Re: Similar (was: 'useful') languages

| >Has anyone else come across this phenomenon?

        Oh, Heavens, yes.
        When I took Japanese in college, I kept slipping into my miniscule
Spanish vocabulary. (Especially the word for "trash can". I could *never*
get that right in Japanese; it always came out "el cesto".)
        When I studied Esperanto, it was close enough to Latin that I kept
"borrowing" from Latin. I still write (in EO) "bona" for good and "bene" for
"well", which is Latin.
        (In Esperanto, "bona" is adjective-good, "bone" is adverb-well, and
"bene" would roughly come out as "blessedly" ("beni" is to bless, "beno" is
a blessing, "bene" is the adverb of such). In Latin, "bona" is
adjective-good, and "bene" is adverb-well.)
        In the Fall, I will be re-taking Japanese to prep for a masters in
linguistics (perhaps, it's a dream, we'll see). A friend of mine keeps
trying to dredge my old Japanese up by asking me questions in Japanese. The
problem is, when I answer, I tend to do it in Esperanto....

        In the fall, if all goes well, I'll be taking Japanese 1 and Yoruba
1 in the same semester. (I'm expecting Japanese 1 to be easy.) I expect that
will result in a charming Japano-African-European patios.

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