My aging memory may have failed me again and started an active thread. I know that Basque is not of the Indo-European group of languages, but I could have been wrong in classifiying Finnish as also different. I was sure one of the Northern European languages joined the Basque in having a different root.
The Indo-European family of languages includes Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and all their derivations - as well as the Celtic, Teutonic and Skandinavian families. In fact one of the ways that the languages and their origins is studied is by comparing words that are appropriate to different locations and eras. Certain words are probably similar in all languages from all roots - I would guess that a form of Mama is universal (although I don't agree with Noam Chomsky's "universal language". The easiest articulated sound for an infant to make is that "Mum-Mum-Mum", and in my experience with children and grandchildren the second is the explosive "Pa-Pa-Pa". Parents looking for speech would reinforce that by repeating it back, and doing so with the word evolved in their language. But the word for wolf wouldn't be universal, in some places there were no wolves. So by looking at the words that would be common to cultures and comparing them, the linguistic anthropologists trace the origins of languages and peoples. So far they have had no success with the Basques <g>. And having sung in Finnish I had thought that was another one, but I might be quite wrong there. Come to think of it, it might have been Hungarian, or another Slavic language, that didn't relate to the Sanskrit. Best, Jon PS, many of you have the habit of addressing both the Lute list and the individual sender. Or just do a "reply all" to someone else's message that does the same. That results in the individual addressee getting two copies of the same message, one sent to himself and one as a member of the Lute List. This isn't a problem, easy enough to delete one, but one does have to take the time to check that they are duplicates. This message is a "reply all" to a message on this thread, but I edited out the To: and Cc: except for the To: Lute List (or Lute Net, depending how you stored it). JWM ----- Original Message ----- From: "arielabramovich" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Jon Murphy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Roman Turovsky" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "Stewart McCoy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Lute Net" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2003 5:01 AM Subject: Re: Languages and strings > For what I know, and please correct me if I'm wrong, Basque's origin is not > yet 100% clear. > Any expert's opinion? > Agur, > Ariel. > > >
