From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 3258
Date: 2000-08-18
----- Original Message -----From: Piotr GasiorowskiSent: Friday, August 18, 2000 11:04 PMSubject: Re: [tied] Proto-Steppe NumeralsSorry, Glen and all,Self-correction: in the paragraph below substitute "Finno-Ugric" for "Uralic". I didn't proof-read the damn thing properly before posting.Piotr
Your explanation of the relation between '3' and '9' in Japanese in ingenious and I have no difficulty accepting it. However, some problems remain: what you gain by solving this problem is a rough match between Japanese, Mongolic and Uralic, with Samoyedic, Turkic, Tungusic, Korean, Nivkh, Yukaghir, Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut showing apparently unrelated forms and the alleged Indo-Tyrrhenian cognate giving you headaches, as you yourself admit. As the Proto-Japanese numeral is somewhat conjectural, everything really hangs on the agreement between Mongolic gur- and Uralic kol(me) -- this is in fact the REAL basis for your kWul(mu). You seem to believe that this kind of double agreement (involving '3' and '4') between two languages (Proto-Uralic and Proto-Mongolic in this case) is unlikely to be mere coincidence. But if you compare, say, the numerals of PIE and Proto-Quechua, you'll find even more spectacularly similar words for '5' and '6'; and if you take Proto-Austronesian and PIE, you'll find the correspondence between the words for '2' and '3' in both families quite literally too good to be true. In other words, you fail to show that the degree of similarity on which you build your reconstruction exceeds that which could occur by chance.