From: Arnaud Fournet
Message: 59952
Date: 2008-09-10
----- Original Message -----
From: "koenraad_elst" <koenraad.elst@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 10, 2008 12:49 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Asian migration to Scandinavia
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Arnaud Fournet"
> <fournet.arnaud@...> wrote:
>> I go as far as stating that proto-Germanic is not a western IE
> language but
>> a far-eastern language, that was originally spoken east of Indo-
> Iranian and
>> in the neighborhood of Yeniseian, Tokharian and Uralic people, in
> western
>> Siberia.
>>
>
> Dear Arnaud (never too late to become friends),
>
> I'd be interested to hear your arguments for this. Are they any other
> than (1) the purported exchange of a few words, like "house", with
> Yeniseian Ket; and (2) the presence of IE and specifically Germanic
> words in Chinese?
==========
Dear M. Elst,
Thank you for your interest about my ideas.
I suppose this can start some interesting string of mails.
You're asking two questions :
- one is about Germanic within PIE ?
- another is about Chinese and PIE ?
If we first deal with Chinese to answer the next part of your mail,
one of the problem is very few people know both PIE and proto-Chinese,
it's clear these two fields lay very far apart.
Very few people can make a critical assessment of both fields.
A surprising huge number of words show strong contacts between Chinese and
more than one indo-european language.
And these contacts must have occured _before_ the Chinese script was
invented,
that is to say before -1500 BC as the latest possible date.
That is to say much earlier than the date when Tocharian is attested.
As regards the word 'dog' *k^won in the traditional approach,
I maintain that this has to be emended to *k^uH2on in order to account for
third tone quan3.
otherwise it should be quan1 not quan3.
There is about no word with the scheme u_o in old Chinese,
so it's clear this word can only be a loanword.
Only a and i appear in second or third syllables in old Chinese.
Chinese mi4 is from *mjit most probably a Tocharian word < PIE *medh.
the word for horse ma3 < moro? is a Chinese word,
obviously *marko in PIE is borrowed from *mor- and suffixed PIE-way, like
por-kos.
The change o > a suggests Germanic can be the intermediate between Central
Asia and Celtic.
I have identified the word 'foetus' pei1 < *phr-y with delabialised y (like
in Russian)
this is obviously from *bhor-u "that which is born".
This word is interesting because Old Chinese clearly bears testimony that
the giving language had aspirates,
so it may be either Indic or Tocharian if Tocharian had still aspirates
around - 1500 BC.
There are many other words, especially in the textile semantic field.
Not to mention 'seven' *tsat < *tsapt-
PIE originally has an affricate in this word.
I'm interesting in learning more about your cattle-raising words in Chinese
?
Arnaud
=========
> About the latter: a handful of IE words in Chinese pertaining to
> cattle-raising have never been controversial, e.g. "quan" for dog
> (Gk. kuon), "mi" for "honey", "ma" < "*mra" for "horse" (mare). But
> in V. Mair's series Sino-Platonic Papers, a few Chinese scholars have
> argued for a much larger presence of IE words in Chinese, effectively
> distinguishing Chinese from the other Sino-Tibetan languages by its
> IE component. The most accomplished contributor was the late Chang
> Tsung-Tung, who ends up with over a thousand IE words, on closer
> inspection most of them Germanic. Was he biased by his own life in
> Frankfurt with a German wife? At any rate, other Chinese scholars
> (and their nationality deserves emphasis, for Chinese scholarship
> tends to be chauvinistic, e.g. resenting the European presence in the
> Tarim mummies) have built on his theory and argued e.g. that the
> Yellow Emperor, the legendary founder of Chinese culture, was an IE
> immigrant. I am not aware of much critical review of this body of
> theory/speculation. Anyone?
>
> Kind regards,
>
> KE
========
Maybe this is going a bit too far !?
I once read a paper in Sino-Platonic papers,
I don't remember who wrote it,
many examples were very shaky.
And you have to work with a clean Old chinese reconstruction and
proto-tocharian or Indic,
otherwise it makes little sense.
Arnaud
===============