Amedeo

[QUOTE]I thought we'd seen the last of your comments in this thread, after you said:

{Deleted five paragraphs consisting almost entirely of ad-hominem attacks - which, when edited out individually, did not leave enough extant text to actually make any sense.}

spin

Perhaps, Amedeo, you could repost your ideas, but in a more acceptible tone for our moderators. While waiting, here's the Akkadian:

So much of the hardest ones have been done for you. Tocca a te.


spin

Amedeo

[QUOTE=Amedeo]You have every right to delete what you deem improper in a thread, but anyone, especially a moderator, should know the difference between an INVECTIVE and a PSYCHO-DIAGNOSIS such as a description of somebody's character (being defamatory, etc., which is attested in the person's statements), or/and of somebody's mind (mental behavior -- which is attested in the person's discouse).

The unfortunate ignorance of the difference leads some people to accuse a man of anti-Semitism when the man writes an exposition or a history of the criminal behavior of some Jews: It is the exposition that is deemed ad hominem, antagonistic, or a piece of hate.

I have been investigating mental behavior for quite a while. The investigating is done and has to be done of the actual behavior of minds -- such as I had done to a little extent and had written done. That was a bit of PHANEROSEOLOGY, as I call the study of mental (thinking, reasononing, believing,....) behavior.

Incidentally, you deleted also a brief description of two types of KNOWING, which I had also made yesterday on the thread "The Best Evidence for Creation" and more formally in a Stormfront Forum thread. (So, nothing was lost by the deletion, but the distinction could have helped unsuspecting minds to probe into their claims to knowledge).

By the way, I usually keep my private archive of what I post. I know [by inference] that it cannot offend the sensibilities of anybody.

Unorthodoxy is my name.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era e` cosa dura
questa selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinnova la paura.
-- Dante: Inferno

Chris Weimer

*gave genitive to show root word

Dean Anderson

If you have a problem with our moderation, the proper place to discuss it is the Problems And Complaints forum. Discussing moderation issues within the thread itself is not allowed as it merely serves to derail the thread needlessly.

spin

Hell, I was leaving the easy bit to our principe italiano. But I don't think he wants to play linguists. Let me add what I can...
§ RGL is the Hebrew form, which is quite similar to the Aramaic RGL). (I couldn't find the Akkadian form.)

I lucked out with Avestan, perhaps I could have chosen a more accessible language.

(Thanks to premjan for the Etruscan input.)

With "eye"...

the German is "Augen", the intervocalic /g/ usually being reduced in English "Segel" - "sail", "egen" - "own". /g/ and /k/ are made in the same part of the mouth, the only difference being voicing. The Latin "oculus" is a diminuitive form of a /*ocus/.

With "one"...

the normal understanding is that the word started as /ai-/ with suffixes added. One Indo-European group added a /-k-/ suffix, while most added an /-n-/.

The evidence should suggest that there are obvious relations between forms of the first four supplied languages and none with the other two.

Now, if Akkadian or its substratum of Sumerian was the mother of I-E, one would expect in the core words of the language that there should be similarities. There aren't, so it's difficult in my mind to give much credence to a theory which doesn't explain the evidence.


spin

Amedeo

=== Some Indo-European Words ===

================================================== ==
Information, to whom it may concern:

For the origin of many Classical Greek words and many Classical Latin Words, one may consult Semerano's LE ORIGINI DELLA CULTURA EUROPEA (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1994 etc.) --
-- Vol. 3: Dictionary of the Greek Language, pp. 1-327.
-- Vol. 4: Dictionary of the Latin Language, pp. 329-620.
================================================== ==

I have not counted the number of etyms [invariable words or word-roots]
which are shared by Classical Greek and Latin and by other ancient languages which were written down, such as Persia's Pharsi and North-India's Sanskrit. This would be interesting to do, since the SHARED etyms is the reason why these four languages and other old European languages are called "Indo-European Languages." (The quest for IE words or etyms started some centuries ago when they discovered some words being shared by Latin and Sanskrit.)

I have an unconventional view:
It seems that both Classical Greek and Classical Latin derived from an Aegean language or Proto-Greek: The majority of Latin etym is found in Greek. Personally, I would define an IE etym as the etym of any language which is found in Classical and pre-Classical Greek. In other words, I choose Greek as the standard Indo-European language; other languages can be called Indo-European to the extent that they have etyms in common with it.
So, the question about the origin of Indo-European is actually reducible to the question of the origin or origins of Greek. (Suppose that X is one of the sources of Greek. Then, the IE words in other languages are derived either from Greek or directly from X.) (Suppose that a word in a certain language is not a cognate of Greek but is a cognate of X, then I would say that the word in question may be presumed to be an IE word.) (If languages A and B and C are preponderantly Indo-European and they share an ancient etym which is not a cognate of either Greek or X, then again, it may be presumed with a high degree of probability that this etym is IE. This plausibility is obviously due to the presumption that the written Greek and the written X do not necessarily contain all the words of those two languages. The hypothesizing of an IE etym is thus based on preponderantly IE languages, not of a phonological recontruction based on a single-language occurrence of the etym.)

