John wrote:

>
>
> This theory is not supported by most reutable comparative or
> historical linguists. They argue that Turkic is the western most
> member of the Altaic family,

There is no Altaic family. See Clauson circa 1950.

>
> This is not so. Anatolia was the homeland of at least four or five
> major languages, none of which have been shown to be Turkic. Hattic,
> the original language of Cappadocia, has been shown to be in fact a
> NW Caucasian language, related to the Abkhazo-Adyghian language.
> Hurrian, the language of Eastern Turkey is shown to be part of an
> early Hurro-Urartuan family of languages, probably related to the NE
> Caucasian language of Proto-Nakh. In the Taurus Mountains, the
> language of Tabal was a Kartvellian tongue related to modern
> Georgian, whilst in the West we find the Proto-Tyrsenoi, who later
> emerged as Etruscans in Italy, who spoke a language which seems to
> have developed from a very early "split" off the line that links to
> PIE.

If Turkic, Etruscan and Hittite are related to Caucasian languages the
comments are moot.

>
>
> Firstly the Saka did not exist 3,300 BCE. As a tribe of the Iranian
> people on the steppe, they only arrived in their vacinity when the

This is based on a simple idea, that turned into a lie and spread for
150 years or so.

The alleged Iranianness was based on one single word, and other authors
simply copied
the lie.

You can check sci.lang for a recent thesis by a Finnish student who
actually went thru
all the references instead of faking it like most IEanists who claim the
Scyths/Sakas
to be Iranians.

>
> This is not so. Once again *pir in PIE is related to the English
> first (OE = fyrst, from Germanic = *furistaz). "Pre" comes from the
> Latin , "prae" meaning before. "Prime" comes from the Latin "primus"
> again meaning first (also derived from the PIE *pir. The PIE *pir
> may be related to a proto-Altaic *bir? as they were both members of
> te Nostratic family of languages.

Ok, let us do real linguistics.

English cardinals: one, two, three, four,
English ordinals: first, second, third, fourth...

Turkish cardinals: bir, iki, uch, dort,...
Turkish ordinals: birinci, ikinci, uchuncu,...

As is obvious, there are irregularities in English (and IE). "second"
comes from Latin from the
verb "to follow" (already posted here and there by others).

"first", "prima", Circassian parma, Indo-Ir par-, Russian perviy, all
come from Turkic. Why?

Because, all the right words are still in Turkic e.g.

bir/ per/ bIr == one
parmak, barmak, perne ... = finger
bash = head

Turkic l=sh rule shows that bash (head) is likely related to the word
for "one" (as in
Hebrew), and likely to "finger" which can be seen to be connected with
numbers
e.g. Latin digitus (finger) > digit, Ruhlen et al finger=one, etc.




--
Mark Hubey
hubeyh@...
http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey