Are you sure that *ARIYO meant noble,I thought it meant strong.
Historical Linguistics
by dorayakii 49 Replies latest jw friends
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Leolaia
PIE *aryo has the sense of "noble, master, lord" and is etymologically derived from *ar- "move, pass" (i.e. those who are "past" others in social rank). Other cognates of the Persian and Sanskrit forms include Greek aristos "high in rank, noble" (hence our English "aristocratic"), Old Irish aire (< *aryo), the Gaulish proper name Ario-manus, and possibly the Illyrian place name Arrianes. There is also a suffixed form *ary-ako "noble male", whence Sanskrit aryaka "venerable man," maryaka´- "male," Greek meirax "youth", and Old Irish airech "suitor".
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Leolaia
There is also interesting evidence of dialectal divisions in Proto-Indo-European. Some roots have cognates only in certain varieties, and not throughout the whole family. Some are shared between Germanic and Balto-Slavic, some are shared between Germanic and Celtic, some between Celtic, Latin, Greek, Indo-Iranian, but not in Germanic or Balto-Slavic. This suggests that there was a time between the original existence of a unified group of Indo-Europeans, and a later time when the Indo-Europeans have split up into their own respective families.
Thus, the god *Dyeus-pêter is not found throughout the whole family and thus represents a late development in Indo-European religion. Here are all the known instances of it in Indo-European languages: Sanskrit dya´ušpita´ , Greek Zeus patèr, Illyrian Dei-paturos, Umbrian Jupater, and Latin Jupiter. It is not known in the Germanic or Balto-Slavic branches of the family. This word was likely innovated after the Proto-Germanic and Proto-Balto-Slavic groups lost contact with the southern groups. Some suggest that the god was borrowed from Mesopotamia, i.e. from the Sumerian sun-god Utu. In Anatolia, the god D Ti-wa-az "sky-god" (<*Dyeus) was identified with Utu: D UTU-wa-az. Of course, it could also simply be a case of syncretism, but otherwise the gods of Anatolia and Greece were heavily influenced by Semitic deities...
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Leolaia
As for "wheel", PIE *kw-kwelo- "turn, turn" can be found attested in Sanskrit cakra "circle", Avestan chaxra "wheel", Phrygian kiklèn, Greek kuklos "circle", Proto-Germanic *hwe´h(w)ula (whence Old Norse hjol, hvel, Old English hweol, hweowol, etc.), Lithuanian kãklas, Latvian kokls "neck", and Tocharian A kukäl and Tocharian B kokale "cart".
For "horse", PIE *ekwo (< *h ekwo with a preceding laryngeal preserved only in Greek and Anatolian), see Sanskrit as´va, (i.e. PIE *kw = Sanskrit c, s´v), Avestan aspa (PIE *kw = sp in Avestan), Thracian proper name Esbe-nus and Lycian esbe-di "cavalry" (PIE *kw = sb), Greek hippos, Latin equus (where PIE *kw remains kw), Oscan proper name Epius, Gaulish epo- (cf. Epona, a Celtic horse goddess), Welsh ebol (< *epalo) "foals", Old Irish ech, Proto-Germanic *eihu-, *eiuh- (i.e. PIE *k = Germanic h) (as in Gothic aihua-, Old English ehu-, eoh, and Old Norse ior "horse"), Old Lithuanian ašva, ešva "mare," and Tocharian B yakwe. There was also a suffixed form *ekwi-no "pertaining to a horse", found in Latin equinus "of a horse, of horses" (whence English "equine"), Old Prussian aswinan "mare's milk," and Lithuanian ašvi´enis "stallion".
Interestingly, the name of the builder of the Trojan Horse in the Iliad is Epo-killos, and the Trojan horse itself was named Epeios. This preserves the /e/ vowel lost in later Greek.
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Pole
greendawn,
Sorry about this late reply, but I missed yours.
:I an not a linguist, my only basis for saying that these two languages are marginally m.i. is what several Ukrainians told me, but as you say there are many dialects in each language and perhaps official Russian and official Ukrainian are not m.i. (based on Moscow and Kiev?) but the dialects spoken near the geographical border on the two sides are.
That's not exactly what I was trying to say. What I meant was that many Ukrainians perceive Russian as "only marginally different" from Ukrainian largely bacause:
1) It's true that both are Slavic languages after all but also...:
2) The great majority of Ukrainians were brought up in a bilingual environment. In fact there are areas in Ukraine where Russian is the dominating language.
Now, what I proposed to verify whether factor 1 or be is more important was to ask a Russian who has never had any contact with Ukrainian if s/he thinks these two languages are really only "marginally" different. The interesting thing is that while many Ukrainians would say Russian is so naturally similar to Ukrainian, you wouldn't be able to find many Russians agreeing with them. I hope I've made it clear in my crippled English ;-)
:I would guestimate that Ukrainian being an East Slavic language is nearer to Russian than Polish which is West Slavic.
Actually, this is a fallacy committed by some historically-oriented linguist ;-). Neat genetic classifications don't always conform to reality, e.g. ukrainian was heavily influenced by Polish due to our common history.
In any case there is no good reason to lump together Ukrainian, Russian and Belarussian as different dialects of the same language.
