I wish we could have extensive corpora of the Khanty, Mansi, Hungarian and Turkic languages. Some Hungarians are particularly interested in a possible genetic connection between Hungarian and Turkic languages.

I am actively looking for Khanty and Mansi speakers who could join Tatoeba and contribute in their respective languages. Some Hungarians are helping me.

This one, sadly, is a borrowing. The Hungarian 'zseb' comes from Ottoman Turkish 'جیب' (cep), borrowed from Persian 'جیب' (jib), which in turn comes from the Arabic 'جَيْب' (jayb). The Arabic word was borrowed into Geez 'ገይብ' (gäyb), and the Persian word into Georgian 'ჯიბე' (ǯibe), Hindi: जेब (jeb), among others. The Ottoman Turkish borrowed word was in turn borrowed into Armenian 'ջեբ' (ǰeb), Bulgarian 'джоб' (džob), Greek 'τσέπη' (tsépi), Serbo-Croatian 'џеп' (džep), among others.

I do. As I do of Arabic 'kannat', a woman who marries your wife's brother.

Ignacio Reyes (who is worked on a Guanche [Canarian Berber] dictionary)

https://www.scribd.com/document...o-insuloamaziq

MessDjaaf: He is one of the most brilliant Amazigh-language etymologies. He once told me that when 2 lexical roots from 2 different languages have more than 1 consonant in common, it's very unlikely that this is a coincidence. However, you also need to be sure of the etymologies of the roots. For example, "tawwurt" (which is sometimes pronounced [tappurt] by the Kabyle women of some regions) obviously neither comes from French nor from Latin. This is a good example of a coincidence.

Every lexical correspondence CAN be explained scientifically: languages have a large number of morphemes, and a limited number of phonemes, so certain combinations are inevitably going to match between languages. To help determine if a pair of words are truly cognates (come from the same origin), we MUST look at the languages they descended from, as well as sister languages and dialects. If, for example, you see a word in Arabic that looks like a word in Spanish (and has the same or similar meaning), but that word is absent in Latin, Proto-Italic or Proto-Indo-European, then the Spanish and Arabic words cannot be cognates, and the word was either borrowed into Spanish, or was coined after.

We must be careful of this: I personally worked for a Korean company that seeks to prove that Homo Sapiens Sapiens evolved on Korean land, and that all of humanity descends from an ancient Korean civilization (that somehow has eluded all the words archaeologists and historians, and grows in size every year they do a presentation on it), and one of their tools is linguistic evidence that other languages descended from 'Ancient Korean', by doing what? By finding words that sound similar and have similar meaning; they did this with Sumerian, Ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. But all they came up with are precisely coincidences: words that had no equivalent in Proto-Indo-European or other Indo-European languages... and as for Sumerian, all of their entries were incorrect Sumerian words, or words that had other meanings than they claimed. It IS a shame, because there are a lot of reconstructed Proto-Nostratic words that evolved similarly between all of Ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Old/Middle/Modern Korean.

> I don't believe too much in coincidence.

Etymology is not about ’belief’. The probability of coincidences is quite high.

There is a common Birthday Paradox: if there are 25 people in the room, they have >50% chances that two of them will have same birthday. It seems strange, but actually coincidences are mathematically common. Same for words: random coincidences are very probable. It’s not belief, you can scientifically calculate the number. (It will depend on the number of sounds in two languages and things like that, but it’s very probable)

That’s why research in etymology doesn’t just look at word similarity. It looks at systematic sound changes (we can’t just substitute sounds, we need find other instances of these sounds substituted), known word history (when this word was first attested?), morphological features (is this word combined of local word-parts, or does it look foreign?)

Many indirect links will be incorrect translations, so it may not make sense for you to use them.

Malayalam: I have a suspicion that the flag represents the seal of Travancore, as opposed to the state of Kerala. They're very similar, so it's hard to tell.

Mohawk: This flag represents an organisation, The Mohawk Warrior Society. It is possible that not all Mohawk contributors will accept this flag. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...arrior_Society

Tamil: The last I checked, years ago, this was the flag of some informal international organisation promoting the Tamil language. It doesn't seem ideal, particularly given that (to my observation), Tamil flags typically involve red, black, and white.

Telugu: The present flag is plain, and the font is squashed. While we could create a non-squashed version of the flag, perhaps we can also wait for a native speaker to suggest any appropriate colours or symbols.

Like I said, each of these cases would have to be discussed with native speakers, as I don't think I'm entirely qualified to comment on these.

The third one isn't good. Just a small green splinter on a blue background. 1 and 2 are much better.

I agree with you. And with OsoHombre.

Thank you very much. 1 is my first choice as well.