Comparisons

Semantic Shift: Words from a common origin change meaning. This deals with native vocabulary and loanwords that come from the same word. The phenomenon does not expand to false friends: Words that look similar or identical, but have separate origins. A pair of words for an example:

Today the romance languages are the descendants of the Latin language, which dominated the European continent for many millennia. Like languages that are related to each other, they have undergone sound shifts and taken on similar vocabulary to each other. Ex. Friulian "Alc" and Spanish "Algo" come from Latin "Aliquid." The romance languages are...

Polynesian languages belong to the wider Austronesian language family. There are three branches of Polynesian: Western, Central & Eastern. Today we'll examine two Eastern Polynesian languages: