Germanic and Uralo-Altaic Lexicon
PROF. DR. Alfred Toth |
Foreword |
We all know that German and English
are Indo-European languages. At one time, before it was renamed, the
Indo-European was even called Indo-Germanic in the European
scientific lingo. In Germany, it still remains Indo-Germanic. At the
same time even a casual observer slightly familiar with Türkic and
German or English runs into words that are phonetically and
semantically clearly related, like Earth/Erde Türk. "yer", -er/Herr
Türk. "er", etc.; even the very name Germani has
a semantically suitable and positive Türkic equivalent At the same time we hear that while
Finno-Ugrian (Uralic) borrowed heavily from the Indo-European
(Mallory and Co), and that the reverse is not true, and Indo-European does not
have a matching number of Uralic borrowings. The clear similarities
seem to be a totally unexplored field, since the scholar A.Toth could
only cite two names, and only one of them published, in addition to
his own opinion, clearly expressed, and supported, at least in
respect to Uralic group, in his cited here work. The absence of
substantial research may be the nourishment that feeds both
misconceptions and misrepresentations. I would love to cite an
authoritive source that examined Grmanic Swadesh List and published
results. For raw numbers, and program for Swadesh multilateral
comparison go to
http://brettkessler.com/McDonald/Indo-Uralic/index.html . The
numbers that that program suggests seems to agree with educated guess
valuations offered by von den Velden, T.Vennemann, and A.Toth. Assuming that the above scholars know what they are talking about, and know the implications of their assertions, Germanic languages are substrate languages, with IE lexicon adopted and absorbed by non-IE speakers, with distortions and particularities inherent to their mother-tongue, as was crisply and loudly asserted in the past. The first consequence of this assertion is that the linguistic tree concept does not apply, which wrecks centuries of careful assembly and wide publication of genealogical trees. The second consequence is that Germanic languages need to be re-classified. and the third consequence is that if Germanic languages with their 25% of IE lexicon and non-IE grammar (they are not inflectional) should be classified as non-IE languages, how it impacts languages like Ossetic, with its 20% IE lexicon and non-IE morphology (Ossetic has agglutinative morphology)? |
Hungaro-Raetica II |
5 According to a guess of von den Velden (1912), about 80% of the German vocabulary is non-Germanic, mostly even non-Indo-European. During my work on EDH (Toth 2007), I came to the conclusion, that the Non-IE component in German is about 75% (cf. EDH-4). In a personal communication, Professor Theo Vennemann (University of Munich) wrote me on 09th of July that he believes that the Non-IE component in German is also 75%. But while Vennemann tries to trace back the non-IE component of German basically to Basque and Semitic languages, I try to show the Sumerian and Semitic components (cf. EDH-4, Brunner 1969). I purposely speak here about German and not about "Germanic", and this on two reasons: First, English, the other Germanic language researched here, has a huge amount of borrowings from French while German doesn't, and second, I do not consider in this article other languages than German and English, even such a task would without doubt be illuminating. I am following here the observation of von den Velden who wrote "dass die germanischen Sprachen vieles aus den uralaltaischen ubernommen haben... . Uberall finden wir dunkle Worte, die ihre Aufklarung meist in den uralaltaischen Sprachen finden, ja ich kann getrost behaupten, dass Wortstamme, die in mehreren uraltaltaischen Sprachen vorkommen, fast mit Sicherheit sich auch in den germanischen Sprachen finden lassen" (that the Germanic languages have taken many words from the Ural-Altaic ones .... Everywhere, we find dark (dubious) words that find their explication in the Ural-Altaic languages. I can even assert safely that word-stems that show up in several Ural-Altaic languages, can be found almost definitely in the Germanic languages, too) (von den Velden 1919/20, p. 791). Bibliography Von den Velden, Friedrich, Über Ursprung und Herkunft der indogermanischen Sprachen und anarische Sprachreste in Westeuropa. Bonn 1912 Von den Velden, Friedrich, Der Ursprung der nichtgemein-indogermanischen Bestandteile der germanischen Sprachen. In: Anthropos 14/15, 1919/20, pp. 788-792 |