Re: A question about language-naming

Hålwésðu, mín frénd!

----- Original Message -----
From: Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2002 3:41 PM
Subject: Re: A question about language-naming


> Not as far as I know. Does anybody know a language called Astou, Moten,
Notya,
> Azak, Reman, Tj'a-ts'a~n, Chasma"o"cho, O, or Itakian? :)))
To answer the question, I took my "Lingvisticheskij Enciklopedicheskij
Slovarj" (Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Linguistics), Moscow, 1990, and
consulted the Index of Language Names.

NONE of these names are there...

> > - Does anyone know about two natural languages, that
> > share a name but have nothing in common?
>
> Let me think... I do know of languages that have similar names, but they
are
> sister languages... So the "nothing in common" doesn't fit. But among the
5000
> languages on Earth (not counting the ones which are now dead), I'd find
it very
> unlikely that such a coincidence never happened.
Right. There are enough examples of such coincidences.
Unfortunately, consulting the same Dictionary, I have to retransliterate
the names back into Latin characters, but I hope it won't spoil the names
much.

So,
we have pairs of lanuages with the same name like these:

Aka, Ari, Bada, Gavar, Gadaba, Kana, Karanga, Kau, Kaya, Kora (even 3
langs!), Masa, Mono, Tonga, Turi.

That's all, folks. Pretty few for 5 or 6,000 langs, even if the list is not
complete.

> Christophe.
With friendly attitude ([Gr] "philía"),
Yitzik
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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