What language would best support learning English?

[Jon_Dahl]

At my university, I'm forced to learn the basics of a language related to Portuguese as part of my Portuguese philology studies. I find this completely idiotic, but I'd like to choose a language that would also improve my understanding on English. I was thinking that Latin would be an obvious choise, but I was surprised to find out that 45% of all English words have a French origin. So would French be the best option? But then again, French is heavily based on Latin, and I think Latin words/terms like etc. and i.e. and many others are more commonly used than French loanwords.

So would French be the best 'support language' for English studies or would Latin be better? Or something else? Whatever it is, it should be related to both English and Portuguese, but I think that's automatic anyway. So haute couture or a toga? I have to say that Latin interests me a bit more, but maybe I will change my mind after reading the comments.

[TechnOkami]

German might be a good choice. There's a fair amount of audible similarity between the two when it comes to some words and some sentence structure.

Then again, I'm really bad at learning, though I wish I had the will to sit down and study more Japanese.

[rakkoon]

French and Latin can help you with the vocab but the structure of English is completely different.
Simplest example is "I love you" in English which is "I you love" in French en "You love(I)" in Latin
Other languages with the same structure are German and Dutch but I wouldn't study them to learn English...

Between French and Latin I would choose French because you can actually learn to speak the language and use it in lots of countries. Latin is a dead language and you cannot just read a text in Latin without a dictionary (well I can't after 6 years of Latin )

[RoyVG]

I'm just going to link a Wikipedia page explaining the history of English, so here you go.

English seems to have a plethora of influences such as very old Germanic languages brought there from Germanic settlers, all the way to Latin and Ancient Greek due to the Renaissance. French, German, Dutch are all very much related, so take your pick.
German is quite structured and has similar grammer rules to Latin and Ancient greek with Dutch being a more bastardized version with fewer rules and a more chaotic structure and many exceptions that you 'just need to learn by heart' (I'm Dutch btw ). I had to learn English (which I was already decently proficient with), and some German and French in middle school and dabbled in Latin and Ancient Greek for a couple of years because it was mandatory.

[Eldariel]

French and English have had over a millenium of language contact both in their various forms being lingua francas at various points so a vast shared vocabulary is natural. But French vocabulary mostly derives from Latin and Germanic languages. Honestly, the western Indo-European national languages are sickeningly inbred. Latin would help you with your Portuguese too though, as Portuguese vocabulary and grammar mostly derives off Latin, being just one of the many surviving variants of vulgar Latin, so it's a safe choice. And it covers French too.

And French and English are actually very similar in terms of grammar, which is surprising since they are of different language families. Both feature superficial SVO word order, a similar passive construction, subjunctive (though many people might not notice it in modern English due to English having lost most of its inflections), etc. French is one of the easiest languages for English-speakers to learn and vice versa even though French is Romance and English is Germanic. That said, French suffers of artificial meddling over centuries and its guise is rather far-removed from the natural, artificially made to sound beautiful. Jacob Grimm argued that this is what cost French its claim to universality while English being a melting pot of Germanic, Romance and Celtic languages is precisely what earned it the position (he predicted the universal position of English already in the early 1800's).


But yeah, want to learn roots? Latin offers vocabulary and some of the grammar still survives (most importantly conjunctive/subjunctive). Greek is another vast source of vocabulary. Scottish Gaelic is another source of vocabulary and few structures. German contains a lion's share of the grammar and also a significant portion of the vocabulary (but English has lost most of the Germanic structures). Latin underlies all this and thus I do recommend Latin (or Sanskrit; it's surprisingly widely preserved in the modern Indo-European branches, in places one wouldn't think at first).

All in all, Indo-European languages form just one small sandbox and just Romance and Germanic ones are a minor part of that, so observing any grain is like to help you understand all the rest.

[Yora]

English seems to have a plethora of influences such as very old Germanic languages brought there from Germanic settlers, all the way to Latin and Ancient Greek due to the Renaissance. French, German, Dutch are all very much related, so take your pick.
German is quite structured and has similar grammer rules to Latin and Ancient greek with Dutch being a more bastardized version with fewer rules and a more chaotic structure and many exceptions that you 'just need to learn by heart' (I'm Dutch btw ).

