Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 16:46:30 -0400 (EDT) From: cjc26@cornell.edu To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> Cc: "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: <Pine.SOL.3.91.1020522160649.23407A-100000@travelers.mail.cornell.edu> In-Reply-To: <20020522192335.P47352@lpt.ens.fr>
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On Wed, 22 May 2002, Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > 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? It's a reconstruction, based on the huge number of regular sound correspondences between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, English, and many other languages spoken in Europe and South Asia. There's no written evidence for it, as it was spoken well before the invention of writing, but any claim that it never really existed would have to explain where all these sound correspondences come from (and no, "mere coincidence" doesn't count as an explanation :) > How do people arrive at > "Hoi(H)nos" and "h3ekteh3" (how do you pronounce those "3"s?) in PIE? Sorry, those are supposed to be "h"s with a subscript "3", which is kind of an unusual sound pronounced something like "hw". Linguists arrive at these reconstructions by looking at corresponding sounds in different languages and figuring out what would be the most likely sound in the protolanguage that could develop into the corresponding sounds in the attested languages. An easy example is the reconstruction of PIE /p/ -- Sanskrit /p/ corresponds to Latin /p/, Greek /p/, Hittite /p/, Avestan /p/, Lithuanian /p/, Old Church Slavonic /p/, Tocharian /p/ (do you see a pattern here :), and Gothic /f/ or /b/ (both of which are very similar to /p/, in that they are pronounced using the lips), so what a linguist would say is that the protolanguage had /p/, while Proto-Germanic underwent a sound change that changed all instances of /p/ to either /f/ or /b/. (Not all of the reconstructions are this simple, of course) > 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? Well, we can tell a little about where they lived and what their culture was like based on which words we can reconstruct in the protolanguage. So, for example, we can reconstruct the words "sow", "plow", and "cow", so we know that they knew about agriculture and raising livestock. We can't reconstruct the word for "chicken", though, so that suggests that they did not live any farther east than Persia. Also, we can reconstruct a word for "metal", but not for "iron", so that suggests they lived sometime during the Bronze Age. > Yes, I suppose I could try look up the book you cited, but I'm lazy :) I really recommend taking a look at Beeke's book if you're at all interested in the subject...it's a good introduction to historical linguistics. You could also try googling for "historical linguistics", "comparative method", "proto-indo-european", etc. -- Cliff Crawford :: cjc26 at cornell dot edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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