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From: ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Esperanto and the origins of some in
Message-ID: <25@spar.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 11-Jan-85 03:48:00 EST
Article-I.D.: spar.25
Posted: Fri Jan 11 03:48:00 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 13-Jan-85 06:57:36 EST
References: <1129@druny.UUCP> <10500037@uiucdcsb.UUCP>
Reply-To: ellis@max.UUCP (Michael Ellis)
Organization: Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, CA
Lines: 31

From Judy Grass:
>I looked over the list and saw very little that looked Slavic to me...
>
>... I once had a friend
>(a linguist, who should have known better) try to demonstrate that
>Russian was related to Latin on the basis of some similar vocabulary
>between Italian and Russian.  I am still not sure she could have
>been serious.  
>

Indeed, esperanto appears to have an extremely strong bias towards the
Romance languages, with occasional Teutonic stems. Slavic, Semitic,
Sino-Tibetan and Japanese seem to be totally unrepresented.

As to the relationship between Latin and Russian, that has been verified
beyond any shadow of doubt for perhaps a hundred years or more. Consult
any elementary text on comparative philology. Latin and Russian derive
from dialects of a postulated proto-indo-european language.

The similarity goes deeper than just collections of `core' vocabulary, such
as words for close relatives, basic verbs, numerals, pronouns, and so forth.
These are revealing since they are the least likely to be replaced by
loan-words, as they are acquired at such an early age.

What I find most striking is the similarity in the inflections, particularly
in nouns/pronouns. Check out grammars for Lithuanian (which allied to, yet
more archaic than, the Slavic family), ancient Greek (similar, but more
archaic than, Latin) and Sanskrit someday. I bet you'd find many old
acquaintances lurking about..

-michael