Yet another ‘Indo-Europeanism’ is the abundant use of ‘preposition-based affixes’. That sounds technical, but it’s really very simple: prepositions like wy, w, pod (‘out’, ‘in’, ‘under’) and many others are attached to nouns, verbs and adjectives. In Polish, German and Latin, they’re stuck on at the beginning, resulting in triplets like wy-jście, Aus-gang, ex-itus for ‘exit’, w-pływ, Ein-fluss, in-fluentia for ‘influence’ and pod-ziemny, unter-irdisch, sub-terraneus for ‘subterranean, underground’. (The meanings do not often square this neatly with each other, but the structural similarity is helpful all the same.) Only English is less consistent here, attaching these elements sometimes at the start (outgoing, inbox, undergo), but more often placing them at the end (going out, box in, go under).
And then there are the many things that all of us, with our deep-seated Indo-European biases, consider to be absolutely standard, even though from a global perspective they’re anything but. Take verbal conjugations again: we take them for granted, but East Asian verbs typically don’t conjugate at all, while in many African languages they conjugate at the front, not at the rear: sz-ogląda, so to speak, rather than ogląda-sz. A second example are plurals, which we prefer whenever there’s more than one of something, whereas in many languages the world over, they’re used much more sparingly. Other things are inconspicuous by their (near) absence and would require lengthier explanations – look up concepts such as ‘tone’ and ‘ergativity’, if you feel like challenging your inner linguist.
Bishops & Satan
But it’s not just the Indo-European genes that arouse these feelings of intimacy; there’s also the actual propinquity. European languages are spoken in a region with many, many centuries of shared history. And while Polish and my Dutch are not neighbours, they do have a mutual and very influential neighbour in German.