Bantu languages

And this principle isn't restricted to European languages.

Consider the Bantu languages of Africa.

Linguists comparing languages such as Swahili, Zulu, Shona and Lingala can identify systematic correspondences in vocabulary and grammatical morphology.

For example, many Bantu languages preserve related noun class prefixes.

even though their exact forms differ from language to language.

The similarities aren't simply a collection of words that happen to resemble one another, they occur in systematic patterns across the vocabulary and grammatical system.

English is an obvious example.

A considerable proportion of its vocabulary ultimately comes from French and Latin, but English is still genetically a Germanic language.

Mr.

Crisp, in a paper read at the Anthropological Section of the British Association of Science, August 1905, said, The Bantu languages of Africa will express any idea, however esoteric, and will do it with extraordinary precision and often with great felicity.

A foreigner who has acquired one of them will often leave his own language to use a Bantu word, because it conveys his thought more aptly and tersely.

Bantu proverbs and metaphors are often most incisive, emphasizing with much power and delicacy what it is intended to say.

They are masters in the art of destructive criticism, and their native shrewdness, observation, and wit render them dangerous disputants.

Footnote, Nature, November 16, 1905, page 66.