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Archiver > GEN-ANCIENT > 2004-04 > 1082314219
From: "~Ford~" <>
Subject: Re: [Gen-Ancient] Georgia & the Caucasus - Garden of Eden? [Was: Edessa, Judea, and Armenia]
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2004 13:56:39 -0500
References: <004701c42545$a924d130$0500a8c0@SAINTNINO>
----- Original Message -----
From: "Carolyn Clark Campbell" <>
To: <>
Sent: Sunday, 18 April, 2004 08:04
Subject: RE: [Gen-Ancient] Georgia & the Caucasus - Garden of Eden? [Was:
Edessa, Judea, and Armenia]
> Thank you, Francisco.
>
> My only "linguistic training" if you would call it that, is having
> studied Latin, French, Korean and now Georgian (still a beginner). I
> haven't studied Latin since 10th grade, so it's rather rusty. Although
> Latin, Korean, and Georgian are presumably unrelated, it is interesting
> to see that they all have noun case endings (nominative, genitive,
> dative, etc.) that we don't have in English and French. Georgian and
> Korean have no gender, even for pronouns. (Of course there are nouns
> which denominate gender such as woman, daughter (female-child), etc.,
> but in ordinary language they are used only if one wants to
> intentionally make a gender distinction -- otherwise person, child, etc.
> are the normal linguistic uses.
>
This kind of grammatical paradigm is called inflection, (it includes
declensions and conjugations). There are a limited number of possibilities
for such paradigms. I know of only three (3): Inflected, agglutanative,
and tonal. So it is not surprising that unrelated languages should share
the same structure. Merely coincidence. Indo-European languages are
inflected. So are Semitic languages, and Japanese.
> One extra point: there are a few indo-european
> markings which are quite well known and which appear
> in all i.-e. languages; they provide a kind of litmus
> test:
>
The more comonly used is a word, the more likely it is to retain something
like it's original form, i.e. pronunciation, irregularity of inflection,
etc.
Ford
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