Pole -
Frannie Banannie
(sighs) I could've sworn this thread topic read, "Hysterical Linguini" and I was SO wanting that recipe!
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Leolaia
Actually, this is a fallacy committed by some historically-oriented linguist ;-). Neat genetic classifications don't always conform to reality, e.g. ukrainian was heavily influenced by Polish due to our common history.
That is true...the classical Neogrammarian Stannbaum model is too simplistic to account for language contact, borrowing, etc. Hugo Schuchardt in the late 1800s wanted to chuck the whole model because of these complicating factors.
But I believe most linguists today take a more nuanced view of language change and recognize the heterogenous nature of the lexicon (and the way sound changes progress through the lexicon through lexical diffusion). A genetic classification like the one given for Polish as West Slavic is perfectly valid, because the earliest strata in the lexicon has a set of sound correspondences that group it with other West Slavic languages. Now, there may be later influence, such as Polish influence in Ukrainian or Latin/French influence in English, but such lexicon represent later borrowings, and can often be distinguished by such techniques like the Swadesh list which focuses on the core, most conversative basic vocabulary of the synchronic language....the words least likely to suffer replacement. Thus, the Swadesh lexicon of English is overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, not Romance (i.e. 75% of the total lexicon is Romance-derived, but 90% of Swadesh lexicon in English is Germanic). There would be few in favor of characterizing English as a Romance language like French and Italian for such reasons. If one wants to talk about genetic relationship, one has to look at the portion of the lexicon that precedes borrowing in the later history of the language, but rather what is genetically inherited from earlier proto-languages. Thus, the classification is diachronically oriented in historical/comparative linguistics. What English borrowed into its lexicon in the 1200s-1600s is just not relevant to understanding what the ancestor to Old English was like before AD 400, for instance.
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greendawn
Pole as I said I am not a linguist and if what you are saying is right then all the books I read about the classification of the Slavic languages have to be rewritten on this point because they all class Russian-Ukrainian-Byelorussian as East Slavic and Polish-Czech-Slovak as West Slavic. Your contention is that Ukrainian should be in the West Slavic sub branch.
But I can understand why English though 65% of its words are Latin it should be classified as a Germanic language, due to its Anglosaxon origins. -
DannyBloem
Just want to say that this is a very interesting topic.
Thank you for sharing this information with us.
As speaking some eropean languages (not all fluently) dutch, german, french, english and spanish, I see the similarities in grammer and words. (also in the nor modern words).
I do also speak a language belongingto the polynesian language group. There it is the same, although in my opinion the words vary more, but there are a lot of similaraties also. The area is very wide, and of course much less contact was there then in europe.
Is there any more information on other language groups, or are many australian (aboriginal) languages, african languages and native american languages unrelated?
Danny
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Leolaia
I do also speak a language belongingto the polynesian language group. There it is the same, although in my opinion the words vary more, but there are a lot of similaraties also. The area is very wide, and of course much less contact was there then in europe.
Oooo, which language(s)? I am really into the Polynesian languages too. Did you see my comparison of Hawaiian with Malay/Indonesian?
Is there any more information on other language groups, or are many australian (aboriginal) languages, african languages and native american languages unrelated?
Yes, there are many books and webpages on the subject. Here is one webpage that has maps of the major families:
http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/languagefamilies.html
In Africa there are several language families, such as the Khoisan languages, the Niger-Kordofanian languages, the Nilo-Saharan languages, and the Afro-Asiatic family (which includes Eygptian, Hausa, and the Semitic languages, including Hebrew). The downside of this webpage is that it accepts Greenberg's classification of Native American languages in two major macrofamilies, the Na-Dene languages and the Amerind family. Many linguists dispute the existence of the Amerind family (which embraces many small language families), and Greenberg's methodology of language comparison is highly problematic.
The main problem is that language change eventually erases sound correspondences (if enough time passes by)....so to reconstruct language families with such enormous time depth (i.e. to 9500 BC and beyond), rigorous comparison of correspondences becomes less and less productive, and the possibility of chance coincidence becomes more and more likely. This is especially the case when one is lenient with semantics (which increases the number of possible words to compare) and more tolerant of "exceptions" to correspondences. Greenberg gives up this methodology and instead has mass comparison without regard to one-to-one sound correspondences, which imho is not much better than randomly comparing lexicon between two completely unrelated languages (e.g. between Chukchi and Sumerian, for example). The Nostratic macrofamily (which lumps Indo-European with Afro-Asiastic and Uralic) is more plausible, but still a long way from proven imho. Another problem with such distant reconstructions is that languages simply die out, and thus lots of critical evidence of relationship do not survive because whole families may have died out, thus skewing our knowledge of the past. Basque was probably the member of a whole language family and its own idiosyncrasies may not be representative of the whole family it is a member of. If Armenian or Albanian were the only members of the Indo-European family to survive, we would not be able to accurately reconstruct Proto-Indo-European and compare it with other families.
The Australian aborigines have lived on the continent for 40,000 years, and thus there are many languages and sub-groups but no possible macrofamily for all the aboriginal languages that can be reconstructed. It's just that 40,000 years is an enormous amount of time, and our methdology can only penetrate so far into the past (usually only as far as 7000-5000 BC).