Re: swadesh?

On Thu, 1 Apr 1999, Tom Wier wrote:

> I believe it was Irena who asked if there were any lists available that
> would indicate what kinds of words are most common in world natlangs,
I'm being accused of all kinds of things lately :-) No, it wasn't me;
I'm married to a professional linguist and we had our share of fun
with the Swadesh list when he was studying historical linguistics. If
you play the game properly, you can prove that *all* languages of the
world are related. I even seem to recall that that's what Morris
Swadesh intended - not as a game of course, he was painfully serious.

It's fun to see people's "Hildegard" lists that show priorities in
different languages; every language has some strange gaps and equally
strange clusters of meanings. I suppose it depends on what one writes
about; it does for my vocabulary.

Oh, and it's not Irena, but Irina. I'm kind of particular about that.
Strangely enough, in Esperanto Irina would be the female form of Ira
(like patro-patrino), whereas in Church Slavonic (where I got it, I'm
Orthodox and I changed my rather inadequate original name when I was
received into the church) and other Slavic languages Ira is the short
form of Irina.

   Irina


            Varsinen an laynynay, saraz no arlet rastinay.
                     irina@rempt.xs4all.nl (myself)
     http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/frontpage.html (English)
    http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/backpage.html (Nederlands)