system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 Is there a root oriental language

ELI5: as western languages have a Latin or Greek root, do Asian languages have a root language? Most Asian countries have a fairly rich history, so it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't. But why are Asian languages so structurally different to western languages?
gpt
none of your assertions are correct, but that's fine. 

there is only a single language with a greek root: greek. modern greek evolved from older greek forms.

a subset of western languages, called the romance languages, came from latin. those languages are, among others, french, spanish, italian, portuguese, and romanian. these languages evolved from latin. 

english does not come from greek or latin. it's related to those languages, and it's notable for having borrowed a lot of words from latin, greek, and french (which DOES come from latin).

latin and greek are related, which means they share a common ancestor. however, the only real similarity between latin and (classical) greek is grammatical structure and some cognate words. most latin and greek words are, for our purposes, completely unintelligible to each other (consider the latin root 'aqua', the greek root 'hydro'; they both mean water).

to answer your question: do asian languages have a root language? we must actually look at what 'asian languages' mean.

asia is really fucking big. it's the biggest continent, after all. asia has languages that are related to english (like hindi, persian, and punjabi). asia also has languages that are related to hawaiian (tagalog, indonesian).

whoa whoa whoa. all this 'related' and 'evolved' talk may be making your head spin. what does it mean?

'related' means that the languages are likely to have a common ancestor. we demonstrate this by looking at similarities and looking at how certain features of the language (pronunciation, grammar, tones, etc.) came to be in their present forms.

'evolved from' means that the language is actually a NEWER form of that language. languages change, a lot. think of new slang words that didn't exist 10 years ago. think of the way some people may 'misuse' grammar in english (i ain't got none of that!) well, imagine that happening multiple times over thousands of years. that's how languages change and evolve.

so... asian languages. some asian languages are related. others have evolved from older forms of a pre-existing asian language.

but i'm gonna wager a guess: you're thinking of chinese, japanese, vietnamese, and korean. 

none of these languages are related as far as we know. 

we have been unable thusfar to establish any sort of common ancestor between these languages. 

however, because of the point you brought up about rich history, there are somethings that are very similar.

i don't know if you've ever studied chinese or japanese. but chinese is structurally very similar to english. this is a coincidence. 

chinese and vietnamese are structurally similar to each other, as well. this is less likely to be a coincidence, because while chinese and vietnamese cannot demonstrate a common ancestor, they still have something like 60% of their words in common.

japanese and korean are structurally similar to each other, but completely alien to chinese and vietnamese. however, both japanese and korean have many words (again, something like 60%) in common with chinese.

how can this be the case? well, the answer is, essentially, empire. the chinese were very good at establishing spheres of influence throughout their 4000 year long history. they took with them ideas, language, and the written word to places where writing had never even been attempted.

chinese writing, though, is very restrictive. so the japanese and koreans came up with their own solution. the vietnamese, which actually fits the chinese characters a lot better, just decided to listen to the french and write their language with the roman alphabet.

(you might be asking about the mongols, where do they fit into this? well... they don't, either. their language is just as alien to the rest of the east asian languages. they had their own writing system, unrelated to that of the chinese. they now write their language in the cyrillic script, which you might know as the 'russian alphabet'.)

long ass history lesson. why are they do structurally different to western languages? well, in the case of chinese and vietnamese... they're not. in these languages, the order of words is the same as in english. grammar is very similar (if you've ever taken a french, spanish, german, or god forbid latin class, you'll know that these languages have relatively complex grammar compared to english)

but their sounds might as well be alien to us (seriously, go do a vietnamese lesson and try to pronounce those words. that language might be one of the hardest to pronounce for english speakers.)

japanese and korean are very different to english structurally. the words are not said in the same order as english. expressing ideas is a little bit 'backwards' in these languages. but they do demonstrate similarities with turkish, hindi, and several other languages.

i know i'm skirting your question. you're asking why.

the answer is an unfortunate... it is what it is. they evolved differently. the east and the west had basically no contact until the persian empire. that's millennia upon millennia of language evolution. 

**tl;dr no**

EDIT: when i say 'chinese' i do mean mandarin, but everything applies to the chinese dialects that derive from middle/classical chinese.