Pat and Doug, (01)
This topic touches on issues related to ontology, but it is in danger
of getting as far off topic as the thread on memes. In any case,
I'll add a few more points. (02)
PC
> Maybe 'bark' of a tree is primitive because of its texture
> and uses, (03)
A word that happens to be common to many languages need not
be "primitive". But if it happens to be widely used, it might
be sufficiently common that it retains its phonological shape. (04)
However, it is also possible that some methods for using of birch bark
along with the word were "borrowed" across different language groups. (05)
Words that were borrowed thousands of years ago have become so deeply
integrated into the language that it is hard to distinguish them from
"native" words that were inherited from a common language. (06)
DF
> Finnish word for mother ("äiti") was totally unrelated
> to "mom", which i thought was universal. (07)
This raises another issue: Some word forms might be common just because
of the way infants learn language. Infants begin to babble at a time
when they are still breast feeding. The consonant /m/ and the vowel
/a/ are two of the easiest sounds for an infant to make. Therefore,
the sound /ma/ or /mama/ is likely to occur very early -- and the
mother will consider it the child's first word. (08)
Therefore, the fact that /ma/ happens to be the word for mother in
Chinese and it is the first syllable of words for mother in the
IndoEuropean languages is not strong evidence that the languages
are related. (09)
DF
> I > mina (a "me" cognate") (010)
Linguists who look for relationships among larger language group
consider the IndoEuropean language family to be related to the
Uralic family (which includes Finnish, Estonian, Sami (Lappland),
Hungarian, and languages scattered across Siberia, such as Samoyed).
One piece of evidence are correspondences between the personal
pronouns in the two language families. (011)
For a table of possible cognates, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Uralic_languages (012)
By the way, the Samoyedi do not use that term. That is the Russian
name for them, and it means "cannibal". The Russian 'sam'is
cognate with English 'same', and 'yed' is cognate with 'eat'. (013)
John (014)
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