From: tgpedersen@...
Message: 10733
Date: 2001-10-30
> If you'd seen, as I have, "Ile-de-France" analysed as a Turkictoponym, you'd agree that some sites had better not be mentioned at
--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> On second thoughts, why not? Here's a learned article by Dr [!]
Alekper Alekperov, of Azerbaijan University, Baku. Criticise it if
you can.
>
>Piotr
Perhaps we should thank fortune that let us be born in a land where
they speak an IE tongue. I have sometimes thought what it would be
like to start assessing the whole history of your region from the
outside having to acquire all the basic roots that the rest of us
know reflections of since we learned to speak. One might counter with
the examples of Finnish and Hungarian linguists, but they, for
sociological reasons, were already fluent in Swedish and German. But,
as we say in Danish: "Blind høne kan også[also] finde et korn
[grain]".
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that a few tens of Turkish-
speaking peoples ended up in an area, where an IE-language was in the
making (perhaps we should imagine the process of the development of
the IE languages as a much more jerky process, as has happened in the
view of geology, more like the development of a thieves' language or
argot) and that they did contribute a word or two, much as the
present immigrant languages of western Europe contains words from
several languages embedded in the host language. How would we IE-
people know? Except from a kooky site? Perhaps we should be sifting
through sites like this, and more with an attitude of "there but for
the grace..." that that of making fun of people who are
linguistically at a stage we left years back? Why is it that these
speakers of exotic languages are OK as informants but when they get
uppity and start doing their own brand of linguistics, they have to
be rebuffed? There's no need, they'll come around eventually (I hope).
And BTW, what _is_ that island doing in "Île-de-France"?
Torsten