Re: Uusisuom's influences

At 2:59 pm -0400 1/4/01, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>Ray wrote:
>> >>Lithuanian = highly prized for its Indo - European roots. Many of its
>>words
>> >>can be traced back to ancient India and the Sanskrit language.
>> >
>> >Traced back to IE, surely; but Sanskrit?
>>
>>Of course not.  The vocab of Lithuanian can no more be traced back to
>>ancient India than can the vocab of English or Welsh.  Lithuanian, nearly
>>all the languages of Europe (Saami, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian & Basque
>>are AFAIK the only exceptions)
>
>We-ell, there's a whole lot of tiny Uralic langs - Ingrian, Votian,
>Udmurtian, Mari, Komi etc -
I know - but I hadn't realized these were all on the European side of the
Urals.

>plus Kalmyk (Mongolian),
I know of Kalmyk, but I hadn't realized it had speakers in Europe.  I
thought it was strictly Asian.

> a bunch of Turkic langs
>- Turkish, Tatar, Crimean Tatar,
Yes, I tend to think of Turkish as Asian as most of Turkey is in Asia
(indeed, the old 'Asia Minor'); I'd forgotten it had a European foothold in
Thrace and I'd forgotten there were still Turkic langs in the Crimea.

>Kazakh, etc -
in Europe?

>and Maltese.
Is Malta part of Europe or part of North Africa?

>I'm probably forgetting something too.
Yes, I'm not sure where the Europe-Asian boundary is drawn across the
Caucasus; it is likely we should include Kartvelian (Georgian) in the
non-IE list of European langs.

Ray.

=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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