Newsgroups: sci.lang,soc.culture.turkish,soc.culture.mongolian,soc.culture.nordic,soc.culture.magyar,sci.classics
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!nntp.club.cc.cmu.edu!goldenapple.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!cam-news-feed3.bbnplanet.com!news.inc.net!news.visi.net!news.mathworks.com!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!ix.netcom.com!netcom16!alderson
From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Finnish related to Turkish? (Not to mention other languages like Sumerian, Magyar, etc.)
In-Reply-To: Bahram Varjavand's message of Sun, 30 Mar 1997 05:15:47 -0800
Message-ID: <ALDERSON.97Apr3102028@netcom16.netcom.com>
Sender: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com
Reply-To: alderson@netcom.com
Organization: NETCOM On-line services
References: <5ad8to$6tj@news.inforamp.net> <5b07sk$m5v@tron.sci.fi>
	<5b57ta$sin@josie.abo.fi> <32D65247.3993@pp.inet.fi>
	<32D69BED.298E@pp.inet.fi> <5bagbs$85c@tukki.cc.jyu.fi>
	<jarnie.33.000EC2E1@utu.fi> <5bdfi9$juq@nef.ens.fr>
	<333E6783.5E64@ucla.edu>
Date: Thu, 3 Apr 1997 18:20:27 GMT
Lines: 35
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.lang:73471 sci.classics:17998

In article <333E6783.5E64@ucla.edu> Bahram Varjavand <gryphon@ucla.edu> writes:

>By the way, I find it incredible that the actual origin of the Finns could be
>this unknown.  Is it because their language was not written down till the
>1500s?  That doesn't seem to have been an impediment to figuring out where
>other people came from?  What do physical appearances tell us?

The actual origins of most modern peoples is unknown, in the sense you seem to
intend.  Only rarely do we have information such as that provided by the Romans
on the early Celtic and Germanic movements in Europe, or the immigration of the
Magyars to their present location.  We may know that humans appear in Australia
about 40,000 years ago, but we don't know anything about their language(s) at
the time; similarly, we know that humans have been on the Americas for at least
12,000 years (possibly as long as 30,000), but there is no agreement among the
specialists on linguistic connections that go back more than about 3,000 years
here.

In other words, it has been a *great* impediment not to have decipherable
writing in most of the world.

We don't even agree on where the Indo-European speakers originated, the most
closely studied language family of all.  There is almost no connection between
archaeology and historical linguistics, in spite of the efforts of both archae-
ologists and linguists for more than a century.

What should physical appearance tell us?  English is an Indo-European language,
spoken natively by descendants of northwestern Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans,
American and Australian aboriginal peoples, East Asians and South Asians, and
dozens if not hundreds of other groups--and that's just in the U. S.  Physical
appearance has *nothing* to tell us about language, you see.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
