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| Irrintzi |
Non-Indoeuropean languages' similaritiesFrom:http://member.melbpc.org.au/~tmajlath/basque.html Basque and Hungarian "These pages contain 'similar' words in Magyar (organised by Basque similarities) which is a subset of the main Magyar Comparisons. NO claim of any relationship is made between them. No matter how many times I stress this, some people still make dogmatic statements about these comparisons. WATCH MY LIPS: nowhere do I claim that Magyar (Hungarian) is related to Basque, Etruscan, Japanese, Sanskrit, Sumerian, or Martian or whatever. I wouldn't dare to make such claims which are, after all, the sole prerogatives of Indo-European. By including as many agglutinative languages as possible such as the taboo language isolates I lay myself open to scientific accusations of nationalism or pan-Hungarian fantasies! On the other hand, by using a restricted range of languages for comparisons, one might be accused of being highly selective. You can't win either way! Not being able to analyse the sound change rules across the many thousands of languages of the past and of the present is a serious handicap. Not being able to include the histories of hundreds of thousands of words (even if we knew them with any certainty) in every language both of the past and of the present is obviously a bummer. Not bothering to compare the 'grammatical similarities' of thousands of languages does not bode well, besides it's just too hard. The argument used by linguists who habitually quote that such wordlist comparisons, "are based on accidental, superficial resemblances" is not entirely justified either. Serious scrutiny is lacking in all quarters, it seems. Historical linguists, in particular, insist "...that from a purely statistical point of view, even among any two unrelated languages, there will most likely be a number of similar-sounding words with similar meanings". The basic premise of this apparently authoritative and oft repeated statement is sound, but it is not based on any hard evidence. With thousands of languages and thousands of words per language, coupled with a finite number of sounds, it does seem reasonable to expect some 'similarities'. But, how many similar-sounding words with similar meanings exist in the strictest statistical sense for each pair of the thousands of languages of the present and of the past? Who can say with any authority how many random matches actually exist between any two given languages? Perhaps such considerations are too hard or perhaps not interesting enough for a research project. Linguists just haven't done the sums. Some do play with artificial computer generated wordlists to prove how high the probability of random matches might be, but such demonstrations don't take into account any form or function that is seen in real and complex human languages which tend to evolve subject to internal and external 'environmental and cultural' determiners that would most likely skew the probabilities from the ideal. Of course, in an ideal linguistic world, "regular sound changes" should show which words are related and which are not. In this non-ideal world there seem to be annoying exceptions to those rules as well. If true randomness is a major factor as is so often claimed, then one might reasonably and objectively expect similar words to be observed more readily between any two randomly chosen languages than across entire language families. Rather, the overall observation in these compilations was that the same or similar words showed up more often across multiple language families. Nevertheless, such comparisons still elicit these words of warning :- "In the respective vocabularies of any two languages there are often words which are similar in form, meaning and sound. However, similar words with similar meanings do NOT prove that languages are related. It may point to a possible relationship; you would still need to examine the origin of each and every word in order to be certain that the similarity is not due to chance or to other factors such as borrowings or native compounding." Having been warned is it still unreasonable to suppose, without resorting to accusations of pan-Hungarian fantasies, that this material may have found its way into the Magyar lexicon over the unbelievable tri-millenial trek of the proto-Magyar nation, during which time many peoples joined them and whose variegated multi-cultural contribution eventually formed a vibrant and dynamic people and a new language? Included are words which are often declared as loans from Indo-European without regard to Caucasian, Middle Eastern and even Asian parallels. Officially, Euskara (Basque) is considered an isolate, that is, linguists haven't been able to classify it.The following crude map shows the Basque region (Euskal Herria) and the distribution of the main Basque dialects which very nearly correspond with the administrative areas as well. The only thing officially acknowledged to be common between Euskara (Basque) and Magyar (Hungarian) is that both are described as belonging to the 'agglutinative' languages, which means that grammatical relationships are expressed by prefixes or suffixes attached to the base (a noun or a verb). Euskara is exclusively suffixing, apart from a few prefixes found in verbal morphology. Euskara is rich in word-forming suffixes, but word-forming prefixes are virtually absent, except in neologisms. In Euskara only 'noun phrases' may be inflected; nouns cannot be directly inflected. [lt] Magyar phrases cannot be inflected as in Euskara. Having said that, some obvious similarities between Euskara and Magyar may be observed (weblink above) Every sound or phonetic value found in Euskara can be found in Magyar, except for the dipthongs, see the page on the alphabets. Both Magyar and Euskara have no grammatical gender and no noun classes. In Euskara, a noun does not carry a plural marker when used with numbers. Similarly, after numbers or any quantifier (a lot, some, a few, how many, etc..) the Magyar noun always appears in the singular. Some Euskara suffixes whose function is to place their complement in some relation with space, and the Magyar 'counterpart'. I repeat, in the respective Vocabularies of Euskara (Basque) and Magyar (Hungarian) there are words which are similar in form, meaning and sound. However, similar words with similar meanings do NOT prove that languages are related. It may point to a possible relationship; you would still need to examine the origin of each and every word (Euskara and Magyar) in order to be certain that the similarity is not due to chance or to other factors such as being loan-words. You would need to examine such scholarly works, for example, which prove that the Euskara word ARRAN (a bell worn by sheep and cattle) is derived from the word ARRAIN (fish) and therefore could not possibly be related to the similar Magyar word HARANG (bell). Finally, the one dictionary that really needs to be consulted by every hopeful comparativist trying to work on Basque is Agud and Tovar's etymological dictionary. That one really does explain what is known about the origins of individual Basque words. [lt] " |
| Liz |
Re: Non-Indoeuropean languages' similaritiesLOL! How repetitive an article it is! I liked the "watch my lips" bit...or rather "read my lisp. Seems like a scientological sermon. I suppose it was a lecture not an article. Was it?It's true that lexical similarities don't necessarily mean that those languages are related to each other, but I think the reader/listerner is able to understand it from the first explanation. without resorting to accusations of pan-Hungarian fantasies I've never heard the expression "pan-Hungarian". Why not pan-Basque? 
Magyar phrases cannot be inflected as in Euskara. That's true, In Euskara, a noun does not carry a plural marker when used with numbers. Similarly, after numbers or any quantifier (a lot, some, a few, how many, etc..) the Magyar noun always appears in the singular. The only example is a Biblical one: A Három Királyok (The Three Kings). We would normally say három király, but everyone is referring to the biblical kings in this archaic form. I've found it on the alphabet page: like 'du' in the English pronounciation of 'during, due' No. Hungarian "gy" isn't pronounced the same was as English "dj". Hungarian "gy" is pronounced as [ɟ] whereas the English sound is pronounces either as [dj] or [dʒ] or [d]. kitten (short 'i') I don't know about Basque "i" but the quality of Hungarian "i" more like that of weak or long tense [i] in English. It doesn't resemble the "i" in "kitten". a soft 'tu' in English 'tube' [not as American 'toob'] The same thing as the case of "gy". "Ty" is the voiceless counterpart of "gy" and isn't the same as the consonant in "tube". The IPA symbol for Hungarian "ty" is [c] |