Oh no, only 60%? Surely that's plenty for a conversation, no?

Now I wonder if this number, provided it is a real one, went up or down during the last 30 years. I would bet on lower but it's only a gut feeling.

Ukrainian shares 84% of vocabulary with Belarusian, 70% with Polish, 66% with Slovak.

English and German share 60% of vocabulary.

Except English, German, and Dutch are not mutually intelligible.

Although as an English-speaking native who has studied German, Dutch often maddeningly looks like it should make sense, but it doesn't.

> Oh no, only 60%? Surely that's plenty for a conversation, no?

It's plenty for communication, not plenty for a conversation.

(It's also a mirror for colonialism, by the way, where the occupied speak the language of the occupier, but the occupiers can't be arsed to learn the language of the occupied.)

It's not even necessarily enough for communication. With the Pareto curve on word commonality it's really quick to get high percentages of vocabulary. But it's the words you don't know on a sentence that are usually the important ones.

You are right. 60% is nothing, especially given the political situation

/s

can't even talk about chips and language without being attacked by the crew

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39295035

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39294267

• https://german.stackexchange.com/a/53783

It's a linguistic topic. Good luck trying to talk with Germans as an English speaker.