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How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

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Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

#41

Post by resolutebat »

kyazawa wrote: post #29
postexitus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Turkish and Hungarian. There are too many similarities between Uralic and Altaic languages that at some point in history they were considered a single language family by some experts (conveniently named Ural-Altaic). According to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages "There is general agreement on several typological similarities being widely found among the languages considered under Ural–Altaic:…

Lots of interestingly similar words between Japanese and Turkish. For example, yabanjin meaning barbarian in Japanese, and yabancı meaning foreigner in Turkish. The word for "good" is basically the same in both languages (ii/iyi), and the particle -de at the end of a word means "at" in both languages.

This is one of those traps the article cautions about. Yabanjin 野蛮人 is not native Japanese, but a borrowing from Chinese yemanren, which is a composite word (barbarian+person) and sounds nothing like yabancı ("yabanjuh").

It's actually even more complicated than that: yabanjin is a kan'on/Tang dynasty era borrowing, so it came from the Middle Chinese spoken in Chang'an/Xi'an around the 8th century, which would have been quite different from the modern Mandarin yemanren.

Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

#43

Post by xdavidliu »

my favorite is how the word ant (the insect) is "mah-yi" in chinese, while the word aunt (the family member) is "ah-yi" in chinese. There's tonality differences as well, but I wonder what the probability of that is, and whether there are other examples in english / chinese

Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

#44

Post by greggsy »

lastofthemojito wrote: post #31

My favorite little cross-language coincidence is how lots of place names up north end in 'vik'. In the old Viking world, there's Reykjavík, Keflavík, Grindavík, etc in Iceland. Then over in Norway, you've got Larvik, Malvik, Rørvik, etc. In Sweden: Västervik, Valdemarsvik, Örnsköldsvik. Then in the new world, Greenland has Aasivik and Arsivik. The Eastern part of the Canadian north has has Aquiatulavik and Iqiattavik…

Given that a cove is actually a place, it is reasonable to conclude that there is a connection between the use of this suffix as a descriptor for ‘place’ in both language groups. There may not have been ‘extensive linguistic exchange’ between Northern American and Northern Europeans, but there is evidence that contact had been made, and it’s not outside the realms of possibility that the vik suffix was transferred one way or the other during those encounters.

Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

#45

Post by omnibrain »

angiosperm wrote: post #14
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #4

I remember some anecdote of an Australian language, where the word for "dog" was pronounced more or less as in English, just "dog". At some point it was proven that the English word could not have possibly been transmitted to those people, it was just some sequence of phonemes that had been arbitrarily assigned to label the animal. I can't find a good link for this. Given enough languages spoken by enough people, see…

The description of the Pleiades as "seven sisters" in Australia and Europe is a similar case. People used to think it meant the story had been carried so long, and so far. But 50,000 years seems to be too long. That said, it has been tens of millennia since a seventh star could be distinguished. People today count six, but it is described as seven most places. And, the story of the husband who visits the land of the…

> the story of the husband who visits the land of the dead and fails to retrieve his wife

In Europe that's Orpheus and Eurydice, do you have a pointer to the north american story and perhaps a source for the claim that it's really the same story (background)?

Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

#46

Post by rafram »

angiosperm wrote: post #20
rafram wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May be related, not “are very closely related.” There are some cognates between the two families. But no two languages that were separated for 10,000 years are very closely related.

They share grammatical peculiarities lost in intermediate languages. Navajo introduced to Ket elders say they are almost inter-intelligible.

Why do people get so attached to pet linguistic theories of all things that they feel the need to make up informants, forage sources, and generally lie in order to “prove” a claim that has literally no value if it’s not true? It’s totally plausible that the languages are related, and that’s awesome! But the evidence for them being mutually intelligible just isn’t there.

Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

#48

Post by angiosperm »

omnibrain wrote: post #45
angiosperm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The description of the Pleiades as "seven sisters" in Australia and Europe is a similar case. People used to think it meant the story had been carried so long, and so far. But 50,000 years seems to be too long. That said, it has been tens of millennia since a seventh star could be distinguished. People today count six, but it is described as seven most places. And, the story of the husband who visits the land of the…

> the story of the husband who visits the land of the dead and fails to retrieve his wife In Europe that's Orpheus and Eurydice, do you have a pointer to the north american story and perhaps a source for the claim that it's really the same story (background)?

Crecganford has a vid about it.

Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

#49

Post by bradrn »

xdavidliu wrote: post #43

my favorite is how the word ant (the insect) is "mah-yi" in chinese, while the word aunt (the family member) is "ah-yi" in chinese. There's tonality differences as well, but I wonder what the probability of that is, and whether there are other examples in english / chinese

Consulting Wiktionary, it lists several words for ‘aunt’ in Mandarin: depending on the precise relation, it can be gūmǔ, bómǔ, shúmǔ, yímǔ, jiùmǔ, plus some other dialectal synonyms. None of these sound anything like ‘ah-yi’.

Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

#50

Post by gfaure »

bradrn wrote: post #49
xdavidliu wrote: post #43

my favorite is how the word ant (the insect) is "mah-yi" in chinese, while the word aunt (the family member) is "ah-yi" in chinese. There's tonality differences as well, but I wonder what the probability of that is, and whether there are other examples in english / chinese

Consulting Wiktionary, it lists several words for ‘aunt’ in Mandarin: depending on the precise relation, it can be gūmǔ , bómǔ , shúmǔ , yímǔ , jiùmǔ , plus some other dialectal synonyms. None of these sound anything like ‘ah-yi’.

This is clearly referring to 阿姨, which is a vocative term of address for an aunt (in particular, on the mother's side). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%98%BF%E5%A7%A8
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