Greek and Turkish/Turkic

>>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.

Turks and IndoEuropeans have a long history together in Central Asia. Turkic
tribes, in their growth and expansion, absorbed many Indo-European speaking
peoples who formerly dominated Central Asia. This is recorded by the ancient
and medieval Chinese historians, as well as seen in archeological finds. I
do not what kind of linguistic effect this may have had, but at least some
cross-influence would be plausible, in my opinion. And the Russian/Soviet
domination of Central Asia has certainly had more recent effects as well,
such as the widespread use of Cyrillic, as well as recent loanwords.

I hope someone with more expertise may be able to provide more details on
these matters...

~Mark DeFillo




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