Sayonara Candice
I'd hazard an eyren on keeping the egg but foo yong sounds like a Guangdon
cook jumped ship at Pompey or Cardiff. ( 'Foo Yong' is reputedly a small
town in southern China, it is my fantasy that one of the tabby-in-the-litter
languages of the Miao-Yao family is spoken there - Hmong aka Meo or Yao aka
Man)
I'd suspect the background to Meika's original musing is as follows: either
the putative 'non-Indo European' component in German is a) a confusion with
the extinct East Germanic family, best known for Gothic; or b) a garbling of
little Balto-Slavic dialects- was not Prussian one such? ; or that the irony
observed is not linguistic but one I've come across several times: that the
Germans are 'racially' a mix of Teutons, Latins, Slavs and Celts, unlike all
the other main population groups of Western Europe, who are predominantly a
mix of no more than three of the long-term ancestral indigenous breeding
populations aka 'races', which of course considering Twentieth Century
history.....
The other candidate for the creole cooking could be the Finno-Ugric
languages, and maybe the beginnings of the Rus have got mixed in the recipe
there. But search me for an isolate out there on them plains sweeping in.
I am currently working on matters related in this field for my forthcoming
critical survey of contemporary literature; 'The Backchannels of Insult:
Poetry on the Front Line'.
david bircumshaw
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2000 5:50 PM
Subject: Re: Muller, Kiefer, Armin, Schama
> Lawrence: If a language--extant or presumed to have existed--is
> classified as "Baltic," then it's also considered Indo-European,
> by definition. As for how one decides or infers that a word is or
> isn't "Indo-European," you start with those language groups that
> are believed to be derived from "Indo-European" (a presumed common
> source in itself), namely, the Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, Germanic,
> Italic, and Celtic. Would you infer that "egg foo yong" belongs to
> any of these language groups? --Candice
>
>
>
> Lawrence wrote:
>
> >No, it says "and some baltic group now disappeared", which implies to me
> >that it *isn't one of those we know of and have therefore been able to
> >classify as indo-european - because we *don't know of it because it has
> >disappeared already
> >
> >I, too, would like to know the source. I'd like to know how one decides
that
> >a word in a language in a set of languages from which the linguist infers
> >the parameters of indo european isn't indo-european... I'm not saying it
> >can'tbe done but it is going to be induction / deduction dangerously
close
> >to bootstrapping.
>
>
> >| Meika wrote:
> >|
> >| >when, and I cannot remember where I heard this, the german languages
> >| >contain the most non-indo-european words in their vocab which has lead
> >some
> >| >to speculate that "german" was/is a creole of indo-europeans and some
> >| >baltic group now disappeared, of course this hybridity would also mean
> >they
> >| >would be like no one but themselves...
> >|
> >| Since the Balto-Slavic languages are _also_ Indo-European, this
> >| Germanic-Baltic "creole" theory doesn't make much sense. (I'd love to
> >| know its source, Meika, if you recall it.) As for "non-Indo-European
> >| words" to be found in Germanic vocabularies, one such vocab. (English)
> >| can probably claim "egg foo yong" by now.
> >|
> >| Candice
>
|