Basque and other relationships

[anthony.appleyard at umist.ac.uk]

  Leonel Hermida <leonelhermida at netc.pt> wrote:
>  I apologize for being off-topic, but can't fail to draw attention
> to the following very basic Basque words which I'm sure all share the
> same (pre-historic and exceedingly primitive) root ...

EME=female
AMA=mother
EMAKUME=woman
EMAZTE= woman, wife
UME=child
SEME=son

This sort of thing about Basque has been discussed to exhaustion on
INDO-EUROPEAN and NOSTRATIC email groups.
Words for females with M in are not free from the suspicion of
originating with the meaning "mother" or "breast" and being
independently imitated ultimately from the same automatic pre-speech
suckling noises that babies make. Baby words are likely to get into
adult speech as stopgaps when the previous adult words become unusable
because of homophony: compare English "nanny" for "child's nurse" to
distinguish from "hospital nurse".

The Basque speakers have been ruled by Indo-European speakers for so
long that many loanwords are likely to have got in, even for family
relationships. Compare: English is Germanic, but "uncle" comes from
Latin "avunculus".

> ... the influence of Mongolian on at least one Uralic language, namely
> Hungarian: it comes to the mind the word *bátor* meaning *brave* which
> apart from being  a fairly common word in Hungarian enters in the very
> name of the capital city of Mongolia (Ulaan Baator, I think).

The Mongols under Batu Khan (he was Genghis's son, I think) overran
Hungary. It is no wonder a stray loanword got across. The word also got
into Hindi as "bahadur".