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Aaargh - busybody neighbor! :(



 
 
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  #121  
Old June 17th 09, 12:22 PM posted to rec.pets.cats.anecdotes
Jack Campin - bogus address
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,122
Default Gender-neutral pronouns

Finnish and Hungarian are both in the Uralic family but haven't
been mutually understandable for about 5000 years. Georgian is
in the Kartvelian (or South Caucasian) family, which includes a
few languages in the same area (Svan, Mingrelian, Laz). Basque
seems to be unrelated to any other living langauge in the world.
None of these are Indo-European.

Laz - isn't that an area of Turkey? Or does it overlap both Turkey
and Georgia?


Most Laz are in Turkey, but the language has been spoken a lot further
east and north.


For some reason, I thought that Georgian was an "orphan" language
like Basque, but apparently not.


There is a school of Russian linguists who think there's a "Nostratic"
super-family that includes Indo-European, the Kartvelian group, and
the Semitic languages. The ancestor language of all three groups
would have to be about 15,000 years in the past. Not many other
linguists believe this. But the Russians go as far as writing poems
in that hypothetical ancestor language.


The two Caucasian groups are maybe vaguely related to each other
(last mutually understandable about 15,000 years ago)

How does anyone know what languages were spoken that long ago??
There wasn't any writing back then.


It works like genetic drift dating of DNA - mostly, languages change
their vocabulary at a uniform rate. So you look to see how many words
are left in common. You can also look at what words languages have
for trees and animals that their speakers must have met with at
specific times long ago, relating migration patterns to biogeography.

You tend to get more linguistic variety in mountain regions since
groups stay isolated. The Caucasus has one of the most extreme
examples, Khinalug, known as the "one-village language" - it's only
spoken in a remote valley in Azerbaijan which is about two days'
walk from any other people by a single barely passable track (which
you can see on YouTube). It seems the Khinalug haven't spoken to
anybody else in the Dagestan language group for about 5000 years.
There are about 500 of them. (California used to be a bit like that).

One of the most amazing bits of linguistic detective work ever is
the recent demonstration that the Na-Dene language group of North
America (which includes Navaho and many of the languages of northern
California, where Joyce is) is descended from the same ancestor as
Ket, a dying language spoken by a few hundred people in the middle
of Siberia which was once thought to have no relation to any other
known language (http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/dy.html - look for Ed Vajda's
paper in pdf). The way they figured that out involved a lot of work
by many people over a long period.

Given the timescale, Na-Dene/Yeniseian is not going to have a native
word for "cat".

==== j a c k at c a m p i n . m e . u k === http://www.campin.me.uk ====
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CD-ROMs and free stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, and Mac logic fonts
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  #122  
Old June 17th 09, 12:23 PM posted to rec.pets.cats.anecdotes
Christine BA
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Posts: 94
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MLB kirjoitti:

She posted on June 7.
My Grandfather, who was Swedish used to converse with a young neighbor
who was Norwegians. They could understand each other. When I was 13, I
could partially read some articles in his Swedish newspaper though I did
not know the language. MLB


Swedish is not related to Finnish. And yes, one does understand
Norwegian if one speaks Swedish. It's even possible to understand a Dane
(not a Great Dane though... ) if they speak slowly and clearly.

--
Christine in Finland
christal63 (at) gmail (dot) com
  #123  
Old June 17th 09, 07:53 PM posted to rec.pets.cats.anecdotes
[email protected]
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Posts: 9,349
Default Gender-neutral pronouns

Christine BA wrote:

MLB kirjoitti:


She posted on June 7.
My Grandfather, who was Swedish used to converse with a young neighbor
who was Norwegians. They could understand each other. When I was 13, I
could partially read some articles in his Swedish newspaper though I did
not know the language. MLB


Swedish is not related to Finnish.


Except for loan words, right? Doesn't Finnish have a lot of Swedish
words? I realize that's not the same thing as the languages being
related, ancestor-wise.

And yes, one does understand Norwegian if one speaks Swedish.


That's interesting. I guess that's kind like how speakers of Spanish
and Portuguese can understand each other? At least, that's what my
boss at work, who's from Peru, says - he can read Portuguese although
he hasn't studied it.)