I have not compared an exhaustive vocabulary of Greek with Semerano's etymological dictionary of Greek. I feek that the latter is lexically less extensive that the total Greek dictionary; he was concerned with derivations of Greek Words; I am referring to Greek as the standard or base language for the denomination of foreign words as IE etyms of not. (As I said above, "total" Greek may be a cultural development from pre-Greek, or from this as well as some culturally different language [X].

Now I am ready to evaluate some words as being IE or not. A list of words had been made:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
: Latin : Greek : Avestan : Sanskrit: Akkad. : Etruscan:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
mother : mater : mHtHr* : : mitri : ummu : ati :
father : pater : patHr : pitar : pitri : abu : apa :
brother : frater : fratHr : : bhratri : axu : ruva :
night : noct[is] : nukt- : : nakta : lilatu : - :
foot : ped[is] : pod- : : pad : [RGL]§ : - :
one : unus : ena : aeva : eka : axadu : thu :
two : duo : duo : dva : dwau : $ina : zal :
three : tres : treis : urayo : treyas : $ala$tu : ci :
eye : oculus : okkos : : aksha : enu : - :
heart : cord[is] : kardia : : hrid : libbu : - :
---------------------------------------------------------------------
In the Greek /H/ is an eta.
* "meter" is Ionic; "mater' is Attic --with the etas. These are attested dialect variation of Greek.
================================================== ====

Of the above languages, TRADITIONALLY the first four named ones have been called Indo-European, Akkadian has been called Semitic, and Etruscan neither. As presently I am not dealing with the question of the origin(s) of Indo-European, or whether Akkadian and Etruscan are also Indo-European, I disregard the Akkadian and Etruscan tabulations of the words.

Speaking of those first four named languages:

The listed words are attested words and their meanings are known. So, what is there left to do, in order to assert that they are cognates, is to consider their sound. If the sounds are basically the same, then those words are cognates. / Greek is one of those languages. So, if those listed words are cognates, the words of Latin, Avestan , and Sanskrit are cognates of Greek (the standard IE language). So, it would follow that they are IE words.

I find that they are cognates, except in these cases:
-- aeva is not a cognate of the other three languages.
-- eka is not a cognate of the other three languages.
Comment: word endings don't count; the etym of those four words is one consonant preceded by a vowel. Now, N, V, an K are different and irreducible consonants. Therefore we are faced by 3 different language-words. Only the Latin UNUS and the Greek ENA are consonants; and they are IE words.
-- urayo is not a cognate of the other 3 languages. In the proffered Avestan, only pitar is a cognate of Greek and the other languages.

What about English (the above unnamed language)? It is evident that, except for EYE, the words are IE words. (That is, judging from the list and not considering anything else.) So, if we omit Avestan for a moment, the tabulations show 4 Indo-European languages: English, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. Nevertheless, the "heart" words are not clearly cognates, since they are not really reducible to R\T (or R\D matrix), butI am omitting further discussions of the point.

The examination of the listed words is not over. At least 2 of the 10 (or fewer) words under each language are ONOMATOPOIEC words, namely words whose sound imitates a natural sound, in this case, the sound produced by babies in many contries, before they learned any language.

-- MO, MA, and ME or MA are hearing-attested verbalizations produced by babies which then adults used as words to designate either the nurishing breast or the mother. Duplication or variation of these utterings yield ma-ma and mamma; mam; ma-ma-ma :m-am m-am; am am.
I have never heard the verbalization IM or Um, but they are feasible. So I safely presume the the Sanksrit and Akkadian words for "mom" are also onomatopoiec.
Onomatopoiec words are techically cognates, but it is clear thay they are not SHARED words; the people who speak their own language coin their own "mom" without any social connection with speakers of different languages. (They are accidental cognates.)

-- PA, PA, (the phonic variation) FA, and possibly PI are onomatopiec words. Elaborations of these words yield: pa-pa, pa-pa` [in Italian], and the phonic variation BA, BA-BA, BABBO [in Italian], BAB, AB, AB-AB; ABU [in Akkadian]; (with phonic variation) APA [in Etruscan]. All of these are accidental cognates.

There are other baby utterings that became words. E.g. In my native Italian dialect there is also the occurrence of TATA (for father). As this occurs in Magna Graecia, I checked the Classical Greek dictionary to see if the Greeks of the mainland (Hellas) had made this sound a word. They had. There are two Greek variations: TATA and TETTA [which would be Ionic]. Then I found that TATA occurs also in Latin. Judging from the above tabulation, the Etruscans applied the baby uttering to the mother, as they used APA for the father.

So, at least MOTHER and FATHER (and cognates) must be removed from the list of IE words, since they are locally coined; their similarity is due to the similarity of baby behavior and adult coinage.

