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This article is from the sci.lang FAQ, by Michael Covington (mcovingt@ai.uga.edu) and Mark Rosenfelder (markrose@zompist.com) with numerous contributions by others.

9. Why do Hebrew and Yiddish / Japanese and Chinese / Persian and Arabic look so much alike if they aren't related?

Distinguish LANGUAGE from WRITING SYSTEM.
In each of these cases one language has adopted part or all of the
writing system of an unrelated language.

(To a Chinese, English and Finnish look alike, because they're written
in the same alphabet. Yet they are not historically related.)

An excellent introduction to writing systems is Geoffrey Sampson's
WRITING SYSTEMS (1985). The authoritative (but expensive) reference
is Daniels and Bright's THE WORLD'S WRITING SYSTEMS (1996), which
discusses every known script.

 

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• next: 10. How do linguists decide that languages are related?

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