--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham" <richard@...>
wrote:
>
> [...]
> It's also claimed that one of the Ossetian languages is actually
> Turkic - I think that's just a chauvinistic claim.
>
> Some claims are just plain wrong - Estonian often gets listed as an
> Indo-European language!
The noun morphology of Ossetic is agglutinative which may be due to
a Turkic influence. Still, Ossetic vocabulary is mostly inherited
Iranian and the language is traditionally classified as IE.
There is a lot of Iranian, Baltic, Germanic and other IE words in
Baltic Finnish (particularly in Estonian). The morphology is
agglutinative. The languages are classified as FU.
This may raise questions:
1. What are the criteria on which we define whether the language is
or is not IE, applied to the two cases above?
2. Can one say that if historical circumstances were different,
Ossetic had ultimately become Turkic (or Northeast Caucasian, or
Kartvelian etc) and Baltic Finnish Germanic?
In short, don't we face here examples of a failed Turkification and
a failed Indo-Europaeization respectively?