Thread: Are very many words phonetically similar to English/Latin?

Originally Posted by gRomoZeka

There are also words that are not the same, but resemble each other anyway. Since both English and Russian are Indo-European languages some of these words share the same roots...
nose - нос
brother - брат
sister - сестра
water - вода
Sun (sol) - солнце
(etc.)

If you ever studied Latin for at least a year or so, you may remember the four principle parts of the verb for "to give":

do, dare, dedi, datus

And it's not a coincidence that the Russian perfective verb дать ("to give") resembles the Latin participle datus, while the the imperfective verb дарить ("to give as a gift; to make a present of") resembles the infinitive dare. (Russian also has the word дата, "calendar date", but although this comes from Latin datus, it was a relatively recent borrowing, and not example of "evolutionary development" in the Indo-European family.)

P.S. By the way, Alan, as you progress in Russian, you'll learn that words like независимость ("independence") were also borrowed from Latin, despite the total lack of phonetic similarity! (Hint: The Russian verb висеть and the Latin verb pendere both mean "to be hanging; to dangle", and the Latin participle independens literally means "not dangling from something"). This is a phenomenon called "calquing", and it's really a topic for a separate thread -- but I just wanted to give you a heads-up that Russian has borrowed foreign words in various different ways.