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.Zaarin wrote:I would love to hear the logical acrobatics it would take to justify that one.linguoboy wrote:I think my favourite was Zuni-Latvian.
Indo-Pacific language family
Re: Indo-Pacific language family
Re: Indo-Pacific language family
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?”
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”
Re: Indo-Pacific language family
some major howlers in the "some more cognates" link: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
+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)
Re: Indo-Pacific language family
I love how the Wikipedia article glosses the Korean word for 'ass' as 'buttocks' but the Tamil word for the same thing as 'backside'.
Re: Indo-Pacific language family
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.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'.
Re: Indo-Pacific language family
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).linguoboy wrote: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.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'.
Re: Indo-Pacific language family
I don't think native Tamil words allow initial r-, so a variant with initial e- added would make sense.thetha wrote:the Dravidian form is obviously a Sanskrit loan, and I can find no corroborating source for the initial e.
Re: Indo-Pacific language family
Romba 'very' is a native Tamil word.Sol717 wrote:I don't think native Tamil words allow initial r-, so a variant with initial e- added would make sense.thetha wrote:the Dravidian form is obviously a Sanskrit loan, and I can find no corroborating source for the initial e.