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From: dasher@netcom.com (Anton Sherwood)
Subject: Re: Fear of a LOJBAN planet
Message-ID: <dasherDJz19L.629@netcom.com>
Organization: That would be telling.
References: <4b989o$pi4@casaba.srv.cs.cmu.edu> <4ba4e5$rm3@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu> <dasherDJxDII.4ot@netcom.com> <4bcdrv$8tq@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: Fri, 22 Dec 1995 04:46:33 GMT
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chakravorty bonnie jean <bchakrav@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> says:
: . . . Esperanto "question" words start with a k just as
: Hindi "question" words start with a k sound, examples - kaun, kya, kaha;
: I also seem to remember that one of the forms of expressing possession was 
: similar to Hindi's ki, ka. Off the top of my head I can't think of which
: words were similar to Hindi, I think some of the numbers were...couldn't
: tell you whicjust now.

The Proto-Indo-European question words are reconstructed as beginning
with kw-; which became qu- in Latin, hw- in Germanic (including
English), and k- in Sanskrit.  So it's not surprising that Zamenhof
chose k- for the question words.  The Esperanto word for `whose' is
_kies_.  The numbers too are similar throughout the IE family:

	Esper.	Skt	Russ.	Latin
2	du	dvi	dva	duo
3	tri	tray-	tri	tres
4	kvar	c^atur	c^etyre	quattuor
5	kvin	panc^	pjatj	quinque
6	ses	s^as^	s^estj	sex	
7	sep	sapta	sem	septem
8	ok	as^tau	vosem	octo
9	naw	navas	devjat	novem
10	dek	das'	desjat	decem

(from memory; the Skt is likely wrong)
Each language in the group has changed the primordial sounds in a
different pattern, so they don't look alike at first glance.
-- 
Anton Sherwood   *\\*   +1 415 267 0685   *\\*   DASher@netcom.com
I wasn't always anarcho-capitalist, you know.	--   Ubi scriptum?
