Wissam - Odd that your dictionary omitted mention of two major branches of the Indo-European family, namely: 1) Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Bulgarian) and 2) Indo-Iranian (Farsi, Kurdish, Tadjik; Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Benghali, etc.) After all, the term is INDO-European!
A much smaller branch of the Indo-European family is Baltic: Latvian and Lithuanian. One of the proudest boasts of the Lithuanians is that their language is closest of all the other Indo-European languages to Ur(i.e., the original)-Indo-European.
One other branch (Phyrygian)deserves mention, although there is only one surviving language in it: Armenian.
I agree that learning other languages helps improve one's knowledge of English. (Winston Churchill would NOT agree, but that's a long story.) Certainly my high-school Latin was of immense help with learning English vocabulary, in that I was easily able to grasp the meaning of Latin-derived roots, prefixes, etc. Now, if I had studied Greek, that would have been even better!
Studying languages that are unrelated to English also helps, in that it gives one a better understanding of the psychology and the expressive advantages/disadvantages of one's own language. Every language has its own distinct personality, and, here as elsewhere, vive la difference!
jbe |
