Re: Armenian, Sumerian, Burushaski, and Turkic languages

On May 27, 5:11 pm, Darkstar wrote:

[...]

2) Moreover, I always adjust for lexical stability. Some lexemes are
particularly stable (I, not, this, that, thou, mother, water, foot,
fauna/flora, numerals), while others can be slangy, compound and
semantically vague (fat, good, kill, cloud, rain). For instance,
"rain" is "falling water" in Turkic. "Tear" is "eyewater" in many
Altaic and many SEA languages. But "water" itself is semantically
stable, because it's not similar to any other things, it's just a
generic name for "something wet". On the contrary, "kill" can be
easily substituted by "croak", "ice", "take out", "beat down",
"shoot", "murder", etc.

If 'water' is so stable, why do Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin have
unrelated words for it?

Fauna/flora names are also quite stable. Such words as "moss",
"goose", "birch" have very few synonyms (in fact, none) and they are
rarely used so they don't get a chance to change, hence Russian "moh",
"gus'", "bereza" and Spanish "musgo", "ganso", "abedul".

<bereza> and <abedul> are not cognates.

.

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