Re: SV: joatsimeo-Loan Words

Actually the example from Finnish isn't quite correrct, it is kuningas not
kuningaz since the "z" doesn't exist in finnish. In the same way a words
like *druhtinaz ´lord´ is actually ruhtinas in finnish since initial
consonant-clusters aren't permitted there.

Finnish is an extremely conservative language and has acted as a sort of
etymological museum of IE (germanic, balto-slavic, indo-iranian) loanwords
of widely differing ages. As for the existence of actual PIE loanwords in
Uralic this is a little more uncertain since these might also belong to an
earlier Indo-Uralic (Nostratic?) stratum.

Tommy Tyrberg

----------

> Från: JoatSimeon@...
> Till: cybalist@egroups.com
> Ämne: [cybalist] Re: joatsimeo-Loan Words
> Datum: den 16 december 1999 04:10
>
> >brentlords@... writes:
>
> I don't mean to sound impatient, but it would save you and everyone else

> lot of trouble if you'd simply read a few introductory works on

historical

> linguistics before you tried to critique the field. You're in the

position

> of someone who has no calculus trying to offer alternatives to General
> Relativity.
>
> You don't have the knowledge-base to _understand_ the theories you're
> criticizing.
>
> >THE SOUNDS ENTER BEFORE THERE IS EVEN AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THERE TO BE AN
> EVOLUTION IN THE WRITTEN LANGUAGE.
>
> -- this is easy to detect because different languages don't undergo the
> _same_ sound changes.
>
> Eg., Proto-Germanic had a word for "king", roughly *kunningaz; from this

are

> derived our "king", "koenig", etc.
>
> The same word was borrowed from Proto-Germanic into Finnish, where it
> survives as... kunningaz. You can also trace a series of very early PIE
> loans into proto-Finno-Ugrian.
>
> >Maybe the relationship being found between the earliest languages does

have

> more to do with adjacency and interaction than an expansion of a culture

and

> its diversification into subcultures.
>
> -- the way languages develop through differentiation of dialects and

thence

> into a language-family of related tongues has been historically observed
> (with Latin ==> Romance, for instance, and Proto-Germanic ==> Germanic
> languages.)
>
> It always happens this way. Language expands territorially, dialects

diverge

> because innovations are no longer shared, separate languages emerge.
>
> Furthermore, languages don't borrow their basic vocabularies. More than

half

> the English vocabulary is loan-words (mostly from the Romance languages)

but

> the _basic_ vocabulary, things like kinship terms, body parts, and common

> objects, is almost all Germanic in origin... and, in fact, mostly PIE.
>
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