From: Daniel J. Milton
Message: 41431
Date: 2005-10-14
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...> wrote:
>
> Okay, I have got to be the biggest fool among
linguistically-interested people. I told you all about how I asked
the Kurdish hairdresser what the Kurdish word for "water" is, hoping
to have a descendant of IE *wodr/n, and she replied with a word that
sounded exactly like the North American English pronunciation of
"water". Well, that's because she was merely repeating what I said.
She was just confirming that I asked for the word "water" -- and then
proceeded to forget to answer me, being very busy at her counter. She
did not say it in the intonation of a question, which is why I thought
she was answering my question, not repeating me. I said "So the
English and Kurdish words are the same", but when she answered that
"many words are the same", it was a misunderstanding of what I was
saying, she wasn't really sure of what she was saying and was not
really paying attention. I asked her today what the Kurdish word for
"water" is and she replied /aw/, which is /av/ in Iran. I
> asked her if Kurdish had /w/ and she said yes (but said that it is
/v/ in the north), but when I asked her for examples in initial
position she had none, so maybe she was thinking of medial and final
position. So I tried to think of other words of IE that had initial
*w that might be preserved in Kurdish, so one that I asked was the
word for "see", to which she replied /bi:nim/ (/dabi:nim/ or similar
in the present tense). I suspected that perhaps this is from *weid-
and that Kurdish has /b/ for initial /w/. I'm sure some of you know
the answer to this, so I'll wait for your replies before looking it up
myself.
> So I apologize for misleading you (albeit completely
unintentionally, I misunderstood her because her reply sounded
deceptively like an answer, not a request for confirmation which it
was). I actually laughed my head off as I was coming home thinking
about the gross misunderstanding.
>
> Andrew
>