In a message dated 12/13/99 8:03:31 PM Mountain Standard Time,
brentlords@... writes:
>He further states that there is less difference between between the groups
he was proposing [Dravidian and Sanskrit] than between Celtic and Sanskrit.
-- this is absurdly wrong. The relationship between Celtic and Old Indic
(Sanskrit) is immediately apparent. Dravidian is unrelated to the
Indo-European languages; there are some Dravidian loanwords in Sanskrit, but
that's all.
>But what I did pick up on, was that many of the common/shared words were
with items that either had a trade value
-- sigh. No, no, no!
The words that originally made it obvious that the Indo-European languages
were genetically related (descended from a common ancestral language) were
for things like the numerals from one to ten, parts of the body, kinship
terminology, and words for common objects -- trees, animals, wagons, and so
forth.
These are the things _least_ likely to be borrowed between languages; they're
extremely stable.
Example: the numbers from "1" to "10" in four Indo-European languages.
Irish Latin Lithuanian Sanskrit:
1 aon unus vienas eka
2 do duo du dva
3 tri tres trys trayas
4 ceathair quattuor keturi catvara
5 cuig quinque penkti pankti
6 se sex sesi sas
7 seacht septem septyni sapta
8 ocht octo astuoni astau
9 naoi novem devyni nava
10 deich decem desimt dasa
By comparison, the numbers in four non-Indo-European languages:
Turkish Hebrew Malay Chinese
1 bir 'ehad satu yi
2 iki snayim dua er
3 uc saelosa tiga san
4 dort 'arba'a empat si
5 bes hamissa lima wu
6 alti sissa enam liu
7 yedi sib'a tujoh qi
8 sekiz semona de lapan ba
9 dokuz tis'a sembilan jiu
10 on 'asara su-puloh shi
The comparison extends to things like the declension of the noun, as well.
For example, in Latin the word for "fire" is "ignis"; in Sanskrit fire is
"agnis". Not only are these obviously similar, but they decline as follows:
Sanskrit Latin
Nom. singular: agnis ignis
Acc. singular: agnim ignem
Dative: agnibhyas ignibus
Or to take an entire phrase, "God gave teeth; God will give bread".
Latin: Deus dedit dentes; Deus dabit panem.
Sanskrit: Devas adadat datas; Devas dat dhanas.
Lithuanian: Dievas dave dantis; Dievas duos duonos.
>Wouldn't the assumption be that they [words having to do with the sea in
Germanic] were involved in a derivative chain
-- if they'd been loaned into Proto-Indo-European itself, then they would be
_part_ of PIE. We can tell they weren't because they're absent from the
other daughter language families; we can tell they were loaned before the
breakup of Proto-Germanic because they undergo the sound shifts
characteristic of those tongues (English, Danish, German, etc.)