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To: Claud
The language lurking in the background here is a CREOLE.

The way you get a creole is you start with two or more groups who live in the same environment and who allow their children to play together.

The kids will create a common tongue for future generations ~ at the same time they will make use of parts of words, or restructure entire sentences or idiomatic expressions into new single words.

What you need to do in comparing numbers is figure out if any 2 numbers of equal/comparable value have some of the same sound values. That's because today's language is a rather evolved creole based on words coming from a multiplicity of origins.

I went through your lists and the same numbers share a vowel or a consonant, or a blend.

English numbers rose out of a creole of the German languages of the Angles, those of the Saxons, the French, the Gallo Speakers, and some other unknown source (but probably not any of the Gaellic words for numbers). Today's English number set has barely anything at all in common with the standard German number set ~ outside of sharing a consonant or vowel. We are talking about two modern languages with just about the same amount of time separation you'd find between the particular "Norwegian" involved in the Wallum Olem and today's Algonquin language(s).

About two months ago I went through a standard number set used by the largest Indian tribe in El Salvador and compared it to Japanese.

This was simply to see if the locals down there had developed a Creole (outside of Spanish) to accommodate possible earlier migrations by Japanese crossing the Pacific. (This was just to see if there was modern evidence around of the Japanese who left behind the burial grounds recently discovered in Costa Rica). Lo and behold the modern Indian Creole and modern Japanese have numbers with at least a vowel or consonant in common AND, the Salvadoran creole language shows a uniform vowel shift. (Vowel shifts can happen pretty fast ~ e.g. English shifted in the 1600s from the European standard to the current English standard ~ which has created all sorts of problems for young American chilluns' learning modern European languages ~ they do, of course, say EVERYTHING wrong on the Continent).

74 posted on 03/07/2011 1:39:25 PM PST by muawiyah (Make America Safe For Americans)
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To: muawiyah
"(This was just to see if there was modern evidence around of the Japanese who left behind the burial grounds recently discovered in Costa Rica). "

Kindly link me to this article. Thanks

75 posted on 03/07/2011 2:20:53 PM PST by blam
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To: muawiyah

The creole hypothesis I can’t endorse. Have you ever seen a map of how far-flung the Algonquian languages were in North America?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquian_languages

All of these languages started to diverge from each other about 3000 B.C.—according to glottochronology and other estimates. Your hypothetical creole would have had to have been in place by that time to have created the extensive divergence between the languages we see today.

Give me a mechanism for this creolization that makes sense in this time frame. Show me with real-life examples how it happened.

Ironically, the process you are describing actually did happen once historically—when Pidgin Delaware (it never really became a creole) was formed with a largely Lenape vocabulary but with some deference to Germanic (Swedish, Dutch, English) grammar.

But not Algonquian itself, no.


78 posted on 03/07/2011 2:37:02 PM PST by Claud
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