Guillaume:
>Sorry John, this article is really written by an incompetent guy.
Yes, I agree. You have to admit though - That there article's got some
mighty purdy wordin' goin' on that makes ye jus' wanna believe it sum'n
fierce.
The AN items could only be coincidence and nothing else. It's absurd to
seriously go into the possibility of IE-AN connections at all. He also makes
strange conclusions like the idea that Semitic loanwords in IE are in fact
inherited ones. Granted, even Bomhard makes similar conclusions with
Nostratic reconstructions #188. *sab- "seven" and #193. *sWaksW "six" but
these are perfect examples of bad etymological research. It should be quite
apparent that all of the Semitic words listed in this article are _borrowed_
into IE or its daughter languages and not inherited from Nostratic despite
what the cracked author says.
What's more, I've noticed some teensy booboos (well, more like large, bloody
gashes requiring 50 stitches). Sanskrit /cattra/ "spindle" supposedly comes
from an IE form *kettra, so Mr Author says. I don't know about everyone else
but it comes as a surprise to me that *k- becomes /c-/ in Sanskrit! I'm sure
he means *kWettra but even then, the form doesn't look like proper IE. As
well, although I'm not sure, I would expect this Finnish /kehra/ to be a
late borrowing, if truely borrowed at all, of which coincidentally, given
the validity of the author's reasoning, makes me highly skeptical of
anything he's saying.
Let's all just agree that IE was never spoken in India, 'kay?
- gLeN
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