Use of Huge Dictionaries (was: Lislakh)

From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 66922
Date: 2010-12-03

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "piervantrink" <piervantrink@...> wrote:

> 10/The Arabianic character of IE languages
> http://anthrocivitas.net/forum/showthread.php?p=68091#post68091

> There is an Arabic dictionnary written in the 13 th century wich is the compilation of older Arabic dictionnaries but whereas those older Arabic dictionnaries do contain as much as 2 mln words, this dictionnary called "lisan al 3arab" does contain more than 5,5 mln words and searching in it I did found around 460 out of around 550 proto Indo-European roots (wich is the total number of Indo-European roots and could be found in wiktionnary) with around 200 Arabic roots that do have identical phonetics and semantics than the Indo-European ones and the other being very similar with rather strict semantics and phonetics.

That's a lot of words seeing as there are only 614,656 words 4 consonants long. However, 5.5 million words is a combination of a great many authors' vocabularies, and is hardly likely to be a meaningful indication of what was in Proto-Semitic.

Would you please explain your 460 out of 500 and 200. Examples of each category of root or pair of roots would be helpful in explaining what you mean.

Richard.