Talk:Pumpokol language

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It seems very strange that the only content here talks about similarities in vocab to Germanic. There is no such content in the Russian language wikipedia (and you'd expect them to know).

So far as I can tell, there's no citation for the claim of similarity to Germanic. (The citations to Werner and to Pallas are merely the sources for the Pumpokol words AFAICT.) Is the table an extract from a longer list? What/where?

And frankly all of the comparisons to Germanic are spurious:

papa/abba for father and mama/amma for mother are pretty much universal in every language: it's the sound of babies babbling. Linguist Roman Jakobsen explained that a long time ago https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/the-mamas-the-papas-in-babies-babbling/.

The other examples really aren't very close in sound or in meaning or neither. Furthermore there's 'cherry picking' of which Germanic language to get the sound from: why OE for some, OHG for others? 'Hay' = mountain from OE 'high' won't work in German 'hoch': the -gh in English spelling is a leftover from how the word used to be pronounced. It's only been pronounced 'hi' in English in recent times.

If you're going to justify cognates between two languages (or language families), you need to apply the philological 'comparative method' Comparative_method, to show a consistent pattern of sound changes. And for that you need a substantial number of examples. And you need a rationale for when in history the words were transmitted, not scattergun OE, OHG, Icelandic, etc. Oh, and there's Italian thrown in: the archetypal language that is not remotely Germanic. Also good would be archaeological evidence, and evidence of transmission of other cultural artefacts such as pottery or weaving. And these days DNA evidence would help.

It's very easy for non-linguists to hear sound-alikes between unrelated languages, and to invent some vague meaning-alike. For that reason, linguists are meticulous with the Comparative Method before drawing conclusions about words travelling between languages.

Northern Siberia is a long way from anywhere that speaks Germanic (or that spoke Germanic in the past 1500 years). How did the words travel?

AntC2 (talk) 11:49, 1 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]