Sanskrit numbers (was: French, Flemish and English (was: cvs commit: src/sys/alpha/alpha clock.c))
Greg 'groggy' Lehey
> Greg 'groggy' Lehey said on May 22, 2002 at 18:30:52:
>> So, shall we move on to German numbers?
>
> Anything interesting to say about them?
Well, they're backwards, like in Sanskrit.
> The other languages I know are boringly normal. The only
> interesting aspect is the similarity of numbers, and many other
> words, in some Indian languages (Sanskrit origin) and European
> languages.
Well, Sanskrit is uncannily close to ancient Greek and Latin that it's
just not funny, and the numbers are backwards in the same way as
German:
French English German Sanskrit
soixante-trois sixty-three drei-und-sechzig tri:sasti
(hyphens in the German to show the individual components only; as
we've already established earlier in the thread, nouns get run
together in German).
Apart from that, it's interesting to note that Sanskrit is closer to
the Swiss pronunciation of French numbers :-)
soixante sixty sechzig sasti
septante seventy siebzig saptati
octante eighty achtzig asiti
nonante ninety neunzig navati
And yes, sorry for the missing diacritical marks in Sanskrit, but I
don't have the correct character set handy.
Greg
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Rahul Siddharthan
> Apart from that, it's interesting to note that Sanskrit is closer to
> the Swiss pronunciation of French numbers :-)
>
> soixante sixty sechzig sasti
> septante seventy siebzig saptati
> octante eighty achtzig asiti
> nonante ninety neunzig navati
Interesting. I had a look at the latin numbers, and they're really
strikingly similar to Sanskrit, with the notable exception of "one"
("eka" in Sanskrit, which doesn't seem similar to any Western
language). Also take "twenty" -- "vimshati" in Sanskrit, very
similar to "viginti" in Latin or "vingt" in French, but quite
different from the English and German words. (In fact many other
English and German numbers -- four, five, hundred, thousand -- seem to
have very little resemblance to Latin or Greek, whereas their French
equivalents clearly come from Latin and are often similar to
Sanskrit.)
- Rahul
cj...@cornell.edu
> Interesting. I had a look at the latin numbers, and they're really
> strikingly similar to Sanskrit,
Well, yeah, they're related languages. :) They're both descended from
Proto-Indo-European.
> with the notable exception of "one"
> ("eka" in Sanskrit, which doesn't seem similar to any Western
> language). Also take "twenty" -- "vimshati" in Sanskrit, very
> similar to "viginti" in Latin or "vingt" in French, but quite
> different from the English and German words. (In fact many other
> English and German numbers -- four, five, hundred, thousand -- seem to
> have very little resemblance to Latin or Greek, whereas their French
> equivalents clearly come from Latin and are often similar to
> Sanskrit.)
I think "five" and "hundred" can be explained by Grimm's Law[1] -- /p/,
/t/, /k/ in PIE usually became /f/, /th/, /h/ in Proto-Germanic, while PIE
/b/, /d/, /g/ became Germanic /p/, /t/, /k/. If anyone's curious, here
are the numbers in PIE from one to ten (from Robert Beekes' book
"Comparative Indo-European Linguistics") (and sorry about leaving off all
the accents that I can't type):
PIE Sanskrit Greek Latin Gothic
1 Hoi(H)nos ekas heis unus ains
2 duoh1 dva(u) duo duo twai
3 treies trayas treis tres threis
4 kwetuor catvaras tessares quattuor fidwor
5 penkwe panca pente quinque fimf
6 (s)ueks sas hex sex saihs
7 septm sapta hepta septem sibun
8 h3ekteh3 asta(u) okto octo ahtau
9 (h1)neun nava ennea novem niun
10 dekmt dasha deka decem taihun
20 duidkmti vimshati eikosi viginti twai tigjus
[1] Yes, the same Grimm who published all those fairy tales.
--
Cliff Crawford :: cjc26 at cornell dot edu
cj...@cornell.edu
> They undoubtedly have some sort of link, but is this
> "proto-Indo-European" some sort of guess or reconstruction, or is
> there actual evidence for it somewhere?
