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MessDjaaf MessDjaaf 9 октября 2018 г. 9 октября 2018 г., 11:36:57 UTC link Пермалинк

Today, I'm going to open a discussion that can be interesting for both linguists and ordinary people who love languages. The discussion will focus on the lexical affinities observed between the different languages of the world. The question that arises is: are these words part of the common vocabulary that refers to a common language of humanity, or are they just loan words resulted from migrations and invasions / colonisation?

EXAMPLES :

- Berber (tagarfa) – Arabic (غراب) – English (crow) – French (corbeau) – Japanese (カラス)
Notice now the roots of the above words written in simplified phonetic alphabet:
/GRF – ƔRB – KRW – KRB - KRS/

- Arabic (أرض) – Hebrew (אָרֶץ) – English (earth) – German (erde)
Roots : /ARḌ – ARŢ – ERṮ - ERD/

- Berber (aberkan) – English (black)
Roots: /BRK – BLK/
“an” is the mark (suffix) of an adjective in Kabyle.

- Berber (it) – English (it) – German (es)
Roots: /T – T – S/
Notice the resemblance between these sentences: “ečč-it” – “eat it” – “iβ es”.

- Berber-Touareg (awatay) – Kichwa (wata), which means “year”.
Roots: /WTY – WT/

- English (brother) – Persan (برادر) – Serbe (брате) – Ozbek (birodar)
Roots: BRḎR – BRDR – BRT – BRDR/

(...)

With in-depth research, one can discover many more examples within languages classified by linguists in different language families. Does not this demonstrate that, like man, all the languages of the world came from one mother-language (proto-language)?

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OsoHombre OsoHombre 9 октября 2018 г. 9 октября 2018 г., 12:15:56 UTC link Пермалинк

Very interesting, indeed. Thank you for the examples. If you are doing research on that, this book could help you a lot:

Saul Levin - Semitic and Indo-European
https://books.google.dz/books/a...MC&redir_esc=y

I read it in 2000 and I found many more examples about words like this. I am sure that there is an updated version of the book. I really recommend it for you.

This website could also help you as far as English is concerned:
https://www.etymonline.com/

Some words just have interesting etymologies.

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MessDjaaf MessDjaaf 9 октября 2018 г. 9 октября 2018 г., 12:32:16 UTC link Пермалинк

Thank you for the links you suggested to me. I am eager to discover the treasure I am looking for.

cueyayotl cueyayotl 9 октября 2018 г., изменено 9 октября 2018 г. 9 октября 2018 г., 17:04:15 UTC, изменено 9 октября 2018 г., 17:21:27 UTC link Пермалинк

I'm a big fan of the site The Tower of Babel, by Sergei Starostin, where he has a huge database of such potential cognates across language families, as a supporter of the Nostratic Hypothesis.
http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bi...?flags=eygtnnl

In fact he has that 'brother' from your example above can be reconstructed to *pVrV in Proto-Borean and to *berV in Proto-Nostratic (possibly meaning 'child' or 'to bear'). Just click on the + sign next to the language families to see how it could have diverged between the language families Proto-Borean would break into. It seems to have been *barar in Proto-Berber, and according to the book Language Planning and Policy in Africa by Richard B. Baldauf, Robert B. Kaplan, the Tamasheq word for 'son' IS 'barar'.
http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bi...31&root=config

I could get lost for hours on that site!

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Amastan Amastan 9 октября 2018 г. 9 октября 2018 г., 17:44:36 UTC link Пермалинк

I have know this website since a long time. It sometimes helps me with Amazigh etymologies.

MessDjaaf should also read more about the Nostratic languages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages

I think that with its millions of example sentences, Tatoeba would some day help comparative linguists a lot in the field of establishing links between languages that are said to be close but had few studies carried out on them to demonstrate this.

Cueyayotl: I have always been curious to know how much Khanty and Mansi are close to Hungarian. If we could get Khanty and Mansi speakers to participate to this website, we could offer linguists much richer corpora to demonstrate beyond any doubt (to the most skeptical people) that Hungarian is close to these two languages spoken in Siberia :-)

MessDjaaf MessDjaaf 9 октября 2018 г., изменено 9 октября 2018 г. 9 октября 2018 г., 18:36:08 UTC, изменено 9 октября 2018 г., 18:54:09 UTC link Пермалинк

Indeed, the word "barar" still exists in Touareg with the meaning of "son". It sounds even like the Dutch word "broer", which also links to the Hebrew "bar" (son), etc.

soliloquist soliloquist 9 октября 2018 г. 9 октября 2018 г., 20:08:30 UTC link Пермалинк

As a linguist, what is your opinion on this Hungarian-Turkish pair? Is it just borrowed words?

#3506165

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Amastan Amastan 9 октября 2018 г. 9 октября 2018 г., 20:37:46 UTC link Пермалинк

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.

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cueyayotl cueyayotl 10 октября 2018 г. 10 октября 2018 г., 03:18:15 UTC link Пермалинк

Some thousand sentences in each of the Uralic and Altaic languages would be a dream come true. Y-chromosome and mitochondrial migration maps all show a genetic connection between the two groups of people and evidence of a split somewhere in Mongolia or bordering Russia with the Uralic peoples heading west, and the Altaic peoples heading east (see: https://natgeoeducationblog.fil...aplogroups.png and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_N-M231). Clearly the group spoke some form of language just before that split, which would be an ancestor of both the Uralic and Altaic language families.

cueyayotl cueyayotl 10 октября 2018 г. 10 октября 2018 г., 02:39:43 UTC link Пермалинк

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.

