IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Dr. John E. McLaughlin]

>>  [AH] I do not know or claim these to be cognates. But it might be.

> [Stefan George] I claim these not to be cognates. No, it might not be.

> On the other hand, if containing - somewhere in the word - an /n/ (oops,
> obviously a nasal will do) is sufficient enough to suspect cognacy, well,
> then we could add quite an array of languages, as e.g.
> Tibetan /ming/, Swahili /jina/ (looks like Basque, so perhaps with
> j-mobile), Mongolian /ner-e/ (hey, here's the heteroclitic; I knew it had
> to be somewhere !), Khmer /chmua/ (remember the semitic forms !),  aso.
> Voilà, l'unità d'origine dell'linguaggio, how could I ever be so
> skeptical,
> silly me.

> St.G.

> PS: welcome to the beautiful land of Ruhlenistan

...and Shoshoni, Panamint, and Comanche /nahnia/; Lushootseed /da?/
(Proto-Salish *n > d)...

Let's make it even more explicit.  /n/ occurs in about 90% of the world's
languages.  About 99% of the world's languages have any kind of nasal (I'll
assume this is 100% in the calculations below).  Within these languages, /n/
accounts for, on a rough average, for 5-10% of the consonants occurring in
the words of any lexicon.  Nasals account for 10 to 20% of the consonants.
Let's assume that there are 500 unrelated language families and isolates in
the world.  That means that in 23 to 45 of these unrelated language families
the word for 'name' will have an /n/ (500 x (.05 or .1) x .9) and that in 50
to 100 of them it will have any nasal (500 x (.1 or .2)).  That's based on
pure chance.  It doesn't take much rocket science (or linguistic skill) to
find "compelling" evidence from around the world linking very disparate
language families based on chance correspondences.  That's especially true
if one finds W in the word for X in language families A, B, G, and R, then
finds Y in the word for Z in language families B, H, N, M, and R.  We now
have a "language family" consisting of A, B, G, H, N, M, and R!  The mass
comparativists would be most pleased.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
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Utah State University
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