--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "ualarauans" <ualarauans@...> wrote:
>
> --- 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?
You may want to check:
Trubetzkoy, N. S. (2001), Studies in General Linguistics and Language
Structure," Anatoly Liberman (Ed.), translated by Marvin Taylor and
Anatoly Liberman, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Six specific structural features have to be present for a language to
be classified as "Indo-European." I do not know what they are.
"Languages can thus cease to be Indo-European, and they can become
Indo-European. "Indo-European" was born when all six specific
structural features mentioned above first came together in a language
whose vocabulary and morphology displayed a series of regular
correspondences with the later-attested Indo-European languages. It
is not impossible that several languages became Indo-European in this
sense at roughly the same time. [If this is true, then originally
several Indo-European languages existed in a so-called language union,
which later developed into a language family.] We can consider them
today in retrospect only as dialects of the Indo-European
protolanguage, but it is not logically necessary to trace them all
back to one common source. Only geographic contact among these oldest
Indo-European dialects may be assumed with a high degree of certainty
(Trubetskoy 2001, pp. 93-94)."
M. Kelkar
>
> 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?
>