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soliloquist soliloquist 10 октября 2018 г. 10 октября 2018 г., 07:06:37 UTC link Пермалинк

Wow, looks like it's a highly contagious word. :-)

The sentences have more similarities, though.

"Zsebemben sok kicsi alma van."
"Cebimde çok küçük elma var."

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cueyayotl cueyayotl 10 октября 2018 г. 10 октября 2018 г., 07:57:13 UTC link Пермалинк

Oops, I only saw the bottom Hungarian sentence!
All of the words of the Hungarian sentence: "Zsebemben sok kicsi alma van." are of Turkic origin (though borrowed from different Turkic languages), EXCEPT 'van', which The Tower of Babel claims to be from Proto-Nostratic *woɣlV > Proto-Altaic *ṑlu (which became 'var' in Turkish) and Proto-Uralic *wole- (which became 'van' in Hungarian).
http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bi...42&root=config
It also gives *wVʕ/ɣl as a Proto-Afroasiatic descendant, which has become 'yella' in Kabyle.
It's quite possible that Turkish 'var', Hungarian 'van' and Kabyle 'yella' directly descended from the same word.

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soliloquist soliloquist 10 октября 2018 г. 10 октября 2018 г., 19:32:14 UTC link Пермалинк

That's really interesting. Thank you.

cueyayotl cueyayotl 11 октября 2018 г. 11 октября 2018 г., 08:13:30 UTC link Пермалинк

Analyzing your other examples:
Crow: Yes. They may have all come from the same origin (Proto-Nostratic *KVrV > Proto-Indo-European *ḱorh₂wós, Proto-Afroasiatic *ɣVrVb-, Proto-Altaic *ki̯ăro).
Earth: Maybe. A couple linguists give Proto-Nostratic *ʔer-a (“earth, ground”) (Bomhard 2015) or *ʔarV̄ (“earth, land, place”) (Dolgopolsky) > Proto-Indo-European *h₁er- and Proto-Afro-Asiatic *ʔ[e]r-t͜ɬ'
Black: No relation. The English word comes from *bʰleg- (to burn or shine), and the Berber word may come from the color of something seen in nature (bark of tree, color of seed, etc.)
It: pure coincidence.
Year: pure coincidence.

One I've always found interesting is Proto-Boreal *mVnV (for 'man') and *kVnV (for 'woman')

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OsoHombre OsoHombre 11 октября 2018 г. 11 октября 2018 г., 12:43:27 UTC link Пермалинк

*kVnV

Do you think 'queen' is related to this root?

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cueyayotl cueyayotl 11 октября 2018 г. 11 октября 2018 г., 15:27:02 UTC link Пермалинк

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

MessDjaaf MessDjaaf 12 октября 2018 г. 12 октября 2018 г., 11:25:39 UTC link Пермалинк

I don't believe too much in coincidence. For me, every lexical correspondence can be explained scientifically ... providing that we are objective enough so as not to avoid an explanation that contradicts the truth that our beliefs want to mask. ... to be developed later

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Amastan Amastan 12 октября 2018 г. 12 октября 2018 г., 11:32:24 UTC link Пермалинк

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.

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MessDjaaf MessDjaaf 13 октября 2018 г., изменено 13 октября 2018 г. 13 октября 2018 г., 17:32:03 UTC, изменено 13 октября 2018 г., 18:19:19 UTC link Пермалинк

That's the question I asked in my introduction. I said "are these words part of the common vocabulary that refers to a common language of humanity, or are they just loanwords resulted from migrations and invasions / colonisation? "

For the word "tawwurt", it comes from the verb "war" attested in Touareg with the meaning of "open", contrarily to the Kabyle verb "err" that means "shut". In Latin languages, the words "porte / porta" seem to be at the first view isolates - i.e. without verb form - which puts them normally in the list of loanwords.

I said NORMALLY, because a new question arises: how can so civilised Romans borrow the name of the door from people - Berbers - who were said to be mostly nomades and without advanced scriptual tradition?

In fact, the French & Italian "porte / porta", whose verb forms are "ouvrir / aprire", came from the Latin noun "apertum". The roots /VR/ & /PR/ of the French & Italian verbs explain the roots /WR/ & /R/ of the Touareg & Kabyle verbs. And the Latin word "apertum" explains the Northern Amazigh words "tawwurt, tabburt, taggurt, tappurt".

My conclusion is that this is NOT a mere coincidence, but rather a lexical loan case. And in this case, it is the Berber language that borrowed from Latin.

cueyayotl cueyayotl 12 октября 2018 г. 12 октября 2018 г., 11:56:14 UTC link Пермалинк

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.

User55521 User55521 12 октября 2018 г. 12 октября 2018 г., 12:26:00 UTC link Пермалинк

> 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?)

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deniko deniko 12 октября 2018 г. 12 октября 2018 г., 14:32:11 UTC link Пермалинк

> if there are 25 people in the room, they have >50% chances that two of them will have same birthday.

Yep, I like this one too. The probability actually reaches 50% with 23 persons, and in a group of 70 people the chance of at least two of them sharing a birthday is 99.9%

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem