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Serendipitous cognation

During a Usenet search yesterday, I hit upon a message written in Russian, a language I don't speak. As I was idly looking at the message wondering where to go next, my gaze hit upon the word язык.

Now, as mentioned before, I hardly have any Russian at all, but I do know the Cyrillic alphabet. I have also recently taken up a very slow and non-serious study of Czech. One of the very few Czech words I know is jazyk (language). It turns out that the Russian word does indeed mean the same as the Czech one, so they probably have common descent.

So studying smaller languages isn't quite useless.

(Yay! Posting in Unicode works! You may laugh, but being able to do all the steps from multi-language keyboard entry through storage to viewing the text in the web browser without any kind of trouble was far from the norm only a couple of years ago.)