It's a reconstruction, based on the huge number of regular sound
correspondences between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, English, and many other
languages spoken in Europe and South Asia. There's no written evidence
for it, as it was spoken well before the invention of writing, but any
claim that it never really existed would have to explain where all these
sound correspondences come from (and no, "mere coincidence" doesn't count
as an explanation :)
> How do people arrive at
> "Hoi(H)nos" and "h3ekteh3" (how do you pronounce those "3"s?) in PIE?
Sorry, those are supposed to be "h"s with a subscript "3", which is kind
of an unusual sound pronounced something like "hw". Linguists arrive at
these reconstructions by looking at corresponding sounds in different
languages and figuring out what would be the most likely sound in the
protolanguage that could develop into the corresponding sounds in the
attested languages. An easy example is the reconstruction of PIE /p/ --
Sanskrit /p/ corresponds to Latin /p/, Greek /p/, Hittite /p/, Avestan
/p/, Lithuanian /p/, Old Church Slavonic /p/, Tocharian /p/ (do you see a
pattern here :), and Gothic /f/ or /b/ (both of which are very similar to
/p/, in that they are pronounced using the lips), so what a linguist would
say is that the protolanguage had /p/, while Proto-Germanic underwent a
sound change that changed all instances of /p/ to either /f/ or /b/. (Not
all of the reconstructions are this simple, of course)
> Who are the people who spoke it -- the Aryans who are believed to have
> originated from around the Caspian Sea? If so, how do we know
> anything about their language -- is there any kind of record they left
> behind at all?
Well, we can tell a little about where they lived and what their culture
was like based on which words we can reconstruct in the protolanguage.
So, for example, we can reconstruct the words "sow", "plow", and "cow", so
we know that they knew about agriculture and raising livestock. We can't
reconstruct the word for "chicken", though, so that suggests that they did
not live any farther east than Persia. Also, we can reconstruct a word
for "metal", but not for "iron", so that suggests they lived sometime
during the Bronze Age.
> Yes, I suppose I could try look up the book you cited, but I'm lazy :)
I really recommend taking a look at Beeke's book if you're at all
interested in the subject...it's a good introduction to historical
linguistics. You could also try googling for "historical linguistics",
"comparative method", "proto-indo-european", etc.
Rahul Siddharthan
[proto-Indo-European]
> There's no written evidence for it, as it was spoken well before the
> invention of writing, but any claim that it never really existed would
> have to explain where all these sound correspondences come from (and
> no, "mere coincidence" doesn't count as an explanation :)
I suppose that makes sense. There are a few "Hindu nationalists" in
India who try to claim that Sanskrit is the mother of all languages
and spread from India westwards, but their scholarship is in general
quite shoddy. The fact that Sanskrit and Latin have totally different
scripts suggests that they both originated from some earlier language
which had either no script, or a very inadequate one...
> > How do people arrive at
> > "Hoi(H)nos" and "h3ekteh3" (how do you pronounce those "3"s?) in PIE?
>
> Sorry, those are supposed to be "h"s with a subscript "3", which is kind
> of an unusual sound pronounced something like "hw".
[example of reconstruction of sounds]
> (Not all of the reconstructions are this simple, of course)
I'm still skeptical about how far you can really go with such
techniques. Sounds and pronunciations change over time, and
recordings didn't exist until a hundred years ago (in which time span
there have already been significant changes in pronunciation), so
extrapolating back 10,000 years seems far-fetched. Sanskrit has
mostly been passed on by word of mouth by the priestly classes, so has
diverged remarkably little between say the north and the south of
India, but there are notable exceptions. The first letter in the word
for "knowledge" is pronounced roughly "jn" or "gn" (somewhat as in
"lasagna") in the south, but "gy" in the north (so, "jnana" versus
"gyana"). The former is probably more accurate. The distinction
between two different forms of "sh" -- as in "krishna" (more
accurately, "krshna") and "sharma" -- is not altogether clear, and in
practice most people don't make a distinction. In living languages
such as Hindi, the divergence is much greater, as it is in English
(even within England there is a huge regional variation in
pronunciation, particularly of vowels).
