🚀 go-pugleaf

deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff) wrote:

>>>>> ... Why is Mr. Chong starting with
>>>>>modern forms anyway?  If he really wants to prove a relationship, why
>>>>>doesn't he compare Sumerian to reconstructed Proto-Finno-Ugric and
>>>>>Proto-Altaic?

Not a bad point. I recently got a hold of Roy Andrew Miller's "Japanese 
and the Other Altaic languages" and noted down several Proto-Altaic 
words. Compared with Sumerian and Magyar and Finnish, and HEY! quite a 
few sound thought-provoking to say the least...

However, I'm seem to have run a problem with "Proto-Finno-Ugric". I have 
read that: (and I quote...)

1) The Finno Ugric "ancient language" never existed. Linguists creating 
something similar by hypothetical means, came to this result.

The well-known Hungarian linguist - Hajdu - (42) tells us about this 
hypothetical "ancient idiom";

   "as there are no texts in basical Finno-Ugric idiom - ... the     
    vocabulary of this language and its grammatical structure in its 
    entirety and its details remains unknown. So the only thing we can do
    is to try to reconstruct a Hypothetical Finno-Ugric Basical Idiom."

2) The different peoples, called "finno-ugric" have no common history.

3) During the last century the leading men controlling Hungarian cultural 
problems were Austrians and they were naturally enemies of Hungarian 
national cultural interests. So the Hungarian language was declared to 
belong into the Finno-Ugric linguistic group, inspite of Hungarian 
protests. The comparison of the Hungarian with any languages of "Southern 
Origin" was forbidden, thus paralyizing Hungarian researches for more 
than 100 years.

   Now - in 1973 - the actual government of Hungary also forbids the 
investigations of the Sumerian-Hungarian identities. (1)

>[snip]
>>>>Working from reconstructions is second-generation
>>>>research -- one step further removed from the raw data, with all the
>>>>ambiguities, errors, and occasional prejudices that are accidentally
>>>>embedded in the reconstruction. It is akin to what the statisticians
>>>>call "data-mining" -- very useful, if you are very careful.

True

>>>
>>>	Yes, but working in ignorance of data that, in some cases,
>>>represent a lifetime of painstaking reconstruction just strikes me as
>>>foolhardy.  By all means, double check the data sets to see if your
>>>predecessors knew what they were talking about, by why rediscover Grimm's
>>>Law?

But true once more...

>>
>>I don't suggest reinventing the wheel. Trusting and extending previous
>>effort is after all the hallmark of science, isn't it. But I thought
>>(correct me if I was wrong) you were asserting that because the
>>reconstructions exist, using modern languages was wrong. That's pretty
>>much like appealing to Aristotle.
>
>Hardly.  Ural-Altaic reconstruction is not that old a field.  Starting
>work on it without any reference to recent work is like deciding, today,
>to build a heavier-than-air flying craft without reading Bertoulli or his
>succeesors.  It's those who dispense with modern comparative
>reconstruction techniques in favour of intuitive comparison who are
>appealing, if not to Aristotle, to Enlightenment philologists and their
>search for the language of Adam.
>
>>It is not inconceivable that modern languages could shed some light on
>>mr Chong's attempt to show a relationship between Sumerian and
>>Altaic... imagine, if you will, that there are some cognates between
>>Sumerian and Mongolian, and some other cognates between Sumerian and
>>Manchu, but that Manchu and Mongolian didn't share these -- or at
>>least didn't share enough of them for the words to have turned up in a
>>reconstruction of proto-Altaic. Admittedly this is a somewhat
>>far-fetched notion, yet mr Chong ought to be allowed to pursue it in
>>the absence of flamage.

The problem for me is that, I can't get a hold of many proto-Uralic or 
Proto-Altaic sources directly since the field of Ural-Altaic linguistics 
is treated with such apathy. (At least in MHO). Thus I'm left with 
obtaining lexicons of modern languages (I've found Finnish, Estonian, 
Magyar, Japanese, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Tatar and Uzbek ones) and only 
some Sumerian sources. The problem also is that many of the Sumerian 
sources I can find are written by Deimel (ergo German which I can't 
understand) so I'm restricted by a linguistic barrier (for now)...

However, what similarities I can find between modern Ural-Altaic 
languages and Sumerian are notable and cannot be easily ignored. In fact, 
I found some Chinese words and IE words that sounded similar to Sumerian 
and those can either be attributed to pure fluke or a possible 
linguistic/cultural exchange between Sumerian and Chinese and/or IE 
peoples. However, that is something of which I am unsure about and I 
won't say anything further about IE & Chinese vs. Sumerian.

>I never flamed Mr. Chong or any other contributors to this thread.  I
>merely suggested that the methodology apparently underlying this attempt
>was deeply flawed and seemed to ignore much previous work.  If Mr. Chong

Sorry :-( -> :-D

>has posted something to the effect of "I'm familiar with the work of the
>following linguists, but I think it falls short" or if he had presented
>more proof than a mere word-list I would have reacted much differently 

That's arrogance...

NEway...

I have found some Proto-Altaic words that sound similar to Sumerian and 
Uralic words and maybe I'll send you the list when I'm done.

Cheers,

Peter Chong

(1) Badiny, Francisco Jos, "The Sumerian Wonder". Buenos Aires: School   
      for Oriental Studies of the University of Salvador, 1974.