Renfrew's Celtic Scenario

[Vidhyanath Rao]

"Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
> I know how similar cognate words are in Hittite and Sanskrit.
>  After one abstracts out the differences in writing systems, they
> are very little different at all.  Indeed, if the phonetic differences
> were all there were, they would be more like dialect variants of
> one language.  Farsi and Hindi, on the other hand, do not have
> many such transparently similar cognates (and most of those are
> accidental - much like the fact that in my dialect of English, "worm"
> is pronounced almost identically to the reconstructed
> PIE root it derives from [*wrm] - sans endings).

I am curious about this. Has anybody actually sat down with dictionaries
and tried it out? One problem is that, depending on the speaker, Hindi
can contain varying amounts of loans from Iranian languages [For
example, the Hindi word for 1000, `hazaar' is transperantly Persian, and
transparently cognate to the Sanskrit sahasra.]. On the other hand,
``Shudh Hindi'' deliberately replaces these with Sanskrit words whose
selection criteria may introduce its own bias into the comparison. I
would like to know how these were handled?