Re: Turkish and Greek

From: Christopher Straughn
Message: 7212
Date: 2001-04-25

>I took it for granted that until a few centuries AD the Turkic peoples
>lived way far to the east in Central Asia totally out of reach and
>linguistic contact and consideration by Europeans. But in a Turkish
>grammar I was surprised to find Turkish cases `-da' and `-dan' with
>similar meanings to the Classical Greek suffixes in `oikothi' = "at
>house" and `oikothen' = "from house". Is this a coincidence, or what?

Has to be coincidence. Most (probably all) Turkic languages have some sort
of ending like da/de/ta/te and dan/den/tan/ten of Turkish. I know for sure
that Azerbaijani and Kazakh do.
I still wonder what, if any, interactions the Indo-Europeans have had with
the Turks in the distant past.

Chris
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