Date: Thu, 23 May 2002 18:30:50 +0930 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> Cc: Martin Karlsson <martin.karlsson@visit.se>, cjc26@cornell.edu, Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Sanskrit numbers (was: French, Flemish and English (was: cvs commit: src/sys/alpha/alpha clock.c)) Message-ID: <20020523183050.N230@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <20020523080740.GA894@lpt.ens.fr> References: <20020522115950.D47352@lpt.ens.fr> <Pine.SOL.3.91.1020522125123.29827A-100000@travelers.mail.cornell.edu> <20020522192335.P47352@lpt.ens.fr> <20020522175216.GA2441@foo31-146.visit.se> <20020523080740.GA894@lpt.ens.fr>
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On Thursday, 23 May 2002 at 10:07:40 +0200, Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > Martin Karlsson said on May 22, 2002 at 19:52:16: >> Well, it is a guess, supported by "evidence" which make it possible >> to reconstruct. As there are no written records of anything PIE, >> the thing linguists do is to look at languages _not_ related to the >> IE-family. >> >> English Swedish Finnish >> king kung kuningas >> >> Finnish is a non-IE language, and kuningas is a very "un-Finnish" >> word, and thus probably a loan (from another (IE) language). Now, >> because we know about Grimm's law, and Werner's law, it's possible >> to apply sound-changing rules _backwards_, and arrive at the >> conclusion that the word for king in PIE probably was (something >> like) kuningaz. > > But is it clear that the distortion did not happen *after* entry into > Finnish? Well, according to the OED, yes. > To take an example in India, Tamil and other southern languages are > non-IE, but as spoken today they have several Sanskrit-origin words > mixed up in them, and indeed many of these words may have been > imported many centuries ago. These words are usually pronounced > differently from Sanskrit -- Tamil tends to confuse the sounds "t" > and "d", "g" and "k", etc. So if a Tamil word for a particular tree > is "shembaga" and the Sanskrit word is "champaka", it is quite > definitely because it got changed in Tamil, not because it was > "shembaga" in some PIE language. This sort of change is also typical in European languages. It's interesting to note that initial sounds tend to change, while suffixes tend to disappear (as they did in the example of "king"), so a suffix is more likely to point to the original. > By the time Finnish was in a position to absorb words from > neighbouring Indo-European languages, surely the forms of Latin and > Greek were already quite solid. Beyond that. I'd guess that this happened about 500 AD. And the Latin and Greek words for king are nothing like this. > If PIE was spoken near the Black Sea, I don't see how it could have > influenced Finnish... That depends on where the Finns came from. I believe they migrated from Asia, and since they're linguistically related to the Hungarians, it's not at all unlikely that they were near the black sea. The trouble is, by then PIE had been dead for thousands of years. > In fact, "kuningas" sounds nothing like any Sanskrit word for > "king", which it should have if it was indeed PIE. But the Latin "rex", with genitive "regis", most certainly does. Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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