Re: A China-Sumer connection

From: John Atkinson (johnacko_at_bigpond.com)
Date: 03/07/05 

Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 11:30:19 GMT

<phippsmartin@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1110079915.949753.131050@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

> [...] I have studied both Japanese and Filipino and
> I find that their grammatical structures are similar too (the way they
> both add endings to a base verb to make it past tense - of course we do
> that too in English for regular verbs - and the way they have particles
> following nouns and verbs to indicate the parts of speech).

Eh??? Tagalog does *not* "add endings to a base verb" to make past tense.
(For many verbs, the basic (shortest) form is used for past. For verbs
starting with mag-, the prefix is changed to nag- in the past. Some verbs
have infixes in the past.) Nouns have particles (articles, prepositions)
*in front*, not following. Verbs also tend to be formed by adding
*prefixes* to root forms -- though some do use suffixes, in particular -in.
The particles following verbs are mostly personal pronouns; Japanese verb
endings don't distinguish person at all.

In fact, it would be difficult to find two languages more different in their
grammatical structure than Japanese and Filipino.

Since you seem to know so little about a language that you hear every day,
it's hard to take anything else you say seriously.

> It seems
> to me that linguists are more willing to believe that cultures are
> related based on the similarities of language

It seems to you wrong. Linguists do no such thing.

John.

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