Date: Thu, 23 May 2002 10:07:40 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> To: Martin Karlsson <martin.karlsson@visit.se>, 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: <20020523080740.GA894@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <20020522175216.GA2441@foo31-146.visit.se> 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>
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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? 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. 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. If PIE was spoken near the Black Sea, I don't see how it could have influenced Finnish... In fact, "kuningas" sounds nothing like any Sanskrit word for "king", which it should have if it was indeed PIE. - Rahul To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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