Re: Armenian, Sumerian, Burushaski, and Turkic languages

On May 25, 4:46 am, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <1180045303.063108.281...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,





Darkstar <darkstar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On May 24, 10:40 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <1180027614.823798.178...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,

Darkstar <darkstar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On May 22, 6:37 am, Darkstar <darkstar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
This short, preliminary web article consists of two main parts: (1) a
table of cognates apparently found within certain languages of Central
Asia and the Middle East, and (2) the discussion of the mechanism
which could explain why languages located so far apart could possibly
have anything in common with each other. Since the matter is highly
controversial, there are no conclusions.

http://www.geocities.com/indo_european_geography/Central_Asian_cognat...

Has anyone found any mistakes or inconsistencies in this work, and

Lack of systematic correspondence.

You mean "colors" don't look convincing? One would need something like
*A = *B = *C?

I mean "Where language 1 has phone X in environments E and F, language
2 systematically has phones Y and Z respectively".

By your tally, you might not be able to prove the relation between
English and Spanish. Have you tried this sort of experiment with your
students?

Besides, you're forgetting that I'm using Swadesh lists, which are
highly stable, not just words off the top of my head (as usually
examplified in that type of practice). [And that Chinese has a reduced
number of syllables which differ only by pitch, so it's particularly
suitable for that excercise. Neither that anyone has ever proven that
Chinese is tottaly unrelated to any other European language (such
lexemes as "ma" for "mother" or numerals might in fact be not so far
away from the rest of the world because they're consistent with a lot
of other families).]

What you have is, roughly, "Where language 1 has phone X, language 2
randomly has V, W, Y, or Z".

I say, "Where language 1 has phone X, language 2 randomly has Y1, Y2,
or Y3, where X is phonetically related to Y"

Just because [b] and [m] are both voiced bilabial stops doesn't mean
that they are randomly interchangeable between languages.

They're easily interchangable within the Turkic languages (as well as
within Monglic and Tungus-Manchu) so I figured there's nothing wrong
with this patricular example. It should be part of their respective
proto-languages.

.

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