Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 19:52:16 +0200 From: Martin Karlsson <martin.karlsson@visit.se> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> Cc: cjc26@cornell.edu, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.ORG>, 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: <20020522175216.GA2441@foo31-146.visit.se> In-Reply-To: <20020522192335.P47352@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>
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* Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> [2002-05-22 19.23 +0200]:
> cjc26@cornell.edu said on May 22, 2002 at 13:14:14:
> >
> > Well, yeah, they're related languages. :) They're both descended from
> > Proto-Indo-European.
>
> They undoubtedly have some sort of link, but is this
> "proto-Indo-European" some sort of guess or reconstruction, or is
> there actual evidence for it somewhere?
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.
> How do people arrive at "Hoi(H)nos" and "h3ekteh3" (how do you
> pronounce those "3"s?) in PIE? Who are the people who spoke it --
> the Aryans who are believed to have originated from around the
> Caspian Sea? If so, how do we know anything about their language
> -- is there any kind of record they left behind at all?
>
> Yes, I suppose I could try look up the book you cited, but I'm
> lazy :)
Try:
The English Language. A Historical Introduction
by Charles Barber, for a bit of light reading :)
Hope I got this more or less right ;)
Cheers,
--
Martin Karlsson _
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