Same for English dialects.
For Germanic languages this is not the case. English and German are both Germanic, but knowing German does not let me read English literature.
Lisp is like English: a basic vocabulary, a basic syntax, basic semantics understood by all readers. I can look at some basic Lisp code and I will understand the program. A Lisp developer looking at Clojure code will understand very very little.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7671549
For the rest of the family, there's a lot of mutual intelligibility. And, a metaphor is a metaphor, no metaphor holds if you dig deep enough.
> A Lisp developer looking at Clojure code will understand very very little.
This is an assumption, not a fact. Java interop code and (recur) are a bit confusing in the first sight, but not undecipherable.
The prog lang that's most like English is C++: too many things are overtly overloaded, see phrasal verbs.
I would guess that 10% of its operator names come from Lisp. Okay, that's a wild guess. Let's look at the special forms:
def-, if+, do-, let+, quote+, var-, fn-, loop-, recur-, throw-, try-, monitor-enter-, monitor-exit, ...
Around three from thirteen special forms have roughly the same name/meaning in Lisp.
Let's look at printing: pr-, prn-, print-, println-, newline-. None Lisp names, either they don't exist in Lisp under that name or they do something else. PR and PRN don't exist in Lisp. PRINT prints a newline before printing the object. PRINTLN does not exist in Lisp. NEWLINE is called TERPRI. Thus even for a simple thing as basic IO the API is different.
Any modern fiction. No chance.
Not German, Clojure. Clojure is pretty easy.
user=> (list 1 2 3)
(1 2 3)
user=> (list? (list 1 2 3))
true
user=> (cons 0 (list 1 2 3))
(0 1 2 3)
user=> (list? (cons 0 (list 1 2 3)))
false
user=> (list? '(0 1 2 3))
true
WTF?
Compare ELISP:
ELISP> (listp (list 1 2 3))
t
ELISP> (listp (cons 0 (list 1 2 3)))
t
CL-USER> (listp (list 1 2 3))
T
CL-USER> (listp (cons 0 (list 1 2 3)))
T