Re: Lithuanian v Hindi/Sanskrit

----- Original Message -----
From: "Nikhil Sinha" <nsinha_in@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Friday, September 12, 2003 12:16 PM
Subject: Lithuanian v Hindi/Sanskrit


> There is a Lithuanian name, Arunas. There is a similar Indian
> (Hindi/Sanskrit) name, Arun. Arun means Sun in Hindi and Sanskrit. Does
> Arunas mean the same in Lithuanian, as Lithuanian is closer to Indian
> languages than any other European language.

Um, that's not actually true.  Lithuanian is closer to Latvian than any
other European language.  Shortly followed, I believe, by the Slavic
languages, and then the Indo-Aryan language(possibly actually closer to
Germanic than them).  It is, however, true that Lithunian and Sanskrit are
both very conservative Indo-European languages.  And, superficially, they
are much alike in grammar.  But this is not truly indicative of its origins.

To tell whether they're the same, you can probably check the declension.  In
Lithuanian, the ending |-as| is the basic masculine(like |-ah.|[an |a|
followed by a visarga] in Sanskrit).