>Where is Nakh spoken, and what sort of language is it?
Spoken in the area in and around Armenia, and it's weird :) If you're really
interested in these languages, there's an online dictionary of a related
language called Chechen (You know, like Chechnya?):
http://www.compling.hu-berlin.de/~johannes/dict/chechen/chechentrans-dict.html
Unfortunately you have to know some German but online German dictionaries
will help you out. That's what Windows is for afterall. I find the words to
be fun to pronounce because they have strange consonant clusters by
IndoEuropean standards such as Chechen /txo/ "we" (x is a gurgled "h") or
Ingush bwearg "eye". Fun, fun, fun! But not as much fun as the North
American language called Klallam which has prettier words like /Lq?t@...?@c^/
"beaver", /s^xWL?pe?w@.../ "shirt" and /n@...?e?wi?@l/ "a religious person".
Oh, and you may as well have this link to Starostin's North Caucasian site
which has plenty of vocabulary from NorthEast Caucasian languages like Nakh,
Chechen and Ingush.
http://starling.rinet.ru/
>Has any connection been found between Etruscan and the modern >Caucasus
>languages?
Some people try desperately but nothing serious has been found.
>The Egyptian inscription describing the Sea Peoples seems
>to say that peoples including the Tursha invaded from Anatolia. >Perhas
>they were driven by a drought famine.
The prevailing idea is that the Etruscans are from the east as the classical
author Herodotus had claimed. (Actually he said from Lydia in West Anatolia
but these Tyrrhenian languages probably were in control of the whole general
area at one time from Greece to West Anatolia). Lemnian is spoken on the
island of Lemnos near Greece and is definitely related to Etruscan. Lemnian
pretty much proves that the Etruscans migrated by sea to West Italy at a
late date. Rhaetic is to be explained away as having seperated early,
northward from the traditional Tyrrhenian area towards Northern Italy,
thereby alleviating the confusion caused by another classical author
Dionysius who thought that the Etruscans had always been there. He may have
been speaking more of their related Rhaetic cousins who would have been
there long before the Etruscans.
>[...]from IE root H1-L-Dh ?[...]
*H1leudh-
>I tend to use the terms "big-endian"
A computer pHreAkeR is in our midst. Cool cross-over terminology. I like.
Hey, let's call phonemes "bytes" from now on!
- gLeN
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