Contents › Section 5: Sociolinguistics, historical development and politics › answer 31 of 45
Is Chechen language close to Chinese?
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The answer is no. For two reasons:
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Just because a language might belong to the same family as another language, they may not be outwardly similar at all. Just compare German, Russian and Persian. It takes a very close historical study to link them. Or even just German and French.
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Many of these proto-X families are extremely hypothetical and the evidence for them is tenuous and controversial based on a vague similarity of a few words, a few sound parallelisms and some proposed historical connection. Not infrequently being the pet theory of one author. Of these, Proto-Sino-Caucasian is one of the less widely accepted.
© Dominik Lukeš. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Originally published on Linguistics Stack Exchange, attributed there to Dominik Lukes (profile).