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From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Re: Scythian religious terms and Ural Altaic.
Message-ID: <petrichDCvLGv.L1C@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <3v71ee$dh9@news.htp.com> <petrichDCIqJ0.AuB@netcom.com> <3vmni7$3ov@news.htp.com>
Date: Sun, 6 Aug 1995 06:17:19 GMT
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Sender: petrich@netcom23.netcom.com

In article <3vmni7$3ov@news.htp.com>,
Fred Hamori  <budapest@mail.calypso.com> wrote:
>Response to Lauren Petrich

>>        Agglutinative is simply a kind of structure -- it says nothing 
>>about relationship. Simply look at the Indo-European languages -- they 
>>are widely divergent in structure, yet they are recognizably related.
>  Ditto for U.A. / Dravidian etc.. they share a certain amount of 
>  vocabulary, prefixes, suffixes but there is quite a range of grammatical
>  differences due to a constantly changing language. So what's your point.

	I find the Nostratic hypothesis a better explanation for what 
similarities do exist -- why don't you read some of the Nostratic 
references I have posted.

>>>  Tab-iti  = "Hestia" fire god according to Herodotus
>>>  ["fire", "to hit", "iron", "smith", "tinder", "cinder"]
>>    A rather horrible mix.
       
>     Seems perfectly logical for the most part to me since related to 
>     fire and working with fire. Have you got anything better?

	A smith is someone who shapes metal into usable objects. Fire is 
only secondary -- for the purpose of refining and heating and melting the 
metal as needed. Furthermore, mixing up "iron" and "fire" is, to say the 
least, *very* suspicious. Why don't you consult with some of the 
mainstream linguists here on how to do comparisons?

>>>   [Words for "father": ada, ata...]
>>    This is a baby-talk sort of word, like "mama" or "papa" or "dada"
>     This is a fine way to describe a language family, ...

	The reason why baby-talk words are not very good for
language-family relationships is because they are imitative in sound -- a
baby sounds like be-be-be-be-..., and because a baby's first attempts to
speak sound like ma-ma, pa-pa, ba-ba, da-da, ta-ta, etc. 

>     Meanwhile since you imply that everthing is derived from I.E. throughout
>     Eurasia, please supply with better etymologies for our enlightenment.

	I NEVER claimed ANY such thing -- just that this supposed Uralic 
derivation of the Scythians is a non sequitur.

	["Caesar"...]
... So you say that the family 
>     name became a title? Seems like a remote posibility, but could happen.

	Exactly. I note that he was the *first* of the Roman Emperors, so 
it is plausible that his successors may have wanted to use his name as a 
title. Something like US Presidents deciding to call themselves the 
Washingtons.

>   This list actually is but a small percentage of what was stated, much of
>which is just brushed off with a huff, not reasons. In fact this posting is
>but a small part of the total and I will be posting again.

	Because much of it looks like crude hand-waving and my patience 
wore out.

-- 
Loren Petrich, the Master Blaster	Happiness is a fast Macintosh
petrich@netcom.com			And a fast train
Visit ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/pe/petrich
Or ftp to ftp.netcom.com, then go to /pub/pe/petrich
