Re: Related languages (Re: A China-Sumer connection)

From: Comm (no_at_spam.com)
Date: 03/23/05 

Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2005 22:37:10 GMT

"Neeraj Mathur" <neemathur@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:d1roj8$n18$1@news.ox.ac.uk...
>
> "Comm" <no@spam.com> wrote in message
> news:b%40e.2200$H06.428@newsread3.news.pas.earthlink.net...
>>
>
> Well, Ancient Greek itself seems to only have Indo-European roots at the
> basis of about forty percent or less of its vocabulary.

What is the remaining 60%?

IE is reckoned to be
> even less of the vocab of Sanskrit.

Then what is the other language root?

I count them nevertheless as IE
> languages. The reason is just that the IE words are the ones that are the
> most frequent.
>
> Put it another way. If you were to count up all the words in any given
> Greek text, or make a recording of any Greek and go work from there,
> counting each word as many times as it appears / is spoken, and then work
> out the etymologies of each word, you will (probably) find that a much
> higher proportion of IE is used than of anything else. Similarly, if we
> counted all the words in this thread, we would find that the vast majority
> of what we say goes directly back to Germanic. Romance words in English
> may well make up half of the dictionary. They may even dominate in
> carefully selected sentences, as you offered before. They may be found in
> everyday usage, in common thoughts as well as elevated, in every register
> or age-group. But when total instances of usage are considered, most
> English goes back to Germanic, not Latin.
>
>>> This is much more sophisticated than simply drawing up a table of words
>>> that > look similar. If you were simply comparing vocabulary, you might
>>> be tempted > to posit some sort of connection between Latin 'deus' and
>>> Greek 'theos',
>>
>> And Sanskrit Devi, also Zeus and Jupiter. Zeus pater.
>
> Well that's the thing - none of the words here appears to have any
> connection to Greek 'theos'. They have a superficial resemblance only.

That's interesting. I thought they were the same words.
>
> The connection between 'deus' and Skt 'deva / devi' is fine, going back to
> an IE form *deiwos. Zeus and Jupiter are connected; the word produced is a
> > very irregular IE nound *dye:us, which is also the root of Latin dies
> 'day'.
>
>>> However, in terms of their > sounds, Hindi is much, much more like
>>> French than either are to English.
>>
>> Hmm, it doesn't sound anything like French to me. I always know when
>> people are talking in French. Sounds like they talk with food in their
>> mouths. Doesn't sound like the samples you told me to listen to at all.
>
> Hindi and French both have true dentals,

Like D, T? Hmm, maybe TH.

English has alveolars; Hindi and
> French both have pure long vowels, English has diphthongs instead.

English has long vowels too, depends on who's speaking it. ooo, aaaah,
eeee?

Also
> English has its aspiration patterns for stops - aspirates exist in Hindi,
> but you can still have a word beginning with an unaspirated stop, like
> French, unlike English.

Hmm, still doesn't make French sound anything like what I heard recorded
(your urls) to me.
>
>>> I talked above about how trees are secondary to tracing the history of
>>> words to a common source. The problem most modern linguists have with
>>> >>> Ural-Altaic is that it doesn't seem that there are actually that
>>> many words that do seem to have a common source, nor does it seem that
>>> there are reliable, regular sound changes that allow us to move back
>>> beyond the >>> beginning of our records.
>>
>> Well, spoken-only languages evolved a LOT faster than written ones
>> evolve. Definitely. No one is there to enforce rules of pronounciation
>> or grammar in nomadic cultures. If the kid can be understood - then
>> that's fine. Kids grow up. Repeat scenario. Language changes fast.
>
> I absolutely agree with you - all linguists do. Languages change quickly;
> sound changes happen all the time. But sound changes are regular. This
> means that at the end of any arbitrary point in time, you should still be
> able to work out the sound correspondences. For instance, English
> 'father', Persian 'pedar', Sanskrit 'pita': obviously the sounds have
> changed an awful lot. Nevertheless, you can work out a regular
> correspondence between each and every sound in all of these words that
> will then hold and be applicable to other words in the language. This is
> possible to do within Uralic and some of the other groups on the chart you
> sent me (thanks for that, btw), but not across all of them.

Yes, but again, just about all of the IE languages had written texts and
people probably there to "correct" growing children. This is not quite true
of nomadic people. Taking a look at BVE, parents really do not take the
time to correct them when they grow up - usually there is only a mother in
the household, too - for the ones that speak it. That language is evolving
fast - and it is literally unintelligible to some people now. And
definitely, the parents or grandparents used to all speak with a definite
southern kind of accent. This generation doesn't have that at all. They
sort of have a similar accent to mine - which I found odd. I never hung out
with enough blacks at any time to ever "learn" their lingo - and I don't
like rap music - I don't tend to watch it much on TV unless it's a comedy on
cable they made. But I understand them when they speak this kind of
language. I don't always understand the metaphors and they change very
quickly.
>
>> UA used to be linked together in very old language family trees. I can
>> show you something - in Old Finnish, Orja (pronounced Orja) means slave
>> (A Fin told me this). To us, the Arya were the enemy (we were Turan). To
>> the Aryans, Arya means nobel. A very similar word in Finnish means
>> slave. That's more like what we thought of them since we conquered them a
>> lot and beat them in wars - very early on, too. But no one that's a
>> linguist would make the leap and see this.
>
> They usually do - they see it as a borrowing by Uralic of an Indo-Iranian
> word, with appropriate modifications in meaning. The Indo-Iranians called
> themselves Arya; when you conquered them, you still called them Arya, but
> the meaning changed. Fair enough.

So they are seeing Uralic languages as Indo Iranian? I'm not sure Uralic
speakers would agree with that, I know one that does not. What about Altaic
then?
>
>>> Therefore, you will find that someone who talks about Indo-European will
>>> start by telling you a lot about etymologies of given words in certain
>>> languages (the vocab comparisons that Martin was talking about) while
>>> people who talk about Ural-Altaic have a lot more to say about language
>>> strategies than etymologies. The comparisons between Uralic and the
>>> other languages are quite interesting and worthy of study, and as such
>>> they are studied not by historical linguists but by people interested in
>>> linguistic typology.
>>
>> What else can they do when there are so little, if any at all, written
>> texts? Even what is written, is going to have been written by the rare
>> person that could write and read. A person probably educated in some
>> other place, like Persia or whatever. Nomads don't bother with that kind
>> of thing. I don't write English words the way I pronounce them at all
>> unless I'm trying hard to be very clear and precise - but they don't even
>> look close to the way I pronounce them when I'm having a casual chat,
>> neither does the grammar.
>
> Spoken languages can be used to trace historical development, you don't
> need huge numbers of ancient records (although those do make the job
> easier!). You're right, there's a deviation from writing, but it's regular
> (the way in which you deviate can be studied and generalised into
> descriptive rules). In fact, some of the most useful words are the most
> comon spoken ones - personal pronouns, numbers, common verbal forms,
> kinship terms. If no common words can be found amongst these most stable
> vocab items, there is probably no single point of origin for the two
> languages.
>
> Neeraj Mathur
>

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