samcster94
Banned
Interesting observation.My boyfriend took Classical Latin in high school, and between that and casual exposure to Spanish having grown up in California is able to read Spanish fairly well, albeit slowly. It often involves him having to think of synonyms for what would be the word most commonly used in Latin in order to understand a word in Spanish. Spoken Spanish, on the other hand is harder to understand. Of course, Latin education rarely emphasizes listening comprehension, but the sound changes are also easier to reverse-engineer in writing than in speech.
I would argue that the resemblance between Old Chinese and modern Tibetan is more of an artifact of the Wylie system of romanization and it's fidelity to Tibetan orthography, which is insanely conservative. The modern spoken language has gone through a somewhat similar process of consonant cluster simplification and tonogenesis as modern Chinese languages.