Given all this, and given that we can't confidently say what Sanskrit
sounded like as recently as the Vedic period (even the written
language then was quite different from the later "classical" Sanskrit
of 2000 years ago), or for that matter how the Romans spoke Latin or
the ancient Greeks spoke Greek, I don't see how sounds of a
proto-Indo-European language (for example, the "hw" you cite above)
can be reconstructed at all.
> Well, we can tell a little about where they lived and what their culture
> was like based on which words we can reconstruct in the protolanguage.
> So, for example, we can reconstruct the words "sow", "plow", and "cow", so
> we know that they knew about agriculture and raising livestock. We can't
> reconstruct the word for "chicken", though, so that suggests that they did
> not live any farther east than Persia. Also, we can reconstruct a word
> for "metal", but not for "iron", so that suggests they lived sometime
> during the Bronze Age.
That's pretty interesting, and much more believable than the
reconstruction of sounds... but not *entirely* believable. The words
for "chicken" or "iron" could have changed for some relatively minor
reason -- compare "iron" and "steel" in English, whose distinction is
not terribly important in practice. Or, they may not have thought a
separate word necessary for "iron". The present-day Hindi/Sanskrit
word is "loha" but my Sanskrit dictionary suggests "loha" could mean
iron, copper or gold; perhaps it's the generic word for "metal" you're
thinking of? Iron certainly existed in vedic times, so the lack of a
distinct word doesn't mean much. (There are several distinct words
for gold, which perhaps show its importance; I'm not sure about
copper.)
> I really recommend taking a look at Beeke's book if you're at all
> interested in the subject...it's a good introduction to historical
> linguistics. You could also try googling for "historical linguistics",
> "comparative method", "proto-indo-european", etc.
Will do -- actually already did the google thing a couple of hours ago.
But thanks for your detailed mail, anyway (it's lucky that nothing is
off-topic on -chat...)
Rahul
Greg 'groggy' Lehey
> cj...@cornell.edu said on May 22, 2002 at 16:46:30:
> [proto-Indo-European]
>> There's no written evidence for it, as it was spoken well before the
>> invention of writing, but any claim that it never really existed would
>> have to explain where all these sound correspondences come from (and
>> no, "mere coincidence" doesn't count as an explanation :)
>
> I suppose that makes sense. There are a few "Hindu nationalists" in
> India who try to claim that Sanskrit is the mother of all languages
> and spread from India westwards, but their scholarship is in general
> quite shoddy. The fact that Sanskrit and Latin have totally different
> scripts suggests that they both originated from some earlier language
> which had either no script, or a very inadequate one...
It definitely had no script. Latin, Greek and Sanskrit also had no
script in the early days. The Greeks tried one particularly
unsuitable version early on and dropped it, then, like the Latins,
adopted the Phoenecian alphabet (as did the Hebrews). The current
Devanagari script used for Sanskrit is also at least the second
attempt, and it's much newer than the language.
>>> How do people arrive at "Hoi(H)nos" and "h3ekteh3" (how do you
>>> pronounce those "3"s?) in PIE?
>> Sorry, those are supposed to be "h"s with a subscript "3", which is kind
>> of an unusual sound pronounced something like "hw".
>
> [example of reconstruction of sounds]
It's interesting how many "h"-related sounds PIE had. I wonder if
it's indicative of the way human language has evolved over that
period.
>> (Not all of the reconstructions are this simple, of course)
>
> I'm still skeptical about how far you can really go with such
> techniques. Sounds and pronunciations change over time, and
> recordings didn't exist until a hundred years ago (in which time
> span there have already been significant changes in pronunciation),
> so extrapolating back 10,000 years seems far-fetched. Sanskrit has
> mostly been passed on by word of mouth by the priestly classes, so
> has diverged remarkably little between say the north and the south
> of India, but there are notable exceptions. The first letter in the
> word for "knowledge" is pronounced roughly "jn" or "gn" (somewhat as
> in "lasagna") in the south, but "gy" in the north (so, "jnana"
> versus "gyana"). The former is probably more accurate. The
> distinction between two different forms of "sh" -- as in "krishna"
> (more accurately, "krshna") and "sharma" -- is not altogether clear,
> and in practice most people don't make a distinction. In living
> languages such as Hindi, the divergence is much greater, as it is in
> English (even within England there is a huge regional variation in
> pronunciation, particularly of vowels).
