Indo-Pacific language family

Discussion of natural languages, or language in general.
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linguoboy
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Re: Indo-Pacific language family

Post by linguoboy »

Zaarin wrote:
linguoboy wrote:I think my favourite was Zuni-Latvian.
I would love to hear the logical acrobatics it would take to justify that one.
No acrobatics necessary. Just a list of "cognates" culled from a few hours playing with dictionaries. The actual mechanics of how the ancestral speakers of Proto-Latvio-Zuni ended up on completely different continents is left as an exercise for the reader.

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Re: Indo-Pacific language family

Post by Zaarin »

That seems to often be the case...
"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

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Re: Indo-Pacific language family

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alynnidalar wrote:I really should've linked the Wikipedia article in the first post to avoid confusion! I was indeed referring to the former: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Paci ... age_family
some major howlers in the "some more cognates" link:

+an example cognate pair is Middle Korean *əraha and "Dravidian" eraja for 'king'. the Dravidian form is obviously a Sanskrit loan, and I can find no corroborating source for the initial e.
+kuŋtuŋi is morphologically complex and thus is bad data as comparison with kunti, unless there is an -i nominal suffix in Dravidian or we have good external reason to believe there was one at one point.
+kolani does not mean 'deer, elk'. It means H. inermis, a very specific species of deer.

I could go on, but mistakes like these show the kind of poor scholarship that can only result from a combination of wishful thinking and carelessness. With hypotheses this extravagant, the coincidences always melt away when you actually study the data. Even with Japanese-Korean, a hypothesis with much more prima facie likelihood, the more we learn about these languages and their history, the less reasonable a genetic relation looks.

(another very serious issue that the author may have just been unaware of is that korean aspirates derive from cluster reduction, so in each case when they're used in comparison, you're actually comparing what's originally a CVC sequence with a single consonant, not a one-to-one phoneme comparison)

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Re: Indo-Pacific language family

Post by Vijay »

I love how the Wikipedia article glosses the Korean word for 'ass' as 'buttocks' but the Tamil word for the same thing as 'backside'. :D

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Re: Indo-Pacific language family

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Vijay wrote:I love how the Wikipedia article glosses the Korean word for 'ass' as 'buttocks' but the Tamil word for the same thing as 'backside'. :D
As an aside, I found this a weird euphemism growing up. For years I thought it meant literally the back side of a person, from the back of their head down to their heels.

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Re: Indo-Pacific language family

Post by Vijay »

linguoboy wrote:
Vijay wrote:I love how the Wikipedia article glosses the Korean word for 'ass' as 'buttocks' but the Tamil word for the same thing as 'backside'. :D
As an aside, I found this a weird euphemism growing up. For years I thought it meant literally the back side of a person, from the back of their head down to their heels.
The even funnier thing is that we use the same euphemism at least in Malayalam, too (I'm not sure whether that's a calque from English or not).

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Re: Indo-Pacific language family

Post by Sol717 »

thetha wrote:the Dravidian form is obviously a Sanskrit loan, and I can find no corroborating source for the initial e.
I don't think native Tamil words allow initial r-, so a variant with initial e- added would make sense.

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Re: Indo-Pacific language family

Post by Vijay »

Sol717 wrote:
thetha wrote:the Dravidian form is obviously a Sanskrit loan, and I can find no corroborating source for the initial e.
I don't think native Tamil words allow initial r-, so a variant with initial e- added would make sense.
Romba 'very' is a native Tamil word.

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