The Neolithic Hypothesis

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

Carol Jensen <jorna at web4you.dk> wrote:

>I would protest! Swedish and Danish, to me, are farther apart than Vedic and
>Avestan. It's been 30 years since I studied them, but they seemed then like
>virtually the same language, which no one could say about Swedish and Danish.

Swedish and Danish are of course different, but while looking at
the differences between Old English and Old Norse the other day
in Buck, as compared to those between Swedish and Danish, as well
as Sanskrit and Avestan, I was rather surprised to discover that
there were zero mismatches, counting generously, between Swedish
and Danish in the Swadesh-list words listed by C.D. Buck (against
I believe 8 or so between OE and ON, and more, but I didn't
count, between Skt. and Avestan).

There was an intersting bit by Eugene Holman about the
differences between Swedish and Danish Tuesday on sci.lang
(Danish/Swedish seems to be in the same category as
Portuguese/Spanish: Danes and Portuguese are better at
understanding Swedish and Spanish than vice versa).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam