From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Mon Jun 27 2005 - 17:03:23 CDT
On 27/06/2005 19:47, Michael Everson wrote:
> At 18:17 +0000 2005-06-27, Andreas Prilop wrote:
>
>> Romany is spoken in Europe and hence may be regarded as a European
>> language.
>
>
> It's imported.
So is Hungarian. The question is, when was it imported? What is the
cut-off date for imports to be considered?
>
>> (What is a European language, anyway? Afrikaans? Esperanto?)
>
>
> It is not easy to "define" things like this. I have attempted at
> http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/
Indeed, and this is a good list. (I helped you with it, years ago.) And
it includes "Romani", as it should.
But it lists not just the six languages you mentioned before ("Finnish,
Estonian, Sami, Hungarian, Basque, and Etruscan" - actually Etruscan is
not listed, for the good reason that it has been extinct for 2000 years)
but about 90 European languages which are not in the Indo-European
family - in fact more in number than the Indo-European languages. This
excludes recent imports, e.g. roughly 19th century and later, but does
include the 17th century import Kalmyk. But many of the languages
included, but not in your list of six, are not imports at all but are
languages of indigenous peoples who have not migrated for thousands of
years.
The Roma arrived in Europe long before the Kalmyk did, some certainly by
the 13th century, bringing with them their probably Sanskrit-derived
language.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/ -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.8.2/29 - Release Date: 27/06/2005
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