Covered wrote:I've found that there are many studies about amerindian languages and oriental languages like japanese, chinese etc. and I found here a few words that are almost the same in tupi and japanese and have the same meaningTUPI: JAPanese acapê kabe amã, mana âme anhá an-ya arassy arashi caxi kashi curi kuri mi-mi mi tataca tataku sumarê sumire
Pangu wrote:Covered wrote:TUPI: JAPanese acapê kabe amã, mana âme anhá an-ya arassy arashi caxi kashi curi kuri mi-mi mi tataca tataku sumarê sumire
What do those words mean?
And even if you can accept the arbitrary phonetic matches, there's still the vague-ass semantics to deal with. Whatever these words mean, I highly doubt they mean the same thing aside from the most tenuous connections (things like "god" and "lightning", or "rain" and "earth"). A fun word-association game, but nothing else.linguoboy wrote:You can make a list like that for absolute any two languages you like. I've seen similar ones for every pairing from Latvian and Zuni to Quechua and Semitic.
Lazar Taxon wrote:Indeed, if two languages have a millennia-old genetic relationship, then their cognate words are likely to have undergone greatly divergent phonetic evolution. The words that seem near-identical are more likely the result of happenstance or, where applicable, recent borrowing.
Sumire refers to the violet plant 菫johnklepac wrote:sumire - never heard of it; I'm guessing it's an animal or plant considering that katakana come up first when I type it.
Unmundisto wrote:Those similiarities are impressive.
Unmundisto wrote:Look at the very impressive similarities that Proto-World advocates have pointed out, among he words in various different superfamilies of languages. Again, the main argument against the Proto-World theory is that words are sure to always diverge to unrecognizability.
linguoboy wrote:Unmundisto wrote:Those similiarities are impressive.
No they aren't.
Unmundisto wrote:Look at the very impressive similarities that Proto-World advocates have pointed out, among the words in various different superfamilies of languages. Again, the main argument against the Proto-World theory is that words are sure to always diverge to unrecognizability.
No, the main argument against Proto-World is that, with enough latitude in your comparison criteria, you can come up with "impressive" lists for any given pair of languages, regardless of their relatedness. See the link I posted above for more details (and a mathematical proof).
Unmundisto wrote:Sure (regarding the Proto-World hypothesis), among all the words in those superfamilies, maybe there are some that, just by chance, show a close match in meaning and sound, among superfamilies. So, the argument goes, if you "cherry-pick", among those vast vocabularies, you can find convincing-looking matches, even if they're just by chance. That's where statistics could be helpful. But the OP wasn't talking about Proto-World, but only about Native-American/Asian similiarities.
linguoboy wrote:Unmundisto wrote:Sure (regarding the Proto-World hypothesis), among all the words in those superfamilies, maybe there are some that, just by chance, show a close match in meaning and sound, among superfamilies. So, the argument goes, if you "cherry-pick", among those vast vocabularies, you can find convincing-looking matches, even if they're just by chance. That's where statistics could be helpful. But the OP wasn't talking about Proto-World, but only about Native-American/Asian similiarities.
And? The methodological flaws are the same in either case. The OP posted NINE WORDS. How many words of Tupi do you think there are? How many words of Japanese?
"Impressive" is a subjective term. And subjectively, I think anyone who would even consider applying it to short, dubious list like this is very easily impressed.
Unmundisto wrote:As for the number of words, the OP was comparing two languages, not language superfamilies, and so there are fewer words.
Unmundisto wrote:And, if the number of words in those two langauges are so great that nine _close_ matches aren't significant
Unmundisto wrote:It doesn't really matter, because there is other evidence that at least most Native American peoples originated in Asia.
Unmundisto wrote:Anyway, I'm not claiming that the Japanese/Tupi word-similarities prove that the words in question are common-ancestor survivals. But I'm saying that it isn't a terribly important issue either.
Unmundisto wrote:No, I haven't checked the OP's information. As I said, one of your objections is that such checking would need to be done, to verify the information, and I don't deny that. But in the initial posting, the word-similarities are remarkable.
Unmundisto wrote:"Impressive" is a subjective term. And subjectively, I think anyone who would even consider applying it to short, dubious list like this is very easily impressed.
One thing I like about Unilang is its absence of flamewarrior behavior; well almost. Try to limit yourself to the topic, as opposed to exprssion of your opinions of those with whom you disagree.
Unmundisto wrote:As I said, the words in those listed pairs tend to be very remarkably similar, regardless of whether they prove anything. You're confusing "impressive" with "conclusive".
linguoboy wrote:To demonstrate what I mean, here's a list for Korean and English that I came up with in about five minutes:
Korean - English
du - two
bori - barley
ddong - dung
ga - go
ye - yes
mwŏt - what
manhi - many
ŏmma - momma
purŏ - blue
an - in
gol - gully
wae - why
Are you impressed yet, Unmudisto? If not, I can take another five minutes and add some more.
Unmundisto wrote:Quite. You found those yourself in 5 minutes?
Unmundisto wrote:I wonder how many words Korean has borrowed from English, though, yes, I realize that most of your words aren't the sort that are usually borrowed.
Unmundisto wrote:I make no claim to be a linguist, but I've heard that the Krean has sometimes been called Altaic, and that the Altaic and IE families have been claimed to be related.
Unmundisto wrote:So your conicidence-list would be more _impressive_ if it didn't list similiarities between languages in families already seriously claimed, by reputable authorities, to be related and to have improbably much in common.
linguoboy wrote:I considered slipping a couple of these into my list just to keep you on your toes, but in the end I kept it to native vocabulary (except for gully, which is a mediaeval Romance loan).
Unmundisto wrote:I make no claim to be a linguist, but I've heard that the Krean has sometimes been called Altaic, and that the Altaic and IE families have been claimed to be related.
At some point, everything has been claimed to be related to everything else (and the more of an isolate a language is, the more attempts have been made to connect it to something else--just look at Basque and Japanese). So this really means nothing.
Unmundisto wrote:So your conicidence-list would be more _impressive_ if it didn't list similiarities between languages in families already seriously claimed, by reputable authorities, to be related and to have improbably much in common.
Can you name any of these "reputable authorities"?
(I'm also curious to hear how you go about evaluating their reputations given that you're no linguist.)
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