From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 6921
Date: 2001-04-02
----- Original Message -----From: longgren@...Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 6:30 PMSubject: Re: [tied] Digest Number 401> BADGER Proto-Nax *Xest 'otter' , Basque hartz 'bear' "azkonar (from *harz-konH-) 'badger'; for the second element of this latter form, see the Proto-Yeniseian word for WOLVERINE"
The "badger" word in Basque (<azkoin> and other similar spellings < *(t)askone-) is more likely a loan from Celtic (*tasko-, cf. late Latin taxo:, -o:nis). The "bear" word <hartz>, which is strikingly (but most likely deceptively) similar to PIE *h2artk^o-, is at any rate hardly relatable to <azkoin>. If you accept any medium or large-size carnivore as a legitimate term to compare, and if you are satisfied with vague phonetic similarity, why not match *konH- with Polish kuna 'marten' or Latin canis 'dog', for that matter, or equate *harz-konH- with Algonquian ärähkun 'raccoon'? (Of course you'd have to be oblivious of the transparent Algonquian etymology of the "raccoon" word, but you do something very similar in the paragraph quoted below).
> The Chinese word for horse, ma3, was once pronounced "mar" and is a cognate of English "mare". The Japanese word for car "kuruma" has obvious European cognates. There is also the Chinese word for prince, "kung". Compare Orkhon Turkish "qang", Japanese "kung", Mongolian "khan", Norwegian "kong", English "king". There is a Chinese word for village, "Ts'un" which was once pronounced "tun". Compare English "town". The Chinese word for sky "tien" reminds one of Russian "dien" for "day".
Why compare modern vocabularies as if the languages in question had no known history (e.g. English king < Old English cyning < Proto-Germanic *kuningaz)? Take any two languages with a large proportion of monosyllabic root morphemes and you'll certainly find a large number of "matches". A cognate is not a word similar to another word but a word related (via normal linguistic descent) to the same proto-form in the common ancestor of the languages in question (a loan, in particular, is NOT a cognate in terms of genetic relationship). Thus Latin tre:s is a cognate of Sanskrit trayah. not because they look similar but because both descend from a PIE word reconstructed as *trejes. Armenian erekh is also a cognate of both, though it looks anything BUT similar to them. But we know the regular historical transformations that Armenian has undergone and we can rigorously demonstrate that the relationship between *trejes and <erekh> is regular.Now, how can you say that a Chinese or Japanese word has "obvious European cognates" without attempting to reconstruct the common ancestor of Indo-European, Japanese and Sino-Tibetan and making sure that the proposed matches can be claimed to be regular? Which particular "European" words are related to <kuruma>? Latin currus? English car? The PIE root *kWel- 'turn, wheel'? Surely not all of them at the same time? Without applying the comparative method, compiling lists of lookalikes, no matter how long, is an idle pastime:Piotr