Re: [TIED] Re: IE, AA, Nostratic and Ringo

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 2756
Date: 2000-07-04

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Håkan Lindgren
To: Cybalist
Sent: Tuesday, July 04, 2000 9:11 PM
Subject: [TIED] Re: IE, AA, Nostratic and Ringo

Danny, I read your posts with great interest, but still I have to say that Nostraticists make me sceptic. The Nostraticists I've seen just compare lists of words to show that IE is related to other language families. With a list of words (and some imagination) you can prove anything. Take a look at this small list:
Etruscan            Hungarian           Finnish             
 
ais(ar)                isten                   jumala               (god)
apa                    apa                     isä                   (father)
avil                     év                       vuosi                (year)
eca                    ez                       tämä/nämä       (this)
hud                    hat                      kuusi                (six)
Based on this list, it seems like Etruscan and Hungarian are related, but they are not - these words just happen to resemble each other, there are no known connections between these languages. On the other hand, Finnish and Hungarian are known to be related, but the same five words make them look like two languages with nothing in common. (I've borrowed this list from an earlier post by John Croft and added the Finnish words - I hope you'll excuse this, John!)
 
 
This is precisely what Greenberg does:
 
Nobody had premised more than anything other than the very large number of groups. There were no widespread groupings. So, I began to take the common words, write them down, so on, and look at them. And eventually, I put them into notebooks, and the notebooks are like the ones I have here, in which you have the names of languages down one side, and down the other. One can get eighty languages in a notebook like this. And across, I have various words in English for which we find translations in the American Indian languages. So, for example, on this page, after having finished putting the numerals in, I have the pronouns, so I have "I" and "thou," the second person singular pronoun. But, the notebook is actually fairly extensive and contains hundreds of words in a very large number of languages. [This is how he described mass comparison in a TV documentary for the benefit of lay people.]
 
If the first pair to strike him as possible cognates were e.g. Etruscan apa : Hungarian apa, he'd pounce on it and start looking for more lookalikes in the two languages. The end of that would very likely be the grouping of Etruscan and Hungarian together and leaving Finnish aside, as GENUINE Finno-Ugric cognates are of course more difficult to spot and could easily escape a mass comparativist.
 
Piotr