Re: Serbian - contemporary of Sanskrit

On Feb 21, 10:32 am, "Dušan Vukotić" <dusan.vuko...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Feb 21, 4:25 am, fire.serpe...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:



On Feb 20, 1:37 pm, António Marques <m...@xxxxxxx> wrote:

fire.serpe...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Anyway, logic dictates that if languages lose roots gradually over
time, then the languages that contain the most roots are the most
ancient ones.

I don't even know where you got this idea from ('languages lose roots
gradually over time') or what it means exactly, BUT, IF langauges lose
roots over time, THEN the languages that contain the most roots
(whatever that means) must be the most RECENT ones (again, whatever that
means). If they were ancient, they would have lost a lot of roots (they
*'lose roots' over time*, remember?).

--
Posted via a free Usenet account fromhttp://www.teranews.com

Yes, viewed the way you are looking at it, this theory seems to be the
opposite of what I meant. Actually, what I had meant was: take any
language back as far as you can go in time. Then count the number of
root-words it contains.

António made a good point by noticing that you yourself have
"uprooted" your "ancient-root-Arabic-theory".

By this process, it will appear that Semitic tongues contain the
greatest number of roots in their remote past - the past as far as we
can go.

Once again, you are trying to jumble together two different notions:
"the basic unit of words" (stems) and "distant diachronic roots".

Offshoots of any language always contain less root-words than the
language from which it was derived. Take any creole language today and
you will see that its 'mother' tongue was richer in root-words than it
is itself.

What "mother" tongue? Don't you know that Creole is a tongue that
originates from contact between two languages?



Languages which are more recent offshoots of the ancient Semitic
languages also contain, even in their remote past, far fewer root-
words than their 'parent' languages.
So, the more root-words a living language contains today, the more
ancient it will be. It had so many tens of thousands of root-words to
begin with that even with the passage of time, many thousands of such
root-words remain intact. Those languages that started off with far
less roots to begin with - because they were offshoots of an ancient
language, and offshoots always have less than the parent language -
will today have even less roots left to function with.

It is known that semitic languages are among the most ancient on
record. Yet, they are also known to contain an enormous number of root-
words. Also, root-words in semitic languages are very resistant to
change in sound or to metastasis of letters within the root. As
offshoot-languages move away from their source, shifts in sound occur
which weaken the stability of the root-word. In other terms, the root-
word becomes weakened and unstable, and begins to change. Stubbornly
stable Semitic roots can hardly be born from roots found in other
languages which are apt to show enormous variation in their sounds,
letter order and morphology. It is much more plausible that the
relatively small number of weak, changeable roots in Indo-European
were born from the very large number of ancient, stable ones found in
Semitic.

That is why I find the theory that IE languages are offshoots of
Semitic tongues appealing. The changeable root is born from the stable
root. And the recent is born from the ancient. It makes sense to me!

There are people who believe in fairy-tales; they are either too young
(small children) or grown-up (adult) morons!

DV

Dušan Vukotić

That wasn't even addressed to you. By your attitude, you have only
shown that you are rude and immature.

You can't stop butting in, you are obsessed with having to comment on
everything. What is this obsession?

Control yourself, Dušan, and like I had said before, behave like a
mature person, and mind your own business.

If you want to contribute something to this forum, at least have the
decency to use pleasant and polite words.
.

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