Piotr Gasiorowski Wrote:
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> DDeden Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Piotr, thanks for checking.
> > I can't respond at the moment, I'm mostly
> not
> > disagreeing with what you said.
> >
> > This might be of interest [...]:
>
> I know Pagel and Atkinson's article; my own
> research is actually into closely related matters.
> What they have determined using language corpora
> and basic vocabulary lists for numerous
> Indo-European langauges is that words referring to
> frequently used meanings are particularly likely
> to survive for millennia before they suffer
> lexical replacement. Still, to find out related
> words in distantly related languages you need the
> standard methods of historical linguistics.
> Related words don't necessarily look similar, and
> similar words are not necessarily related. There
> is for example an indigenous Australian language,
> called Mbabaram, in which the word for 'dog' is
> "dog". It has zilch to do with the English word.
> It's just accidentally similar (actually, it
> developed from an earlier *gudaga via a series of
> regular sound changes, involving the loss of the
> first and last syllables). Such spurious matches
> are far more common than most people imagine, so
> if you do comparison in an insufficiently
> disciplined way, you are almost sure to find some
> phantom resemblances which may look intriguing but
> don't prove a thing. On the other hand, genuinely
> related words may be as different from one another
> as Latin "duo" is from Armenian "erku", so you are
> likely to miss REAL cognates if you just scan
> word-lists looking for similarities.


Yes, very interesting, words with dissimilar roots can appear to be derived from the same roots.
But then, the opposite occurs as well. For example, 2 in Italian (IIRC) is 'dua', and 2 in Indonesian is 'dua', and I've read that they did not derive from the same root, but I that they did.

I asked about ak- aht- ax- in relation to hammering or chopping, as I think it was conjoined with watr to make akwa (dugout canoe, later other related words). I think 'umiak', 'kayak' (names for ribbed skin boats), 'Ottawa' derived partly from the Altaic (Ket) word for watercraft, and I think similar derived words would be found in numerous languages not closely related. A couple of AE words for watercraft include these sounds, and I'm wondering if akwa referred only to boats derived from dugouts or if the name for reed raft boats was also derived from it, since they were constructed entirely differently.

Your PIE etc. language site is great, I enjoyed reading it.
DDeden