[Histling-l] earliest attestation of a 'cognate set'?

[Pekka Sammallahti]

Hi all,


Professor Johannes Schefferus of Uppsala University in Sweden published a comprehensive description of the Saami people in 1674 called Lapponia. He states that Saami and Finnish are related languages and adds a list of Saami-Finnish word pairs which in his view confirms the relation. He refers to an earlier vocabulary by Zacharias Plantinus as the original source of the idea.


Pekka Sammallahti

professor emeritus of Saami language and culture

University of Oulu, Finland

________________________________
From: histling-l <histling-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu> on behalf of Harold Koch <Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au>
Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2019 9:34:06 AM
To: Claire Bowern; Histling-l at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Histling-l] earliest attestation of a 'cognate set'?


Hi Claire et al

Probably not the earliest but worth noting anyway.



1 Reminder of William Dawes’ 1791 short comparative word list of inland vs coastal dialects of the Sydney language:, showing -nd- : -n- correspondence.

[you]    ngyindi   ngyini

Knee    bundung  bunung

Navel   munduru  munuru

Foot     mandaowi   manaowi

See https://www.williamdawes.org/ms/msview.php?image-id=book-b-page-43

And discussion in Wilkins, David. & David Nash (2008). The European 'discovery' of a multilingual Australia: The linguistic and ethnographic successes of a failed expedition. In William B. McGregor (Ed.), Encountering Aboriginal languages: Studies in the history of Australian linguistics (pp. 485-507). Canberra: Australian National University.



2 A later but better example from this part of the world is:

Hale, Horatio (1968)[1846]. Ethnography and philology: Vol. 6 of United States exploring expedition during the years 1838-1842 under the command of Charles Wilkes. Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press. [first edition Lea and Blanchard 1846]. Section “Polynesian grammar: a comparative grammar of the Polynesian dialects.”

Hale compares 10 languages. Here are some quotes:

p. 232: “The following table will show the number of consonantal elements in each dialect, and the permutations which they undergo in passing from one to another.” [table of 10 consonants correspondences in 10 lects]

“Besides the regular permutations above-noted, there are others which occasionally take place between different dialects.”

p. 233: “The vowels undergo but few changes, and those chiefly in consequence of the permutations of the consonants.”

p. 234 “The following examples will show the changes which words undergo in passing from dialect to another.” [table p. 235 of 17 cognate sets—no glosses given]



From: histling-l [mailto:histling-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Claire Bowern
Sent: Tuesday, 23 April 2019 8:06 AM
To: Histling-l at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: [Histling-l] earliest attestation of a 'cognate set'?



Dear list members,

I'm writing an article about historical databases and I'm trying to trace the earliest example of a correspondence set (or some other equivalent organization of data). Rask has comparisons, of course, and earlier the typological/lexical comparisons of Gesner and contemporaries. Dante makes comparisons between Latin and contemporary vernaculars but I'm not sure we could call those correspondence sets. Are there similar correspondences in the Arabic or Turkic grammatical traditions? Or other early authors who talk about systematic correspondences or organize data in a way that we might associate with cognate or comparison sets?

Thanks in advance for your help,

Claire



--



Claire Bowern

Professor, Director of Graduate Studies

Chair: Yale Women Faculty Forum (wff.yale.edu<http://wff.yale.edu>)

Department of Linguistics

New Haven, CT  06511


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