I think Dutch is probably closest to English. The original English settlers came from Northern Germany, and the Low German dialect of that region is actually pretty similar to English and Dutch. But modern Standard German is based primarily on Middle and High German, which has much fewer similarities with English.

Low German would probably be the most closest relative of English but I very much doubt you'd find language classes for it outside of Northern Germany (and even there it would be difficult). Dutch is probably the next closest thing that is currently spoken and taught. (And I think it's also easier than modern Standard German, which is freakishly complicated. Might be even worse than French.)

[Prime32]

Is Interlingua an option?

[Grinner]

I think Dutch is probably closest to English. The original English settlers came from Northern Germany, and the Low German dialect of that region is actually pretty similar to English and Dutch. But modern Standard German is based primarily on Middle and High German, which has much fewer similarities with English.

You're in a better position to judge, but I've been studying German to get a leg up on my language requirement and have been pleasantly surprised by how similar they are.

There are some parts which have tripped me up, such as switching the verb and the subject when stating a question, but when I think about them, we kind of do the same thing in English. Then there's things like switching the verb and subject when a prepositional phrase is used at the beginning of the sentence, which has no equivalent in English but isn't really so difficult to adjust to.

[Telonius]

German or Dutch are probably the most similar to English. I'm a native US-English speaker, and learned German in high school and college. When my language skills were at my best, I was able to read Dutch, kind of by triangulation. (I never could understand the spoken language).

The similarities really show up in the irregular verbs. If you know them in one language, you can usually make a good guess in the other. Even when it's not obvious, and the English seems to make no sense at all, there's often a connection. Go/went/gone, for example. "Went" doesn't seem like it would have anything to do with "go," but the English version is actually a combined form of two separate (but related) German verbs, gehen ("to go") and wenden ("to turn around").

[Red Fel]

It basically boils down, in my mind, to whether you want to support your English vocabulary or grammar.

Grammatically, as others have mentioned, German and Dutch are much closer to English. The grammatical structure, the sentence structure, of modern English is much closer to those languages, and thus, if your goal is to be able to build your sentences and converse with fluidity and fluency, I'd go with German or Dutch. (Leaning towards German, because I see a lot of use for that language.)

In terms of vocabulary, however, the Latin-based languages share more cognates, which are similar words for similar concepts. For many English speakers, studying French, Spanish, or Italian is a bit more intuitive than studying, say, Mandarin, because similar words come from a similar origin, and we can infer meaning based on that similarity (and, of course, context). The opposite is also true - familiarity with one of the Romance languages (that is, languages descended from the Vulgar Latin) can allow a speaker to recognize cognates in English. As a bonus, Portuguese is a Romance language (at least according to Wikipedia), which means that a language like French will already be somewhat familiar, given its common origin. So for vocabulary-building, I'd go with a language like French.

That said, if you have an easy enough time with vocabulary - and given your posts, you seem to have a good grasp of it - I think grammar is the more valuable tool. So I'd suggest German.

[BWR]

Honestly, it sounds like your university has the right idea. We had something similar in the language programs at my uni. Learning how other languages work really does help you understand the one you are focusing on.

English is a Germanic language, and learning Romance languages will not help you with much there. The extent of Latin/Romance influence is words and a few set phrases, not grammar (barring modern loan conventions like 'no double negatives' and similar).
Really, how in-depth are you interested in learning about English? Because if you want to get a handle on why lots of the stuff works the way it does, I'd study Old English. I assume this is not an attractive option so I'd go with Dutch.
German will (IIRC) give you a bit more grounding in Germanic cases, which again helps to explain certain features of English.
If those aren't to your taste, Norwegian and Danish (and to a miniscule lesser extent Swedish) have much by the way of similar vocabulary and sentence structure. Danish is a bit closer to English than Norwegian (mostly in terms of certain word choices) but is far harder to learn to pronounce and understand what people are saying.