The IE words contain the Greek etym, which itself originated in pre-Greek or/and in a culturally foreign language.

The percentage of IE words in each language other than Greek is yet to be found. But anyone who has specific information about percentages is invited to share it.

premjan

Avestan and Sanskrit have been compared extensively to each other, so if you include Sanskrit as IE, then Avestan ought to be taken too. The point about "unus" is interesting since Tamil uses "onnu" as one (though I think "oru" is the original version). Sanskrit has been shown to contain substantial Munda (North Indian aboriginal) vocabulary borrowings especially for concepts unfamiliar in the IE homeland, presumably.

It would be indeed interesting to do a thorough cross-correlation of IE and Semitic languages to see the extent to which they actually match up, across the whole vocabulary. It is quite possible that some languages are formed by multiple influences.

Amedeo

The exclusion of Avestan was simply according to the consideration of the presented vocabulary (10 or fewer words for each or the presented languages). Obviously no inductive inference about the general character of a language can be made from such an extremely small number of words.

In making a broad study of the cognates of any two languages, I think there are at least two important facts to be mentioned:

(1) When people of a country borrow words from another country [in which case the influx is not massive and the borrower's language is still single rather than multiple] the borrower may actually borrow only the meaning and use some word of his own language with a new meaning [whether it is close or remote]. The point is that the number of etyms in a language have to be counted according to their "unrealted meanings" rather than according to "unrelated basic sounds." For instance, since the computer has been invented and developed in the US, its terminology is used in the original English in Italy. At the same time, much of the terminology has been translated and used in the translated form. This kind of translation -- a transposition -- involves precisely the use of aboriginal Italian words with new meanings -- the specific or technical meanings of the computer terminology. "Computatore" is NOT used for "computer," since "computatore" is a synonym of "calculator" or "calcolatore" and a computer is more than that, despite the etymological meaning of "computer." (The word "computer" is aborginally coined in the US by giving a new meaning to an old word; it is NOT a Latin-derived word.) If we take any two languages at their phonological face value, we may not realize that half of their words may be cognates.

(2) When we compare two words from different languages one of which is
largely unknown (that is, the meaning of most of its words are known), we may face this situation:
Give x in language unknown A, and y in known language B;
x and y are radically different in sound;
their consanguineity is undetermined;
but according to each speaker in his own language:
x (in A) names the whole of a thing [e.g., "melo"];
y (in B) names the same whole of a thing [e.g., "apple-tree].
One and the same thing is being named by one arbitrary word in one language and by a definition [species/genus] in the other language.
So, objectively speaking, the two words are NOT cognates. (A cognate requires sameness of meaning and sameness of sound.) This means that they are not one word shared by two languages. The two words may be totally independent -- that how the words of two DIFFERENT languages are.
But that which is designated by the words may have been imported by one country from the other. So, the meaning of one word [such as "apple-tree']
is not aboriginal in the culture where aboriginal English is spoken. This means that the root of the words [apple-, which corresponds to mel-] may have been an old word adapted to a new purpose. Hence, the present situation is the same as the "translator case" mentioned above.

Once A and B are known by a given person, he finds, by the simple inspection of the two languages, that "melo" and "apple-tree" are not cognates. Therefore, if "melo' is an IE word, "apple-tree" is not (regardless of the respective character of "apple" and of "plant"). Is the meaning of "apple-tree" aboriginal with the aboriginal English speakers? If it was imported by the "melo" speakers, then the two words are "adaptation cognates." They can be recognized as such by those who are familiar with the history of the culture of the speakers of aborginal English.

After all, language is for the expression and conveyance of meanings. To look at the life of languages from the phonological standpoint alone is a big mistake; the primary concern has to be semantic. We need to look for cognates, transposition-cognates and adaptation-cognates. (The comparative study of languages ain't going to be easy; bookworm linguistics is over.)

An application of the # 2 analysis might be this: Since I have taken Greek [all ancient Greek] at the model or standard IE language, we would have to say that any country's agricultural terminology is IE, if it consists of cognates with Greek. Now, if agriculture was invented and first developed in Sumer, the earliest agricultural terminology is Sumerican (just as the earliest computer terminology is American-English). So, either the Greek terminology consists of cognates with Sumerians, or its own word-sounds were used for imported meanings. The Sumerian terminology which was diffused into agriculture adopting countries may consist of the aboriginal terms themselves, or the terms adopted and somewhat modified, or just "translated," by the Akkadian language speakers [so that they appear as and are known also as Semitic words], or in Greek "translation." Linguistic diffusion and history has to start with the meaning of words and, often, with the cultures of the speakers. (The phonological system whereby aboriginal words are reconstructed logically led to the reconstruction of a human culture which never existed. The cultures that really existed are the Sumerian, the Sumero-Akkadian, the Greek, and the others we know by name.)

premjan

I guess we should really be talking about "Vedic" rather than Sanskrit as we are not including modern or medieval Persian but only Avestan in the discussion of IE.