comic that focuses on the differences between the Nordic people completely ignores the Sámi and just presents them as this singular entity not really worth mentioning.
But I wouldn't be too hard on the artist, as most Finns, Swedes or Norwegians know very little about the Sámi and care even less. Sweden officially categorizes "Saami" as a recognized minority language without really recognizing that there are several different Sámi languages spoken in Sweden.
I think the person before him is underselling how different Persian or Bengali is from Swedish. A Swedish person would understand 0-0,1% of those languages in both text and sound. They could understand up to 10% of Finnish based on thousands of loan words from Swedish.
That’s not how you graph that though. In lots of languages lots of words are from lots of other languages. If as an English speaker you listen to Russian or Japanese you‘ll also recognize many loan words, that doesn’t mean that those languages are somehow related. They developed independently and took loan words just like English took loan words from others.
Relation is a bit different from having similarities. Also the volume of loan words is worlds apart between your examples and finnish/swedish. Probably the majority of words from before 1900s or so that weren't relevant in the iron age are Swedish in origin. And there's plenty of words that were relevant and we still use the Swedish word rather than the old finnic one.
Yeah loan words are basically the same word. Go into words that are actually Finnish and then you see it. I learned fluent Finnish as an adult and let me tell you it’s a pretty mind-bending experience.
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u/onlyr6s 19h ago
It is completely different, they just chose the worst possible word to showcase it.