Since none of these are particularly close to Portuguese, I'd go with Latin because Latin is cool.

[Peelee]

I was thinking that Latin would be an obvious choise

English is a Germanic language, not a Romantic language. People mistakenly thinking it is Romantic is where we get stupid non-rules such as "you can't end a sentence with a preposition" and "don't split infinitives," which some teachers try to enforce, despite that they are crap rules and those things are totally allowed.

[Aedilred]

I assume by "related to Portuguese" they mean "from the Italic/Romance family". Persian is related to Portuguese. So is Gujurati, and Irish. But I shouldn't have thought you'd get a lot of cross-linguistic benefit from studying any of them along with it.

So in descending order of closeness to Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian and Romanian among the major languages, plus Latin. There are smaller, more localised languages, but good luck finding anyone to teach them. Even Catalan is likely to be difficult unless you're in the region.

English is a deceptive language because it takes a huge proportion of its vocabulary from French, thanks to the period during the Middle Ages when French was the language of the English aristocracy, during which time it filtered down. It also takes a lot of vocabulary from Latin, as Latin remained a favoured language of the cognoscenti across Europe for centuries and it was fairly common for literature to be written in it - of course, since French is a Romance language itself, we picked up a lot of Latin-derived terms indirectly via French too. But that's pretty much all at the vocabulary level. Underneath, the nuts and bolts of the language are still Germanic, although Romance influence has led to a much greater degradation of inflection than in, say, German. So learning French or Latin might help you with your English vocabulary (faux amis notwithstanding) but I don't think they'll help you gain a greater appreciation of the language. And to be honest I imagine many of the words that have made their way across to English from those languages are also recognisable in Portuguese too.

Assuming you're dealing with the limited selection of six languages I mentioned above, the only ones I could in good conscience recommend learning for practical purposes are Spanish, French and Latin. The other three are just too narrowly relevant to be worth it unless you're going to spend a lot of time in those countries, although given I'd jump at the chance to learn any of them I must admit I don't fully understand your reluctance.

From a philological perspective, if that's what the course is aiming for, Latin and Spanish are your best bets, I think, probably in that order. I'm also a firm believer that knowing Latin is generally to the good - and it will make learning other Romance languages easier in future should you wish to, moreso than the others will (although the western ones are all fairly handily cross-referential). Spanish has the obvious benefit of being by far the most widely spoken of the Romance languages and is also the closest to Portuguese. I retain a lasting affection for French (one I must admit I did not have while I was studying the language!) but other than gesturing at the corpus of French literature, I'm not sure how much benefit there is from learning it in this day and age as opposed to any other language.

From an "understanding English" perspective, I really don't think there's a lot to choose between them except inasmuch as that the more languages you learn, the better the pool of understanding of language in general you have, which is useful for learning more. And there, Latin is probably the one to go for because its grammar tends to be taught much more thoroughly, giving you a better understanding of clause and sentence structure.

There are a few French and Latin phrases which have found their way into English without translation, and so having a passing understanding of those languages is not unhelpful when those come up. But they're not so common that it's a dealbreaker, I think. If you're reading (English) academic literature of a certain vintage, there can be a tendency to quote Latin or French (and sometimes Greek) passages in full without translation, on the assumption that anyone interested in reading it will also know those languages well enough not to need it translated. But that's probably not that significant to you either.

[2D8HP]

For what it's worth most words in English were stolen incorporated from Latin and other "Romance" languages, but the most used words are from Germanic roots. The English language is kind of a "pidgin" language that melded and simplified the languages of Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians (the "Danelaw"), and the Norman French.
Hey if you want to learn languages close to the language spoken by most of the ancestors of the people of England learn Breton or Welsh!
Or since if you learn a closely related language first it's hard not to slip into a different language than the one your trying to speak, be real cool and learn Basque instead, which is supposed to be closely related to nothing!

