The phonetic similarities of languages are strongly affected by the
phonetic background of the people who learn them.
> Why is Moldavian the closest to Latin?
French and Italian, for example, are very close in vocabulary, but farther apart phonetically because the people in Gaul who learned Latin were native speakers of language(s) with very different phonological patterns. I would strongly doubt that Moldavian could have preserved the Latin sound pattern better than most Romance languages. A much more likely hypothesis iis that the speakers who learned it happened to speak languages that happened to have a similar phonology. The distance between langauges should be measured in terms of multiple factors, including syntax and vocabulary in addition to phonology. John Sowa -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 965 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://www.uib.no/mailman/public/corpora/attachments/20100318/0f86092e/attachment.txt>