How did they communicate when different cultures met for the first times? Let's say first portuguese sailors to arrive to japan (pic somewhat related) or the first romans to meet with germanic tribes.
They would, like, point to things and say 'this table" or "me Hiro." And some stuff like greetings could be gathered by context. Once you get the basics you move on to more abstract concepts. Humans have dedicated brain regions to learn language, which are more active in childhood but still functional in adults, so learning language is an innate ability in most neurotypical humans.
>>950619
For each group there would likely be a few people that spoke some words of a common language. Needn't be the language of either group.
>>950619
Portuguese utilized Chinese to communicate with Nips.
Funnily enough. Portuguese was the first European language known by Nips, and when the Dutch came, the Japanese spoke to them in Huehue
>>950643
Really? So what was the third language that both the Japanese and the Portugese spoke in 1543? You fucking moron
>>950680
Chinese?
To build on the whole nips speaking huehue, supposedly they used Dutch to speak to the Russians & British at first as well.
Its not that hard to get a basic trade vocabulary of about 50 words.
You start with pronouns, pointing at yourself, your crew, the other people, their crew. You ususally get the name of each others country at this point too.
Then simple nouns. Money, gold, ship, hat , meat, drink etc. give them some to try, they give you some, now everyones smiling and eating, and you get some verbs too.
A few adjectives like happy, sad, and the corresponding good, bad. Biiger, smaller , more, less can easily be demonstrated with your trade goods and money.
And now you have a basic vocabulary which can be used for basic dealing. You may get more grammar, in which case you start speaking each others language more effectively.
Or you may not bother with the grammar, and just use a restriced form of your languge or theirs. This could eventually develop into a trade language or patois, as happened all over the world on every inhabited continent.
Check out swadesh lists, which are lists of 100 or so common words in a language. These contain most of the impoortant concepts used in everyday language, and are whqt linguists use to elicit words when they first start recording a language that has not been studied before.
( btw Im pretty sure nipponese 'arigatou' is related to portugese 'obrigado', although this could just be headcanon)
-t. Linguist
>>950619
There's some interesting stories in Bernal Diaz' book. IIRC one village the Spaniards arrived at set some logs on fire and made clear that the Spanish would have to leave before the fire went out or there would be fighting.
>>950648
Portuguese used french-chinese dictionaries to speak with the chinese.
>>952950
>Im pretty sure nipponese 'arigatou' is related to portugese 'obrigado'
That seems unlikely given that it's small sentence rather than a single word. I mean, it might be a case of folk etymology or expressive loan but it's just improbable.
>>952950
"From ありがたく (arigataku), the adverbial form of Old Japanese adjective ありがたし (arigatashi, modern ありがたい, arigatai),[1][2][3] from 有り (ari, “the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of verb 有る aru}, “to exist, to be””) + 難し (katashi, “hard, difficult”, 難い katai in modern Japanese).[1][2][3] The katashi changes to gatashi due to rendaku (連濁)."
Turku, Finland was not built by Turks.
>>950648
>Huehue
Please don't equate our beautiful and diverse language with Brazilspeak.