Yes, these are normal changes, and there are similar ones in European
languages. For example, the English word "year" was spelt "gear" in
Anglo-Saxon, and at some time it was pronounced with a g.
> Given all this, and given that we can't confidently say what
> Sanskrit sounded like as recently as the Vedic period (even the
> written language then was quite different from the later "classical"
> Sanskrit of 2000 years ago), or for that matter how the Romans spoke
> Latin or the ancient Greeks spoke Greek, I don't see how sounds of a
> proto-Indo-European language (for example, the "hw" you cite above)
> can be reconstructed at all.
I'm not in a position to put the arguments, but I've read them in the
past and found them well-reasoned. The general method involves
looking at how the words evolved in different languages.
>> Well, we can tell a little about where they lived and what their culture
>> was like based on which words we can reconstruct in the protolanguage.
>> So, for example, we can reconstruct the words "sow", "plow", and "cow", so
>> we know that they knew about agriculture and raising livestock. We can't
>> reconstruct the word for "chicken", though, so that suggests that they did
>> not live any farther east than Persia. Also, we can reconstruct a word
>> for "metal", but not for "iron", so that suggests they lived sometime
>> during the Bronze Age.
Hmm, I've just read a different interpretation, which suggests that
Sanskrit "ayas", Latin "aes" and Gothic "Ais" (whence German Eisen)
might have meant iron. But that's not the point; this kind of
research is of necessity incomplete, and it needs to be refined as
time goes on.
> That's pretty interesting, and much more believable than the
> reconstruction of sounds... but not *entirely* believable. The
> words for "chicken" or "iron" could have changed for some relatively
> minor reason -- compare "iron" and "steel" in English, whose
> distinction is not terribly important in practice.
Indeed. I note that in some Aryan language (Hindi?), a word for goose
is "Hans". In Iranian, it's "Ghans", and in German it's "Gans". This
suggests that geese were known in PIE times, so why not chickens?
> Or, they may not have thought a separate word necessary for "iron".
> The present-day Hindi/Sanskrit word is "loha" but my Sanskrit
> dictionary suggests "loha" could mean iron, copper or gold; perhaps
> it's the generic word for "metal" you're thinking of? Iron
> certainly existed in vedic times, so the lack of a distinct word
> doesn't mean much. (There are several distinct words for gold,
> which perhaps show its importance; I'm not sure about copper.)
There seems to be quite a bit of confusion about metals. My book
suggested "hatakam" for gold in Sanskrit.
Greg
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Greg 'groggy' Lehey
> Greg 'groggy' Lehey said on May 23, 2002 at 14:45:50:
>>> That's pretty interesting, and much more believable than the
>>> reconstruction of sounds... but not *entirely* believable. The
>>> words for "chicken" or "iron" could have changed for some relatively
>>> minor reason -- compare "iron" and "steel" in English, whose
>>> distinction is not terribly important in practice.
>>
>> Indeed. I note that in some Aryan language (Hindi?), a word for goose
>> is "Hans". In Iranian, it's "Ghans", and in German it's "Gans". This
>> suggests that geese were known in PIE times, so why not chickens?
>
> close enough.
Yes, I suppose so. What's "goose"? I have a (very good) Indian goose
recipe which has been called "Khubab Hans", though I don't know what
language that is.
> (On that topic, what does "Lufthansa" mean? Given that the emblem
> is a flying swan, many in India think it means "flying swan" but I'm
> told there's no such word in German.)
Well, of course there's a word for flying swan: fliegender Schwan.
To quote the OED, the Hansa (English Hanse) was "The name of a famous
political and commercial league of Germanic towns". "Luft" means
"air", so "Lufthansa" is something like "air league". I don't know
what the bird is supposed to be.
The Hanse was mainly a maritime organization, and it was spread round
the North Sea and Baltic Sea, with connections in London. Until
recently, the prevailing view was that the English word "Sterling"
referred to the "Easterlings" of the Hanse, but the OED considers this
to be incorrect. Still, it shows the importance of the Hanse that
people should have thought so.
