Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: Lonesome in Massachussets
"Finnish and Hungarian are members of the non-IE Finno-Ugric language group, which has an affinity to Turk and other non-IE languages of Western Asia."

Are these related to Basque?

52 posted on 11/27/2003 5:45:52 AM PST by blam
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 51 | View Replies ]


To: blam
Are [Turk, Finnish and Hungarian] related to Basque?

I am not a linguist, but I think not. I think Basque is sui generis or whatever the Basque phrase for one-of-a-kind is.

53 posted on 11/27/2003 5:53:23 AM PST by Lonesome in Massachussets (Uday and Qusay and Idi-ay are ead-day)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 52 | View Replies ]

To: blam; Lonesome in Massachussets
"Finnish and Hungarian are members of the non-IE Finno-Ugric language group, which has an affinity to Turk and other non-IE languages of Western Asia."

Are these related to Basque?

The majority linguistic opinion on Basque is indeed that it is sui generis, but some, such as Merritt Ruhlen in his book The Origin of Language, posit a relationship between Basque and languages as disparate as Georgian (Kartvelian), Ket (an obscure, nearly extinct language belonging to a "Yeniseian" language group, because its speakers live along the Yenisei river in Central Siberia), Navajo, and Chinese! (Cool, hunh?)

By the way, Ruhlen was a student of the late Joseph H. Greenberg, IMHO one of the greatest linguists of the 20th century, if not of all time, who posited a larger "super-family" of language families consisting of Indo-European, Finno-Ugric (Uralic), Altaic, and other more obscure languages, in his book "Indo-European and its Closest Relatives" published by Stanford a few years ago. Greenberg actually wasn't the first to propose a genetic link between Indo-European and Finno-Ugric, and the similarities between the Finno-Ugric (Uralic) and Altaic (E.g., TURKISH) language families are so prominent that they were noticed back in the 19th Century and led linguists to posit a "Ural-Altaic" group of languages.

77 posted on 12/01/2003 3:38:07 PM PST by Map Kernow ("In terra pax in hominibus bonae voluntatis")
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 52 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson