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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Fear of a LOJBAN planet
In-Reply-To: Paul O Bartlett's message of Thu, 21 Dec 1995 11:53:58 -0500
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Date: Thu, 21 Dec 1995 18:42:31 GMT
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In article <Pine.SUN.3.91.951221115136.26437E-100000@access2.digex.net>
Paul O Bartlett <pobart@access.digex.net> writes:

>On 20 Dec 1995, chakravorty bonnie jean wrote:

>>... could have been a coincidence, or (and I'm no linguist) it could be
>>that the European languages were influenced by Sanskrit.

>Well, Hindi, English, Sanskrit, and most of the western Euopean languages are
>all of the Indo-European language family with descent from a common ancestor
>in the distant past, so it is no surprise that they retain a lot of common
>features.  Informally, I classify Esperanto as an "artifical Indo-European"
>language, so again, it has a lot on common.

Actually, other than vocabulary items that are obvious only to the trained
expert, there are relatively few similarities between Hindi and the other
modern Indic languages on the one hand and modern "Standard Average European"
(a quasi-technical term) languages on the other.

The Indic languages are in general verb-final, postpositional, ergative,
verbally aspectual, and any number of other syntactic differences from the
Romance and Germanic languages of western Europe (generally verb-medial,
prepositional, accusative, and much more temporal than aspectual).

Very little Indo-European morphology is still visible in either group.

Remember, it's been roughly 6000 years of separate development from Indo-
European to its modern descendants.  That's a *lot* of time for any feature to
be retained, which is why such retained features are so rare (and _mutatis
mutandis_, why longer-range comparisons are so hard).
-- 
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_
