Re: StoneHenge In England : An Intelligent Cause ? Why ? rich

In <31303030313034394762986281@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, David Wynne-Griffiths wrote:

For example the Fins in Finland, groups of Basks in Spain and groups in
E.Europe speak the same language..

Poor chap gets everything wrong! There is some similarity between
Finnish and Hungarian but there is no other language with any similarity
to Basque.

Wow. I do miss out on some fun by no longer reading Lenny's posts.

Yes. Finnish and Hungarian are related, but about as closely as English and Farsi. Despite the time separation between Finnish and Hungarian (they migrated to Europe in entirely different events) some grammatical features remain common. Word initial stress, vowel harmony, and facts about sentence intonation. This has an odd effect on Finns and Hungarians in that when, say, a Hungarian hears people speaking Finnish at a distance they can easily think that it is Hungarian. But as soon as they get closer, they realize that they can't understand a word of it.

Estonian, however, is close enough to Finnish for each to be able to learn each other's languages reasonably quickly. Vogul (central Russia) is also distantly related.

Basque is a complete isolate. There just are no surviving languages related to it. At one point it got incorrectly lumped with Hungarian merely on the basis that neither are Indo-european, but that misnomer has been corrected for a long time now. I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see someone like Leonard echo such centuries old speculation, but he is just a receptical of misinformation little would surprise me.

Hungarian and Turkish are a different story They are entirely different language families, but they also share some grammatical features in contrast to Indo-European (vowel harmony again, and a rich set of cases, as well as elements of being verb final languages.) In addition to this there are many words in Hungarian (particularly those having to do with horses and horsemanship) that are borrowed in from some Turkic language. These words made it into Hungarian before the magyars reached Europe so are not from the Ottoman occupation of Hungary. Finnish and Estonian lack that turkic influence.

Thus the error of thinking that Hungarian was a turkic language is more understandable. But it too was an error.

That makes it pretty obvious they were driven out of Germany, by the
Germans during the Great migration.

Actually they came from the other direction out of Asia

Yep. All evidence suggests that these uralic languages have their origins in central Asia.

Basque remains a mystery. Basque and some languages of the caucuses share an important grammatical feature (ergative case marking system) which led people to misassociate them. The error stems from not being aware of how common ergative case marking is in the languages of the world. It just doesn't really show up in the Indo-European languages.

The Indo-european language family is really an odd-ball in many ways that earlier linguists didn't recognize. And the implicit standard that it set in linguists' minds led to lots of errors that weren't really corrected until the first half of the 20th century.

-j

--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
I rarely read top-posted, over-quoting or HTML postings.
http://improve-usenet.org/
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