Re: Old Languages w/ new thread

Muke Tever wrote:


>From: "Jesse Bangs" <jaspax@...>
>>In the meantime, I have an unrelated
>>question that's been bugging me--are there any languages or language
>>families unrelated to the Semitic languages that have tri- or
>>bi-consonantal root structure?  How do their structures and forms compare
>>to the Semitic languages?
>
>Indo-European languages have something like it... with its mainly
>biconsonantal roots and vowel change  extensions.
>
>Er, so I gather.
>CoC-o- noun
>CeC- verb,
>CeC-o- adjective
>CoC-eyo- causative verb
>CoC-mo- resultative noun
>etc.

The Semitic/IE connection is one of the few that's taken at all seriously.
Even Malay has been compared in the far past to Semitic-- after all, it has
basic CVCVC structure (never mind the vowels, and never mind that many
languages have similar structure).

A google search in any language area will produce lots of wonderfully
wacked-out websites (isn't that what "www" stands for?) claiming that
Language X is _obviously_ descended from (ancient language of your choice).
A while back an intruder on Cybalist showed how you can derive any English
word from Hebrew-- metathesize a letter, read backwards, change the voicing,
stretch the semantics, etc. etc..  A Ukrainian demonstrated that Ukr. (but
not, as I gathered, Russian, Polish et al.)  is descended from Sumerian.
Entertaining reading.

Just recently I discovered the Nostratic archives at --
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/nostratic.html  -- not dissimilar,
to the casual or skeptical observer (though it has some reputable
scholars ), and the flame-wars are frequent and very literate!