Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!das-news.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!MathWorks.Com!yeshua.marcam.com!charnel.ecst.csuchico.edu!csusac!csus.edu!netcom.com!alderson
From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Which ling. group are Georgian and Armenian\
In-Reply-To: corre@alpha1.csd.uwm.edu's message of 10 Oct 1994 21:31:31 GMT
Message-ID: <aldersonCxIqJB.7w3@netcom.com>
Reply-To: alderson@netcom.com
Fcc: /u52/alderson/postings
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <1994Oct6.222937.207675@uctvax.uct.ac.za> <37973q$pjc@due.uninett.no>
	<37cbrjINNjkv@uwm.edu>
Date: Tue, 11 Oct 1994 17:13:58 GMT
Lines: 16

In article <37cbrjINNjkv@uwm.edu> corre@alpha1.csd.uwm.edu (Alan D Corre)
writes:

>Trubetskoy is said to have taken back home an Abkhaz boy to teach him the
>language. It is said to have some seventy consonants and one vowel. Ubikh has
>even more consonants, but is currently spoken by twenty people. I guess it was
>those extra consonants what done them in.

I was under the impression that Dume'zil's informant for Ubykh was the last
speaker, and died some years ago.  (He was in his 90s.)  Is this part of the
legendry of linguistics?
-- 
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_
