Re: Armenian, Sumerian, Burushaski, and Turkic languages

On May 28, 6:32 am, "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Darkstar" <darkstar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote

[...] Yoruba
"eniayn" and English "all" don't look too similar.

Hardly surprising, since the spelling <eniayn> doesn't represent a
possible word in Yoruba -- <y> occurs only syllable-initial. Perhaps
you meant to write <enyin> (with a dot under the "e", denoting /E/),
which means "you (pl)".

"All" in Yoruba is <gbogbo>.

You're right as usual. It's "eniyan" (everyone), or
"gbogbo" (everything, everyone), or "sibe," or
"sibe,sibe," (everything). Although since I was using Yoruba as a
source of random words, it's not crucial. (The comma represents the
dot under <e>).

4) There is supposed to be some typological similarity in grammar,
otherwise you won't be able to reconstruct grammatical morphemes. For
instance, the absence of classifiers in English indicates that it
would be difficult to relate English to Niger-Kongo.

Presumably you're confusing the term "classifiers" with "noun class
markers"? Classifiers in the usual sense are almost completely absent
from Africa. 99.7% of African languages don't have them. A few Kegboid
and Grassfields languages do have numeral classifiers, and 'Dongo-ko (a
Mba language) has classifiers in possessive constructions. They're the
only ones.

Right again. My mind has been set on other tasks.


.

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