[Histling-l] earliest attestation of a 'cognate set'?
Vit Bubenik
vbubenik at mun.ca
Wed Apr 24 11:14:37 EDT 2019
Hi Claire,
The earliest attestation of a cognate set in the Afro-Asiatic phylum can be found in three risaalas (‘letters’) by Yehudah ibn Quraysh, a rabbi of the late 10/11th c. from Tahert (Tiaret in Algeria), who compared Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic (and some Berber) and noticed correct correspondences among them.
Another early ‘comparatist’ was Zigmund Gelenius who established a set of 292 corresponding words (in Greek, Latin, Germanic and Slavic (published in 1573 in Basel): Lexicon symphonum, quo quattuor linguarum Europae familiarum, graecae scilicet, latinae, germanicae et slavonicae concordia consonantiaque indicatur. (Basic information: V. Flajshans, Pisemnictvi ceske, Prague, 1901:317).
Vit
From: histling-l [mailto:histling-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Claire Bowern
Sent: Monday, April 22, 2019 7:36 PM
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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