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| Authored by: Tkilgore on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 06:10 PM EDT |
> As I understand it ... there were several waves of migration out of
Africa,
language-wise.
I was not aware that anyone claims to be able to trace all of our languages back
to Africa. Amazing. As to the different "waves" of languages which
have "disappeared" are concerned, though, are you aware that there is
a myriad of separate languages in the Caucasus region alone, which is actually
not such a big place, and many of these languages seem to have no obvious
correlation with the languages used by people living close by? Are we sure that
these all descended from some common ancestral language which came out of
Africa, and, if so, from which wave?
> The first wave of languages has, afaik, disappeared (likewise the third).
The
second wave is the wave to which Finno-Ugric belongs. This was pretty much
wiped
out by the third and fourth waves. The fourth wave is modern Indo-European.
Of course, I can not comment about this. Except to wonder about the "four
wave" theory of which two of the four are supposed to have disappeared. If
such could be true, one could ask about those languages in the Caucasus, again.
One also could ask that where does the family of Semitic languages fit in this
scheme? Is it more closely related to Finno-Ugric, or to Indo-European? And what
about the language (or actually the more than one hundred not necessarily
closely related languages unified only by a pictographic writing system) in
China? Or, for that matter, how does Japanese fit in?
> Then, about 1500, with Genghis Khan, what became Hungarian migrated from
its
refuge in Mongolia or regions east, and ended up in Hungary.
All speculation aside, there are at least two serious errors in the previous
sentence. First, by 1500 or so Genghis Khan had been dead for centuries. Second,
both Hungarian as a language and its wide use even in the area of present-day
Hungary obviously date back to a time quite a bit before Genghis Khan.
> So the VOCABULARY of Finnish and Hungarian is completely unrelated, the
two
languages having come from different ends of the indo-european land mass. But
as
far as the *grammar* is concerned, they are each other's closest relative and
massively way different from pretty much every other modern eurasian language.
Well, the theory has to find some support somewhere, since it is the one that
the scholars decided has to be correct. Not knowing all of those details, I do
confess that I tend toward skepticism.
As to the question of words, though, It is very interesting. One of the big
similarities in vocabulary between Finnish and Hungarian, I understand, is the
similarity of the word for "water" in the two languages. In Hungarian,
it is "viz" and in Finnish it is "vesi" and these are
certainly similar enough to resemble each other. But, interestingly, nobody is
saying that this proves a common relationship of both Hungarian and Finnish to
Celtic which has a very similar word for "water" which is preserved in
modern English as "whisky." That, of course, has to be a mere
coincidence. Also, the fact that the Indo-European languages seem to have
clusters of similar words for family relationships such as "father"
and "mother" and "sister" and "brother" is taken
as a sign of close kinship between the languages. But, if such similarities are
found between Hungarian and Turkic languages -- which they are -- then that is
of little or no account when stacked up against claims of similarities in
grammatical structure.
So where does this leave us? I did not claim to be sure. And I am not. But what
I did point out is that there is a received wisdom of orthodoxy regarding the
history of the Hungarian language, promulgated by the experts in the field.
Anyone who questions that received wisdom is therefore, by impeccable logic, not
an expert. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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