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Assuming they share a recent common ancestor, are there a number of cognates in their lexicons?

Julius Hamilton
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    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Semitic_language – cmw Jan 27 '24 at 03:39
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    What do you expect of languages that split about 4000 years ago? Have a look and compare the two lists: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Semitic_Swadesh_lists and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Modern_Hebrew_Swadesh_list – Yellow Sky Jan 27 '24 at 03:46
  • People say, like English and German. – Anixx Jan 28 '24 at 14:34

1 Answers1

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They share a common ancestor, but "recent" is a bit of a stretch—they split about twice as long ago as Spanish and Italian (to take a random example), so the similarities between them are much less obvious. It's not hard to find cognates (look at the first things students learn, the greetings šālom and salām) and similar morphology and syntax (the famous triconsonantal roots), but a speaker of one won't understand the other without a lot of study and practice.

Draconis
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    cognates are generally phonetically pretty close actually. It seems that the triconsonantal root structure has somewhat limited the extent to which root phonemes have been able to diverge (analogy between different forms of the root resulting in the reversal of many conditional sound changes; this also results in phonemes having different correspondences outside of roots, which are often more divergent). Betweeen Hebrew & Arabic one of the main reasons for low intelligibility is semantic drift so that the cognates have become false friends – Tristan Jan 27 '24 at 08:44
  • @Tristan That would make a good answer! – Draconis Jan 27 '24 at 16:46