The Hanse isn't dead; four famous towns (Bremen, Hamburg, Lübeck and
Rostock) still claim to be part of the Hanse, and Bremen and Hamburg
are still city-states within the German Federation.
Rahul Siddharthan
> Yes, I suppose so. What's "goose"?
Good question. I don't know. I think the usual word in Hindi is
"batak" but that really means duck rather than goose.
> I have a (very good) Indian goose recipe which has been called
> "Khubab Hans", though I don't know what language that is.
"Hans" is unquestionably "swan" in primary meaning, and the only
meaning in Hindi as far as I know, but perhaps it means goose too in
Sanskrit. My Sanskrit dictionary (V G Apte) does not say so, but a
Monier-Williams Sanskrit dictionary which I found online gives that
meaning. But I haven't heard of either goose or swan as a food item
in India (even duck is rather uncommon, the only widespread bird is
chicken).
> Well, of course there's a word for flying swan: fliegender Schwan.
OK, what I was told (by a German) was that "Hansa" does not mean swan;
but she did not know the meaning you describe, the political and
commercial league.
- Rahul
Martin Karlsson
> cj...@cornell.edu said on May 22, 2002 at 13:14:14:
> >
> > Well, yeah, they're related languages. :) They're both descended from
> > Proto-Indo-European.
>
> "proto-Indo-European" some sort of guess or reconstruction, or is
> there actual evidence for it somewhere?
Well, it is a guess, supported by "evidence" which make it possible
to reconstruct. As there are no written records of anything PIE,
the thing linguists do is to look at languages _not_ related to the
IE-family.
English Swedish Finnish
king kung kuningas
Finnish is a non-IE language, and kuningas is a very "un-Finnish"
word, and thus probably a loan (from another (IE) language). Now,
because we know about Grimm's law, and Werner's law, it's possible
to apply sound-changing rules _backwards_, and arrive at the
conclusion that the word for king in PIE probably was (something
like) kuningaz.
> How do people arrive at "Hoi(H)nos" and "h3ekteh3" (how do you
> pronounce those "3"s?) in PIE? Who are the people who spoke it --
> the Aryans who are believed to have originated from around the
> Caspian Sea? If so, how do we know anything about their language
> -- is there any kind of record they left behind at all?
>
> Yes, I suppose I could try look up the book you cited, but I'm
> lazy :)
Try:
The English Language. A Historical Introduction
by Charles Barber, for a bit of light reading :)
Hope I got this more or less right ;)
Cheers,
--
Martin Karlsson _
GPG/PGP public key: 0x9C924660 ASCII ribbon campaign ( )
-against HTML, vCards and X
-proprietary attachments in e-mail / \
Rahul Siddharthan
> Well, it is a guess, supported by "evidence" which make it possible
> to reconstruct. As there are no written records of anything PIE,
> the thing linguists do is to look at languages _not_ related to the
> IE-family.
>
> English Swedish Finnish
> king kung kuningas
>
> Finnish is a non-IE language, and kuningas is a very "un-Finnish"
> word, and thus probably a loan (from another (IE) language). Now,
> because we know about Grimm's law, and Werner's law, it's possible
> to apply sound-changing rules _backwards_, and arrive at the
> conclusion that the word for king in PIE probably was (something
> like) kuningaz.
But is it clear that the distortion did not happen *after* entry into
Finnish? To take an example in India, Tamil and other southern
languages are non-IE, but as spoken today they have several
Sanskrit-origin words mixed up in them, and indeed many of these words
may have been imported many centuries ago. These words are usually
pronounced differently from Sanskrit -- Tamil tends to confuse the
sounds "t" and "d", "g" and "k", etc. So if a Tamil word for a
particular tree is "shembaga" and the Sanskrit word is "champaka", it
is quite definitely because it got changed in Tamil, not because it
was "shembaga" in some PIE language.
By the time Finnish was in a position to absorb words from
neighbouring Indo-European languages, surely the forms of Latin and
Greek were already quite solid. If PIE was spoken near the Black Sea,
I don't see how it could have influenced Finnish... In fact,
"kuningas" sounds nothing like any Sanskrit word for "king", which it
should have if it was indeed PIE.
