Re: Greek and Turkish/Turkic

From: markodegard@...
Message: 7216
Date: 2001-04-26

For the Central Asian Turkic-speakers, I gather that if you scratch
the surface of their languages, you'll *immediately* perceive an
Iranian subsratum (both lexically and phonologically, and probably, a
bit of grammar too).

--- In cybalist@..., "Mark DeFillo" <ategnatos@...> wrote:
> >>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