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#121
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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 ==== Jack Campin, 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland == mob 07800 739 557 CD-ROMs and free stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, and Mac logic fonts ****** I killfile Google posts - email me if you want to be whitelisted ****** |
#122
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Gender-neutral pronouns
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
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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. |
#124
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Gender-neutral pronouns
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#125
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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
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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. |
#127
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Gender-neutral pronouns
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#128
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Gender-neutral pronouns
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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