Here are a few Hebrew words that sound (to me, at least) as if they could be linguistically related to their equivalents in a few Indo-European languages. Yes, of course I know: Hebrew is Semitic, and languages in different families have either coincidental similarities between words, or occasional similarities originating in loan words. (I’m choosing French and German along with English because I’m familiar with them. In these examples, I’m pretty sure that the three Indo-European words within a group are cognates.)
My questions are, one, are there lots more like these, and, two, does anybody knowledgeable find them to be in the least interesting? I could easily imagine whatever language was ancestral to Hebrew influencing or being influenced by a contemporary Indo-European language being spoken nearby at the time.
Transformations between “p” to “f” are common – compare for example “father” and (Latin) “pater.” And the “i” between the initial consonant and the “r” could easily have appeared or disappeared over time.
Not at all saying that you fit into this category, but in the past few centuries there have been, and continue to be a plethora of claims made about non-coincidental similarities between very unrelated languages, which are then taken to prove something [usually not widely accepted] about human history. This is one of the standard practices of pseudoarchaeologists and linguistic charlatans and crackpots, and feeds into their views about race or claims to specialness, adding yet more non-evidence to match the way they butcher archaeological and historical sources to back their claims.
Its a particular issue in constructing historical connections between languages based on limited word survivals or collected wordlists, as opposed to living languages.
Linguist Mark Rosenfelder has approached it as a mathematical probability issue. If you like maths you’ll like this.
We should all relish that even though languages are so varied that they do occasionally throw up these sorts of neat coincidences [and other delicious discoveries such as the name of a person you don’t like meaning shit in some Asian language].
Yeah. I’m studiously trying to avoid that category… I can take some comfort in not having resorted to similarities in words in Proto-whatever, and at the outside, I was only considering the possibility of loan-words between populations that might well have lived in someplace like Western Asia at some time.
I still need to read this, but I also want to check a book I read when taking a historical/comparative linguistics class that discusses the topic. There are only so many sounds humans make. Some are far more common. So you end up expecting overlap.
But by humble opinion is that these are all coincidences. It’s like the birthday problem. You compare enough words from different languages and you are bound to find some close matches just by chance.
Then there’s alef, bet, gimel, dalet vs. alpha, beta, gamma, delta. That’s not a coincidence at all, is it? (Greek borrowed some of the letter names from Hebrew, I’ve read.)
To seriously compare Semitic and Indo-European languages, you need to collect the set of related words, reconstruct the etymon, and see how it is distributed.
On my phone, so I can’t see the OP, but if a word (like the letter names) first appears in Greek and has no cognates in Indo-Iranian, it’s more likely to be a borrowing from Semitic. Do the Arabic words have cognates in Hausa? Aramaic? Akkadian?
Lots of words travelled back & forth between the two families between Greek, Persian, & Spanish on the I-E side. Lots of posited early borrowings in Semitic, too.
And that, folks, is why we amateurs need to relax and wait for the professionals to chime in – unless you happen to know proto-Indo-Iranian. But my original post was asking if anybody knowledgeable had an opinion – and of course as it transpires they have several.
As to the letter names, aren’t they loan words from whatever language the Phonecians used? They invented the alphabet from which the Greek and Hebrew alphabets were derived.
They both got their alphabets from the Phoenicians - though the Hebrews borrowed it before the Greeks did, and the Hebrews had the advantage that the Phoenicians spoke a language more related to Hebrew than Greek.
If you go back far enough, ultimately, mustn’t all languages be related by descent from a common ancestor? Unless you assume that the first humans were languageless, and spread over a broad area, and then different separated groups independently developed language before coming back into contact with each other, but that seems implausible on multiple levels.
Add six to your list. Sechs in German, sis (pronounced sees) in French and shesh in Hebrew. The words in your list do seem like the kinds of words that are unlikely to ttbe borrowed. There was a linguist, Joseph Greenberg, who spent part of his career trying to find enough of these comparisons to establish a single origin. Not many people were convinced. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Still, as @Chronos suggests, the idea of language was unlikely to have been independently invented, it does seem likely that there may have been an ur-language of which all others are descendants. And it is words like those in the OP that might be the most conserved.
Thanks for adding that one to my list! And for the reference to Joseph Greenberg!
I personally doubt very much that language was only invented once, any more than birdsong. Humans – probably not only us so-called sapiens but that’s a contentious subject – somehow went from grunting expressively to actually having words that were meaningful within a clan, and that could have happened many times; whether more than one of those sets of words evolved further into a language is of course impossible to know. How any sort of syntax could possibly have arisen is a great mystery to me, since even modern humans not exposed to some sort of language as children apparently can hardly learn it. OTOH, that’s controversial because the evidence comes from so-called feral children whose history is necessarily troubled.
In any event, an ur-language if there were one would probably be far, far older than any language family for which we have evidence.
But there are significant differences between the human brain and those of our closest primate relatives, and those differences mostly relate to the ability to use language. And those language-related brain structures are found in all Homo sapiens. The original development of language must have paralleled the evolution of those brain structures-- There wouldn’t have been selective pressure for those structures unless they were being used.
It’s hard to see how that could possibly result in completely independently-developed languages, unless you have something like a small group of pre-lingual children who are cut off from all adults but somehow survive, and then become the ancestors of an isolated population. Which I suppose might have happened occasionally (it’s hypothesized that something similar, though not as extreme, might account for the Pirahã language), but it seems farfetched to suppose that every language family has such an origin.
Yes, but it’s also possible that although all languages descend from one original language, enough time has gone by to change descendant languages enough that it’s no longer possible to accurately identify the connections between current languages. It’s pretty impressive that we’ve been able to identify the connections between Gaelic and Urdu, and they have a common ancestor only a few thousand years ago and we have writing for much of that time.
Speech is only one component of language: gesture is also in there. Since our near-relatives use gestural communication and vocal communication, though not (as far as I know) phonemically meaningful syllables, the capacity for a very rudimentary proto-language is pre-human.
Even if it did happen all at once, though—Proto-Indo-European is speculated to be from around 6,000 years ago, give or take. A human capable of making language seems to have arisen at least 94,000 years before that, meaning that the proto-language is probably so deep as to be irrecoverable.