
Basque and Georgian – are they related? (2015) - Thevet
http://blogs.bl.uk/european/2015/07/basque-and-georgian-are-they-related.html
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temp
> _Typological similarities certainly exist between Basque and Georgian._

Typological similarities are not considered to be all too important for
establishing a genetic relationship between languages. What's much more
relevant are word cognates among the most basic words (because there's less of
a tendency for languages to borrow those). And those have to be made with
phonological changes in mind, meaning you can't just compare today's words but
rather their forms at an earlier point in time.

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ar-jan
It's true that cognates in basic vocabulary are very important. But the beauty
of the comparative method is that you don't need the know earlier forms in
order to infer cognacy (although they can provide further evidence).

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tacomonstrous
Does anyone here know if recent advances in ML are relevant at all to this
kind of linguistic study? Are there attempts being made to adapt them? I would
imagine there's enough of a literary corpus in Basque to compare it with
various other existing languages, and maybe (based on no evidence at all,
admittedly, though the recent developments with AlphaGo seem encouraging,
albeit in a different direction) human researchers have missed some patterns
that would reveal themselves to a well-trained neural network.

~~~
upquark
It's just that the answer to the question posed in the headline is a definite
'no'. This type of silly inquiry into "is Azeri related to Sumerian", "is
Georgian related to Chinese" etc. is very common in that part of the world,
and is largely pseudo-scientific at its core.

As for ML methods, I know for a fact that modern Bayesian inference techniques
have been successfully applied in comparative linguistics and proto-language
reconstruction.

~~~
tacomonstrous
>It's just that the answer to the question posed in the headline is a definite
'no'. This type of silly inquiry into "is Azeri related to Sumerian", "is
Georgian related to Chinese" etc. is very common in that part of the world,
and is largely pseudo-scientific at its core.

I should have made this clearer, but the 'question' I had in mind was not
whether Basque is related to Georgian, but the more general one of whether
it's related to anything at all.

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TorKlingberg
Here is an old, but good, article explaining how often words in different
languages sound similar just by chance:
[http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm](http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm)

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amelius
> This looks a lot like a normal distribution, and in fact it is one, if np
> and n(1-p) are both over 5.

How can it be a normal distribution when the values on the "x"-axis cannot be
negative?

~~~
alderz
Because it is a mathematical model, and a reasonable one. When you have p( 211
to 220 ) = .0002 as in the article you don't need to consider negative values.
The power of mathematical models comes from their ability to abstract these
details.

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bbctol
My favorite (even more insane) extrapolation of this is the Dene-Caucasian
language family, which proposes a common origin for Basque, Caucasian
languages, Yeniseian languages, Chinese, Sumerian, and Navajo!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Caucasian_la...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Caucasian_languages)

~~~
Scriptor
Dene-Yeniseian is a bit smaller but much more widely accepted proposed family.
Pretty neat to see evidence of a link going back to the ice age.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_la...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_languages)

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zekevermillion
What about their music? I wonder if any common history, as Goergian music is
quite unique.

[https://stallman.org/RMSGeorgianMusicWUOG.ogg](https://stallman.org/RMSGeorgianMusicWUOG.ogg)

~~~
wrinkl3
As a Georgian (from the country of Georgia) I was really surprised to find out
that Stallman is into our folk stuff. He seems a bit too uh, cerebral for it.
I believe he even visited our country around 2010 just to research the music.

~~~
zekevermillion
Yeah, I was also really surprised. My comment was somewhat off-topic in this
thread, but I couldn't resist the excuse to put the link out on HN and see if
anyone else thought it was amazing.

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saosebastiao
IIRC, basque has a lot of grammatical parallels with both Hungarian and
Finnish, both of which also have no nearby related languages, and both of
which are nearly impossible to learn proficiently as a second language. I'd
love to read more about these languages' histories. Are there any introductory
reads on the subject?

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kmicklas
> both of which are nearly impossible to learn proficiently as a second
> language.

Citation needed.

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joking
Nor nori Nork
[https://nereagaite.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/nor_nori_nork...](https://nereagaite.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/nor_nori_nork_full_table.png?w=535&h=758)

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indubitably
What's impossible about that? Many languages have complicated inflection
patterns like that.

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zhengyi13
I'm not certain this is a "whoosh", but.. they _are_ "joking".