- Rahul
Greg 'groggy' Lehey
> * Rahul Siddharthan <rs...@online.fr> [2002-05-22 19.23 +0200]:
>> cj...@cornell.edu said on May 22, 2002 at 13:14:14:
>>>
>>> Well, yeah, they're related languages. :) They're both descended from
>>> Proto-Indo-European.
>>
>> They undoubtedly have some sort of link, but is this
>> "proto-Indo-European" some sort of guess or reconstruction, or is
>> there actual evidence for it somewhere?
>
> to reconstruct. As there are no written records of anything PIE,
> the thing linguists do is to look at languages _not_ related to the
> IE-family.
>
> English Swedish Finnish
> king kung kuningas
>
> Finnish is a non-IE language, and kuningas is a very "un-Finnish"
> word, and thus probably a loan (from another (IE) language). Now,
> because we know about Grimm's law, and Werner's law, it's possible
> to apply sound-changing rules _backwards_, and arrive at the
> conclusion that the word for king in PIE probably was (something
> like) kuningaz.
That's one of the possibilities. The Old Teutonic form is *kuningo-z
(the * means assumed form). From the OED, with its inimitable
character swapping (/ is a letter that on the screen is so mutilated
that it's difficult to recognize, but was presumably an alternative g
or ng that I've never seen elsewhere):
Entry printed from Oxford English Dictionary (c) Oxford University
Press 1999
king, n.
(kIN) Forms: 1 cyning, (-incg), kyning, cining, cyni/, 1_2 cyng, cing,
(1 cyncg, ching), 1_6 kyng, 4_6 kynge, (4 kinge, kin, 5 kynnge, kink,
keng), 2_ king. [A Com. Teut. word: OE. cyning = OFris. kin-, ken-,
koning, OS. kuning (MDu. coninc, Du. koning, MLG. kon(n)ink),
OHG. chun-, kuning:_OTeut. *kuningo-z, a derivative of *kunjo-, Goth.
kuni, OE. cynn, kin, race, etc. The ON. equivalent was konong-r, -ungr
(Sw. konung). Finnish kuningas king, and Lith. kuningas lord, priest,
were early adoptions from Teut. In most of the Teut. languages two
reduced forms appear: 1) OE. cyni/ = OFris. kinig, etc., OS. kunig
(MDu. conich), OHG. chun-, kunig (MHG. kunic, kunec, G. konig,
_kunig); 2) OE. cyng, cing = MHG. kunc (obs. G. kung, kung),
ON. kongr (Sw. kung, Da. konge). Compare OE. peni/ (G. pfennig)
penny, for pening; ON. pengar pl. (Da. penge) for peningar.
As to the exact relation, in form and sense, of king to kin, views
differ. Some take it as a direct derivative, in the sense either of
`scion of the kin, race, or tribe', or `scion of a (or the) noble
kin', comparing dryhten (:_*druhtino-z) `lord' from dryht
(:_*druhti-z) `army, folk, people', dryht-bearn `lordly or princely
child, prince', lit. `child of the nation', ON. fylkir `king' from
folk, Goth. tiudans `king', from tiuda people, nation. Others refer
*kuningo-z immediately to the supposed masc. *kuni-z, preserved in
comb. in OHG. chuni-, OE. cyne- (see kine-1), taking it as = `son or
descendant of one of (noble) birth'. See Hildebrand in Grimm, and
Kluge, s.v. K<nig; Franck s.v. Koning etc. (The genitive plural in
southern ME. was kingene, -en, -yn.)]
Greg
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Greg 'groggy' Lehey
> Greg 'groggy' Lehey said on May 23, 2002 at 16:18:54:
>> Yes, I suppose so. What's "goose"?
>
> Good question. I don't know. I think the usual word in Hindi is
> "batak" but that really means duck rather than goose.
>
>> I have a (very good) Indian goose recipe which has been called
>> "Khubab Hans", though I don't know what language that is.
>
> "Hans" is unquestionably "swan" in primary meaning, and the only
> meaning in Hindi as far as I know, but perhaps it means goose too in
> Sanskrit.
I'd consider it unlikely that the name of the recipe is Sanskrit. If
it's not Hindi, I'd be more likely to suspect Panjabi, Urdu or one of
the myriad other North Indian languages.
> My Sanskrit dictionary (V G Apte) does not say so, but a
> Monier-Williams Sanskrit dictionary which I found online gives that
> meaning. But I haven't heard of either goose or swan as a food item
> in India (even duck is rather uncommon, the only widespread bird is
> chicken).
This could have been a Moghul dish.
>> Well, of course there's a word for flying swan: fliegender Schwan.
>
> OK, what I was told (by a German) was that "Hansa" does not mean swan;
> but she did not know the meaning you describe, the political and
> commercial league.
I'm sure she did. It's a very well-known word. I suspect it's more
likely that she didn't connect it, or didn't think of telling you.
"Lufthansa" doesn't really fit into normal meanings of "Hansa".
Greg 'groggy' Lehey
> Martin Karlsson said on May 22, 2002 at 19:52:16:
>> Well, it is a guess, supported by "evidence" which make it possible
>> to reconstruct. As there are no written records of anything PIE,
>> the thing linguists do is to look at languages _not_ related to the
>> IE-family.
>>
>> English Swedish Finnish
>> king kung kuningas
>>
>> Finnish is a non-IE language, and kuningas is a very "un-Finnish"
>> word, and thus probably a loan (from another (IE) language). Now,
>> because we know about Grimm's law, and Werner's law, it's possible
>> to apply sound-changing rules _backwards_, and arrive at the
>> conclusion that the word for king in PIE probably was (something
>> like) kuningaz.
>
> Finnish?
Well, according to the OED, yes.
> To take an example in India, Tamil and other southern languages are
> non-IE, but as spoken today they have several Sanskrit-origin words
> mixed up in them, and indeed many of these words may have been
> imported many centuries ago. These words are usually pronounced
> differently from Sanskrit -- Tamil tends to confuse the sounds "t"
> and "d", "g" and "k", etc. So if a Tamil word for a particular tree
> is "shembaga" and the Sanskrit word is "champaka", it is quite
> definitely because it got changed in Tamil, not because it was
> "shembaga" in some PIE language.
This sort of change is also typical in European languages. It's
interesting to note that initial sounds tend to change, while suffixes
tend to disappear (as they did in the example of "king"), so a suffix
is more likely to point to the original.
> By the time Finnish was in a position to absorb words from
> neighbouring Indo-European languages, surely the forms of Latin and
> Greek were already quite solid.
Beyond that. I'd guess that this happened about 500 AD. And the
Latin and Greek words for king are nothing like this.
> If PIE was spoken near the Black Sea, I don't see how it could have
> influenced Finnish...
That depends on where the Finns came from. I believe they migrated
from Asia, and since they're linguistically related to the Hungarians,
it's not at all unlikely that they were near the black sea. The
trouble is, by then PIE had been dead for thousands of years.
> In fact, "kuningas" sounds nothing like any Sanskrit word for
> "king", which it should have if it was indeed PIE.
But the Latin "rex", with genitive "regis", most certainly does.
Rahul Siddharthan
> > Good question. I don't know. I think the usual word in Hindi is
> > "batak" but that really means duck rather than goose.
> >
> >> I have a (very good) Indian goose recipe which has been called
> >> "Khubab Hans", though I don't know what language that is.
> >
> > "Hans" is unquestionably "swan" in primary meaning, and the only
> > meaning in Hindi as far as I know, but perhaps it means goose too in
> > Sanskrit.
>
> I'd consider it unlikely that the name of the recipe is Sanskrit. If
> it's not Hindi, I'd be more likely to suspect Panjabi, Urdu or one of
> the myriad other North Indian languages.
"Khubab" is certainly not Sanskrit and probably not Punjabi. Possibly
it's Urdu. Urdu as spoken informally in India and Pakistan is almost
identical to Hindi, but the formal language has much more Persian and
Arabic influence.
I'm told that (according to a dictionary we have back home) the Hindi
word for "goose" is "kalhans".
> > meaning. But I haven't heard of either goose or swan as a food item
> > in India (even duck is rather uncommon, the only widespread bird is
> > chicken).
>
> This could have been a Moghul dish.
In that case, it's probably of Persian/Farsi origin.
- Rahul