>From: "S.Kalyanaraman" <kalyan97@...>
>
>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Exu Yangi" <exuyangi@...> wrote:
> >> Ya know, I normally don't reply like this, but ... before you are
>quick to > dismiss co-incidence, please study statistics. It isn't
>as rare as you seem > to think it is.
>
>Good point, Exu.
>
>Please see my Indian Lexicon which is organized in 8000 semantic
>clusters.
>http://www.hindunet.org/saraswati/html/indlexmain.htm I have proved
>that over 4000 of the so-called Dravidian etyma (out of 5600+ listed
>in Dravidian Etymological Dictionary) have I-A and Munda cognates.
>That is something for statistics and questioning the statistics of
>the DED used to prove a language family. I say that it was a
>linguistic area on N-W India about 5000 years Before Present.
Sorry. Taking that tack would also "prove" that English is descended from
Latin because of the many Latin cognates. Simple 1-1 borrowing can not be
used to show that. You need to actually show a consistant set of sound
changes, and (as in the case of English) rule out wholesale borrowing.
Considering that the reference claims an "Indian Liguistic Area" from about
3000 years BCE, that seems to imply that a large number of words were
borrowed into Ido-Aryan from the original speakers, since that date is many
centuries before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans (Indo-Aryans).
However, if you want a GOOD look at the state of the earl Indo-Aryan (I
assume here, you mean the satem) languages such as Sanskrit, I would suggest
you look at Mitanni, which has written records dating from about 1700 BCE,
and is a definite relation.
>I would like to see alternative statistics of the etyma from Indian
>languages found in, say, proto-IE to prove the frequent occurrences
>of coincidences in phonemes among unrelated language families.
Because of the limited nature of phoneme count, coincendences run rampant.
To simplify things, let us assume that the human mouth is capable of only
three consonants (p,t,k) and three vowels (a,i,u). That means (for our
example) there are only nine sysllables. Even in unrelated languages, you
are going to get matches. As the number of syllables goes up, the matches
get rarer, but (suprisingly) not by that much.
This is NOT the forum for a syllabus on statistics, so I am not going to
into it here. I would (really) suggest a good book on statistics. When you
have two large word lists (even unrelated) there are many "correspondences".
The problem (as in mo-ri) is the inconsistency of the relationships.
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