Newsgroups: sci.lang,soc.culture.turkish,soc.culture.mongolian
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!rutgers!uwm.edu!spool.mu.edu!howland.erols.net!netcom.com!petrich
From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Re: Altaic words
Message-ID: <petrichDyJGvD.L6u@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <52mj2l$rik@news.inforamp.net>
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 1996 09:26:01 GMT
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	Actually, if you want to pursue this sort of comparison-making 
further, a good place to look may be some work on Nostratic, a 
hypothetical macro-family that includes Indo-European, Uralic, and 
Altaic. This URL points to some references I've accumulated; check out 
those in books edited by Vitaly Shevoroshkin:

http://www.webcom.com/petrich/writings/NostraticRefs.txt

In article <52mj2l$rik@news.inforamp.net>,
Peter k Chong  <peterk@inforamp.net> wrote:
>Turkic language           Mongolian language         Tungusic language

	[A whole lot of nouns compared...]

	I'd be a bit suspicious of nouns, because a lot of them could be
borrowed (that's the main criticism of these correspondences made by
anti-Altaicists), and because some of the comparisons look rather bogus. 

	What I'd be most interested in are pronouns and grammatical 
morphemes and words for body parts and the like. The Altaic numerals look 
like independent inventions, one for Turkic, one for Mongolian, etc.

	Fortunately, here are some examples:

>KIM = who                 KHEN = who
>(Turkish)                 (Khalkha Mongolian)

	This looks something like Indo-European *kwi-/*kwo- "who, what" 
(quis/quae/quid, qui/quae/quod).

>BEN = I                   MINNI = my
>(turkish)                 (Khalkha Mongolian)

	Some Mongolian subject pronouns are bi, "I" and tsi "you (sg.)".

	Note Indo-European *me- and *te- for these pronouns.
-- 
Loren Petrich				Happiness is a fast Macintosh
petrich@netcom.com			And a fast train
My home page: http://www.webcom.com/petrich/home.html
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