David Bircimshaw wrote:
>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)
Sare, Dave, suspect this cat's gotcher tongue.
>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 the even meta-heavier Tocharian A & B?
>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.....
OK, now you're talkin'! A well-fed loop back to Tacitus, who went to
quite a bit of trouble to distinguish among all those Germanic tribes
wandering in the same black woods--an effort conveniently ignored by the
Tacitus-assimilating, purist-fixated Nazis--
>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.
Yeah, say some more about the Uralics, wontcha?
Candice
>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
>>
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>
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