--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "wtsdv" <liberty@...> wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...>
> wrote:
> >
> > Imagine confusing Finnish with Italian. Not quite the same thing.
> > Yet people will confuse Japanese with Vietnamese or Mandarin with
> > Cantonese. Hoeyde gam choen laa!
>
> That's not an entirely apt analogy. For one thing,
> the dividing line between language and dialect is
> fuzzy. For another, Mandarin and Cantonese _are_
> related to one another, Finnish and Italian aren't,
> Vietnamese and Mandarin aren't.
>
> David
I am not sure what 'related' means. If I look at a Finnish
etymological dictionary I discover that 50% or more of the words are
borrowed from IE. Especially Finnish but Italian too, borrow
extensively from English. There are Latin loans in Finnish. Both
languages presumably can be traced to Nostratic or Eurasian (asuming
there is a real basis to those theories).
True the ancient connections are vague, but the modern connections
are real enough. Perhaps I see relatedness slightly differently from
the traditional view. If two languages use mumerous words that can
be traced to a similar etymological sources are they related? I
would say at least partially.
Yes, I know there is a great difference in the historical development
of Finnish and Italian, and in that respect of course the languages
are not related.
Getting back to English as a universal world language, is this bad or
good? I would argue that it has more benefit than detriment, in that
the more easily we, the inhabitant of planet Earth can communicate
the better. I think we see the process in small scale right at this
Yahoo group.
I know there are those who would preserve their linguistic, cultural
or ethnic values, but aren't we all decended from a few hundred
(maybe thousand) emigrants from Africa? We all have two parents 4
grandparents, 8 great grandparents and so on. We don't have to go
back thousands of years before the number of ancestors equals the
total population of the earth. That doesn't mean that an ancestor of
a thousand years ago is shared by everyone today, but trying to
preseve a culture or language based on inherited values become more
suspect as we regress further in time. I would think that everyone
reading this list would be related distantly to all those who
remained in Africa or left to populate the rest of the earth.
Peter P