Re: [tied] Digest Number 1241

----- Original Message -----
From: "John L. Berry" <jlbassoc@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2003 1:07 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] Digest Number 1241

> Linguistic questions: (1) how close is Saami to Finnish in actual fact? The textbooks I have available are evasive on this - are the Saami dialects a different language, or are they basically Finnish dialects?

Definitely different languages. Finnish is more closely related to Estonian than either is to Saami, though they all belong to a single subbranch within Finno-Ugric (usually called "Baltic Finnic"). They probably began to diverge more than two thousand years ago.

> (2) Is Romani (can't remember the PC name - the language of the Rom or gypsies) an IE language, and if so, what are it's affinities? (obviously they would be Indo-Iranian, but within that?)

It's an Indic (Indo-Aryan) language, related to the dialects of northwestern India.

> (3) Non-linguistic question about Rom: is there anywhere else in Europe that the Rom can be shown to have arrived almost simultaneously with the first farmers?

Certainly not. They came to Europe in the fourteenth century.

Piotr