Re: False Congnates

One of our readers, Peter P, has offered Finnish poika 'boy, son': English boy (we can add it to the "boy -- Rom. bãiat" pair).

This leads to another nice pseudo-correspondence. <poika> is a Finno-Ugric word, and its reflex in Hungarian is <fiú>. If we didn't know that, the following correspondence would appear self-evident:

Hung. fiú -- Romanian fiu, It. figlio, Port. filho (from Lat. filius).

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter P" <no1@...>
To: <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
Sent: Monday, September 16, 2002 2:48 AM
Subject: False Congnates



Hello Piotr

I read the "cybalist" regularly, but have not joined since I am not a
professional and therefore have little of importance to contribute.

Anyway in Finnish the letter 'p' is pronounced guite hard,
approaching the English 'b'. I had thought that perhaps;

Finnish "paha poika" = bad boy, and the English may be related, but
now I have my doubts. Finnish being an Uralic language may not have a
lot of interest for persuers of EI except that a lot if not most of
the vocabulary is borrowed from various IE sources as far as I know.

So what do you think "poika" = boy?

Because I am an amateur I don't have a lot of resources handy, maybe
the next time I am at the library I may have to persue this a bit
more.

Peter