Language families

[Anthony Appleyard]

  Frances Karttunen <karttu at nantucket.net> wrote;-
> There is no direct "influence from Mongolia" on Finnish.  There has been
> some contact between Hungarian and Turkic languages in relatively recent
> history.

There is the inevitable quota of accidental resemblances between unrelated
languages, e.g. Gaelic "beag" = Mongolian "baga" = "small", and Greek "theos"
= Nahuatl "teotl" = "god".

Someone compared modern English with modern Hindi (ignoring recent loanwords).
Of the look-alike words that he found, more were accidental resemblances than
genuine cognates. Languages gradually drift away from each other.

Someone mentioned Basque. My own ideas about Basque are:-
  (1) It might have been very distantly related to other non-IE languages
whose speakers came in up the west end of the Mediterranean: Iberian, Ivernian
(an old Irish language), Pictish. But all those languages perished unrecorded.
  (2) Basque may have undergone a drastic remake in latish prehistoric times,
destroying any remaining evidence for old relationships.

  TruBluPooh at aol.com wrote:-
> The fact that some basic Basque words seem to be derived from even simpler
> concepts i.e. aizkora (axe) sharing the same root as the word aitz (rock)
> may mean that Basque is an extremely old language.

But what is an "old language"? Nearly all languages have very old roots.

"aizkora" being an apparent compound may mean merely that a previous simple
word for "axe" because unusable because of homophony due to phonetic change.