Your points about language are interesting..
Knitters are always commenting on how knitting styles from south eastern europe (from turkey, and eastern european countries) moved up north (via river trade routes) to Norse/swedes/scandinavian countries before moving to north west europe (netherlands) and then to british isles.
Turkish knitting is filled with multi color designs..
in scandianavia, a few of these designs predominate.
in (true) fair isle knitting, the selection of patterns is an even a smaller sub set
--and while fair isle knitting (stictly traditional fair isle) is colorful, it is also strictly limited to using only 2 colors of yarn in any one row.
turkish (and other south east european) knitting traditions often have fewer colors in total, but are more likely to incorporate 3 or more colors in a single row!
North Country mittens (from scandinavia all the way to latvia) tend to mirror the shape of turkish socks..)
but most socks in scandinavia tend to be the european style(from cuff to toe, with europen style heel)--not the turkish style-(toe to cuff, with a turkish heel.)
bits and pieces of style remained intact, (Post fixing definite articles/color patterns) but other pieces (basic language vocabulary/basic styles of knitting) are very different!
One can see relationships, but... there are still many differences.
knitting is just a technology.. and seeing how the technology traveled and how different grammatical features did too, is fascinating.. (it's pretty cool too, they tend to re-enforce each other!)
