From: tgpedersen
Message: 59972
Date: 2008-09-11
>There's plenty in the archives.
> --- 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?
>
> 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?