--
Joyce ^..^

To email me, remove the XXX from my user name.
  #125  
Old June 17th 09, 10:57 PM posted to rec.pets.cats.anecdotes
Winnie
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Posts: 1,168
Default Gender-neutral pronouns

On Jun 17, 3:17*pm, Christine BA wrote:
kirjoitti: Christine BA wrote:

Swedish is not related to Finnish.


Except for loan words, right? Doesn't Finnish have a lot of Swedish
words? I realize that's not the same thing as the languages being
related, ancestor-wise.


Yes, there are quite a few words originating from Swedish, but they're
not the same word as in Swedish. This is particularly noticeable in
Western-Finnish dialects, such as the area around me now. For example,
in "normal" Finnish a glass is "lasi", in Swedish it's "glas" and here
in SW-Finland it's "klasi". There are words with Russian origins in
Finnish too, and nowadays lots of loans from English...

* And yes, one does understand Norwegian if one speaks Swedish.


That's interesting. I guess that's kind like how speakers of Spanish
and Portuguese can understand each other? At least, that's what my
boss at work, who's from Peru, says - he can read Portuguese although
he hasn't studied it.)


I don't speak neither Spanish nor Portuguese, but I would imagine
they're at least as close as Swedish and Danish, maybe even as close as
Swedish and Norwegian.

--
Christine in Finland
christal63 (at) gmail (dot) com


Similarly I don't speak Japanese, but many written Japanese words are
the same as
Chinese words. As I recall my history, Chinese settled in Japan long
long long time ago.

Winnie
  #126  
Old June 21st 09, 08:01 AM posted to rec.pets.cats.anecdotes
[email protected]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 9,349
Default Gender-neutral pronouns

Jack wrote:

One of the most amazing bits of linguistic detective work ever is
the recent demonstration that the Na-Dene language group of North
America (which includes Navaho and many of the languages of northern
California, where Joyce is) is descended from the same ancestor as
Ket, a dying language spoken by a few hundred people in the middle
of Siberia which was once thought to have no relation to any other
known language


One more piece of evidence pointing to the theory that the Americas
were initially populated by humans coming over the Bering land bridge
from Asia.

Given the timescale, Na-Dene/Yeniseian is not going to have a native
word for "cat".


I don't even think domesticated cats existed in the Americas until
Europeans brought them in the 15th century. So Natives living here
wouldn't have had a word for them. Don't know about Yeniseian, though
(that's the Siberian language?).

--
Joyce ^..^

To email me, remove the XXX from my user name.
  #128  
Old July 5th 09, 02:58 AM posted to rec.pets.cats.anecdotes
John F. Eldredge
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Posts: 976
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On Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:55:11 +0300, Christine BA wrote:

Jofirey kirjoitti:
"Christine BA" wrote in message
...
kirjoitti:
MLB wrote:

Christine BA wrote:

Christina Websell kirjoitti:

I might mean a difference to your British customer, so you
might need to pay attention to it.
I do pay attention to it with them, but when writing or
chatting casually, I don't that much think about it.

I would settle to know what "kirjoitti" means! Best wishes.
MLB

My guess would be "wrote" or "said" or something along those lines.

Yep, it's "wrote" in Finnish.

Hmmm. Wonder if that is where the English jot, and in let me jot that
down, rather than write that down comes from.

Strange, now that I wrote that, I realize jot is one of those words we
all use but one you almost never see written.

Jo


According to an online dictionary, jot comes from the Latin "jota"
and/or the Greek "iota".
Quote:
jot (n.)
1526, borrowing of L. jota, variant spelling of Gk. iota "the letter
-i-, the smallest letter in the alphabet, hence the least part of
anything. The verb "to make a short note of" is attested from 1721.
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper Unquote.

To write in Finnish is "kirjoittaa", which AFAIK originates from the
word "kirja" - book.


In English, one will sometimes see the phrase "jot and tittle", meaning
extremely minor details. This comes from the Bible, in Matthew 5:18 "For
assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one
tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled" (New
King James Version). "Jot and tittle" translates iota and keraia in the
original Greek manuscripts, meaning minor punctuation marks.

--
John F. Eldredge --

PGP key available from
http://pgp.mit.edu
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better
than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria
 




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