ED/Lluis, Thai should definitely be moved closer to Chinese. They are so similar. You can ask Bill. Most westerners in the beginning are bewildered by a sentence: Mi khon ma ha khun (have man come look-for you, meaning somebody is here to see you. In Chinese, there are exactly five same words: you ren lai zhao ni). Japanese and Koreans are outstanding in Asia. There are inflections in their verbs and adjectives. Maybe they are related with Hungarians and Finnish. Anthony
--- On Sun, 14/11/10, ED <seacrofter...@yahoo.com> wrote: From: ED <seacrofter...@yahoo.com> Subject: [Zen] Re: FW: Quote from St. Thomas Aquinas To: Zen_Forum@yahoogroups.com Date: Sunday, 14 November, 2010, 5:33 AM Hi Lluis, 'Uralic' and 'Indo-European' are clasified as related but separate families of languages. See chart below. With best wishes, --ED http://www.friesian.com/trees.htm Language Affinities Beween Autochthonous Populations The second tree below essentially takes the first one but draws the tree over again using language rather than genetic affinities. What is of interest are the similarities to the first tree, indicating that human languages, which certainly antedate the 300,000 year mark (see Derek Bickerton, Language and Species [University of Chicago Press, 1990]), may also have a common origin in Africa itself. Many of the higher order groupings, however, as discussed above, are rather speculative. The theory of the "Nostratic" languages, which combines Afro-Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic), Indo-European, Ural-Altaic, Dravidian, and American Indian languages, is really the most dramatic but also may have the most credible evidence in common vocabulary items and systematic phonetic relationships. The grouping of Chinese with Basque, which otherwise seems unrelated to any other languages, seems more than a little bizarre but, if true, would be evidence of population movements and distribution prior to the early historical presence of Indo-European speakers across northern Europe and Asia. I have never seen explanations of the actual evidence for the Basque-Chinese connection. --- In Zen_Forum@yahoogroups.com, Lluís Mendieta <lme...@...> wrote: > > Hi, Ed > > Well, I am at lost in what you mind > > I understand that they are westerners, as we are, even being indo-european.. > (so, roots in east). > But all that is dualistic....and not zen (or at least, deceiving) :-) > > With best wishes > > Lluís Hi Lluis, > "Finnish is the eponymous member of the Finno-Ugric language family and is > typologically between fusional and agglutinative languages. It modifies and > inflects the forms of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs, > depending on their roles in the sentence. > > Finnish is a member of the Baltic-Finnic subgroup of the Finno-Ugric group of > languages which in turn is a member of the Uralic family of languages. The > Baltic-Finnic subgroup also includes Estonian and other minority languages > spoken around the Baltic Sea. > > The Finns are more genetically similar to their Indo-European speaking > neighbors than to the speakers of the geographically close Finno-Ugric > language, Sami. It has been argued that a native Finnic-speaking population > therefore absorbed northward migrating Indo-European speakers who adopted the > Finnic language, giving rise to the modern Finns." > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_language >Wist best wishes, > --ED > Hi, Bill > > I beg to differ in two non zen questions > -Hungry? has the subject implicit. You do not place it, but it is implied. > The werb in spanish or catalan would be also implicit, so, I suppose same in > english. > > -finnish is a westerner language. And they have a lot of words to design the > relationship within family. > > With best wishes > > Lluís > Anthony, > > I know Thai's drop subject and sometimes even object all the time, but I > thought it was just because they, like Westerners, are lazy. > > For example, I could ask you: `Are you hungry?', or I could just ask by > saying: `Hungry?' (with a rising tone). That's just laziness, or being > casual in your speech. > > I do think language does reveal the different values of culture. For > example in Thai there are only 3 tenses: past, present and future; whereas > there are many, many adjectives and pronouns that are used to specifically > identify the speaker's relationship with the one addressed. In English > there are many (27?) verb tenses and very few special pronouns. This I > think shows that Westerner's value time more than Asians; whereas Asians put > more importance on personal relationships than time. > > ...Bill!