[Winter_Wolf]

I'd think if you're going for Portuguese, you'd want to study something that helped that, like French. But hey, from my experience languages that are too close to each other can be problematic because they inspire laziness/looking for "the shortcut". I never did do well with German, despite being US born and English being a Germanic language. I crushed Japanese and Chinese, on the other hand.

[BWR]

For what it's worth most words in English were stolen incorporated from Latin and other "Romance" languages, but the most used words are from Germanic roots.

True. You can speak and write using nothing but English words. It may become hard to find the right words and end up being weird.

[TuggyNE]

True. You can speak and write using nothing but English words. It may become hard to find the right words and end up being weird.

For example.

[Eldariel]

True. You can speak and write using nothing but English words. It may become hard to find the right words and end up being weird.

It can also be used as a rhetorical tool. E.g. the peroration of Churchill's second major speech after his ascension is famous for the passages about the endless will to fight, where the word surrender is the only word without old English roots.

[Bobblit]

I can confirm that knowing German as a second language did help me a lot when learning English. Still, I wouldn't recommend to anyone trying to learn German just to improve their English. That'd be kinda insane.

Spanish (my mother tongue) is really similar to Portuguese, so depending on what your university wants to achieve by making you study a related language, it could be a good or a bad choice. But I don't think it'll be very useful for improving your understanding of English, apart from perhaps marginally helping you with vocabulary (although Portuguese will do this all the same, so not a lot gained there).

[Yora]

I never did do well with German, despite being US born and English being a Germanic language.

The diplomatic branch of the UN has different categories of language courses for it's employees. The easiest courses with the shortest training period for English speakers are class 1 and consist of all the Germanic languages. Class 2 is considered harder and has longer training and consists only of German.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Jon_Dahl
I have to say that Latin interests me a bit more, but maybe I will change my mind after reading the comments.

I would definitely go with Latin, because I deeply wish I'd studied it when I had the chance.

As it happens, Portuguese is both my ancestral family language and one of my working professional languages--but my family has been in the U.S. long enough that I had to learn Portuguese from scratch.

Unfortunately, my high school only offered the basics, and I had a choice between Spanish and Latin. I chose Spanish, because I naively assumed that learning Spanish would help me transfer over to Portuguese. Sadly, Spanish ended up complicating things quite a bit, so when I learned Portuguese in Brazil I ended up speaking a mishmash of "Portunhol" early on.

So I've deeply regretted not learning Latin, since that would have given me a far broader understanding of the Romance languages, as well as access to some remarkable classics from the ancient world. And learning Latin would have given me real-world benefits as well, especially while working in remote villages in the Amazon. If you're interested in Latin, I would definitely recommend it.

[Peelee]

I would definitely go with Latin, because I deeply wish I'd studied it when I had the chance.

Man, learning Latin's weird. By the fourth year, we were translating Julius Caesar's memoirs on his Gallic campaign, but I couldn't translate "the tree is green."

Though reading Cicero's diatribe against his ex in a Catholic high school setting was pretty awesome, to say the least.

[SaintRidley]

At my university, I'm forced to learn the basics of a language related to Portuguese as part of my Portuguese philology studies. I find this completely idiotic

Considering you're studying philology, it should be obvious why this is the case. If you're studying Portuguese philology, Spanish and Latin would be the top two languages to look at, but if you want to support a greater understanding of English, French or Latin could work (they're mostly good for vocabulary, though, as their grammars are not the same as English).

Also, to the tangent about which language is closest to English, it's not Dutch. West Frisian is.

[danzibr]

I've only studied Japanese (8 semesters in college), and while the two are completely unrelated except for loan words, I can say studying a foreign foreign language (as opposed to... a not-so-foreign language) really helped me understand how English works.

[Aedilred]

Considering you're studying philology, it should be obvious why this is the case. If you're studying Portuguese philology, Spanish and Latin would be the top two languages to look at, but if you want to support a greater understanding of English, French or Latin could work (they're mostly good for vocabulary, though, as their grammars are not the same as English).

Also, to the tangent about which language is closest to English, it's not Dutch. West Frisian is.

Well, really, English's closest relative is Scots. Beyond that, Frisian, yes (which is, I believe, more closely related to English than it is to Dutch).

There is an element of pedantry to such things, though. When talking in general terms, most languages never even get a mention. People may refer casually to "the six" Romance languages (assuming they're even aware Catalan is a language and not a dialect of Spanish) but in terms of plurality that's barely the tip of the iceberg. There are, I think, seventeen Romance languages in Italy alone. The question of, for instance, whether Valencian and Mallorquin are languages in their own right or dialects of Catalan can be fairly politically controversial.

All of which is to say that, when someone says that English's closest relative is Dutch, I can understand where they're coming from, even if it's not strictly speaking correct.

[BannedInSchool]

I've only studied Japanese (8 semesters in college), and while the two are completely unrelated except for loan words, I can say studying a foreign foreign language (as opposed to... a not-so-foreign language) really helped me understand how English works.

I was also going to say that studying something like Lojban, which is based on predicate logic but also has other features, gets one thinking about language in a different way. Having a place structure instead of cases, for example, clarifies how to use cases in English by comparison. (It's "whom"!!!) But the only language other than English and Lojban I've studied was German, so I can't compare Lojban to those really foreign natural languages.

[Eldariel]

Well, really, English's closest relative is Scots. Beyond that, Frisian, yes (which is, I believe, more closely related to English than it is to Dutch).

There is an element of pedantry to such things, though. When talking in general terms, most languages never even get a mention. People may refer casually to "the six" Romance languages (assuming they're even aware Catalan is a language and not a dialect of Spanish) but in terms of plurality that's barely the tip of the iceberg. There are, I think, seventeen Romance languages in Italy alone. The question of, for instance, whether Valencian and Mallorquin are languages in their own right or dialects of Catalan can be fairly politically controversial.

All of which is to say that, when someone says that English's closest relative is Dutch, I can understand where they're coming from, even if it's not strictly speaking correct.

The difference between "dialect" and "language" is not really a thing either. It's all mostly a byproduct of certain ideological movements from the 19th century. The closest thing to "high standard English" would be any of the various local dialects that hardly differ in the grand scheme of things. That said, actually studying one is rarely an option (even here in Finland, I know of no official teaching of e.g. Savonian even though the whole way of thinking and technique of expression behind it is very different from literary Finnish and the western dialects).

But yeah, Europe is linguistically the poorest inhabited continent by a significant margin due to obvious reasons, and we still have ~300-400 living languages in this area depending on the exact definition of "a language" and the tally itself. Ethnologue recognises 287 living languages here while Glottolog lists 1820 in Eurasia of which about 400 are within the traditional European longitudes and latitudes. It's something one might not immediately realise but about 5% of the world's languages are spoken by about 95% of the world's population - thus the smaller ones easily fall through the fingers. In spite of Europe's relative linguistic poverty, there's still vast amounts of variation available, and a number of really interesting cases to study (did you know that they actually revived Cornish and it's being spoken in certain language nests in Cornwall now?).

[lio45]

It seems that only Aedilred and myself bothered to read the OP -- the choice is limited to Romance languages, which is why Jon_Dahl considers the two most "related to English" choices of the bunch are French or Latin.

If I were him, I'd be choosing between Spanish and French. If you want to improve your English vocabulary, go for French (it's even better than Latin for that -- "fancy" words in English are often lifted from French, and an interesting side-effect of that is that Francophones with a beginner's level of English will usually have their very basic sentences peppered with higher-level English words)

[Bobblit]

It seems that only Aedilred and myself bothered to read the OP -- the choice is limited to Romance languages, which is why Jon_Dahl considers the two most "related to English" choices of the bunch are French or Latin.

But is it? Frankly, I understood "related to Portuguese" as "Indo-European languages"

[Knaight]

I'd probably go with Spanish. Yes, French and Latin are both marginally more useful for learning English, but it's not that big a gap, and given your plans regarding Brazil, it's also going to be vastly more useful. Just look at the languages spoken in South America as a whole - there's a definite trend towards Spanish.