# Old Japanese/Old Icelandic?



## tewlwolow

I was skimming through the Wiki page about Okinawan language when I came across a peculiar phrase: "_(Classical Japanese: 居りwori, to be; to exist)_". It ringed a bell in my head, since in Old Icelandic (and Modern Icelandic and Nynorsk as well) the verb "to be" is "_vera_" (though the older "_vesa_" is attested). Moreover, the PIE "_be_" verbs both seem to have "i" ending (_bhewm*i*, esm*i*_).

I don't expect to have a definitive answer (as if it was possible with the current data about Japanese!), but has anybody any clues how these two can be possibly interconnected (or would be kind and patient enough to show my train of thought's errors)? Nostratic cognates...?


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## Treaty

Here is the etymology of was and were. There is no reason for a relation between the Japanese word and these. I guess you are a few oceans adrift .


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## Awwal12

tewlwolow said:


> has anybody any clues how these two can be possibly interconnected (or would be kind and patient enough to show my train of thought's errors)? Nostratic cognates...?


Surely not Nostratic cognates. The error is that there always is a probability that two words even in two unrelated languages can have similar sounding AND meaning (because, naturally, the range of meanings and the number of distinctive sounds are both limited). Cf. Eng. bad and Pers. بد, Rus. странно and It. strano, and many, many other couples of undoubtedly unrealted words.


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## rbrunner

You may check this older thread about accidental similarities between languages with many more examples.


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## sotos

_居り  _is pronounced "ori", not "wori". The first letter and sound "O" is probably of chinese origin. "ri" is a japanese suffix of certain verbal forms.


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## Awwal12

sotos said:


> _居り  _is pronounced "ori", not "wori".


"Classical Japanese".





sotos said:


> The first letter and sound "O" is probably of chinese origin.


"O" is a kunyomi here. The onyomi is "kyo", from Middle Chinese /kɨʌ/ (cf. Putonghua /jū/, Cantonese /geoi1/). Kortland draws Altaic etymologies for 居る (both for "iru" and "oru", that is, since they are homographs).


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## Nino83

There are other threads and pages: 
Word coincidence 
False cognate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 
Proto-Indo-European *h₁nómn̥: name (English), Name (German), namn (Swedish), nome (Italian), имя ímja (Rusian), όνομα ‎ónoma (Greek),  नाम ‎nām (Hindi) vs. 名前  なまえ namae (Japanese)


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## tewlwolow

I know about coincidences in general, thank you for the links, though! I was more interested in this very example, as I'm rather oblivious to Japanese etymology.



Awwal12 said:


> "O" is a kunyomi here. The onyomi is "kyo", from Middle Chinese /kɨʌ/ (cf. Putonghua /jū/, Cantonese /geoi1/). Kortland draws Altaic etymologies for 居る (both for "iru" and "oru", that is, since they are homographs).



Thank you! Altaic theory is far more full-fledged and logical than PIE cognates, of course.


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## Awwal12

tewlwolow said:


> Altaic theory is far more full-fledged and logical than PIE cognates, of course.


Not as much as I would like, though. Altaists often tend to, as we Russians say, pull an owl onto the globe. No, there is no doubt that Mongolic, Turkic and Tungusic languages are related, and that they are *somehow* related to Koreanic and Japonic ones. The problem is, it's not sufficient to reconstruct the proto-language, or prove its existance, to that matter. And the methodology of the altaists is often pretty questionable.


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## Stoggler

Awwal12 said:


> Altaists often tend to, as we Russians say, pull an owl onto the globe.


Would you be able to explain what that means, please?


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## berndf

First, you shouldn't look at form of_ be-/es- _when analysing the stem _wes- _as the Germanic verb_ *beunaN-*wesanaN_ (_beon-wesan_ in Old English) as the two stems are etymologically completely unrelated. The Germanic verb _*beunaN _had no past tense forms of its own which were supplied by the independent verb_ *wesanaN_.

Second, the_ -r- _in some conjugated in forms of _*wesanaN_ as it occurs in daughter languages is a reflex of an earlier [z] sound that existed in Proto-Germanic but was lost in its later stages. This [z] sound was derived from (probably originally allophonic) voicing of /s/ under the rules of Verner's law.

Taking this together,  there is nothing more than the _w_ that _wori_ and _were_ have in common. And that is much too little to build a theory upon.


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## Awwal12

Stoggler said:


> Would you be able to explain what that means, please?


Trying hard to do something hardly possible, hardly sensible and hardly suitable regardless of any losses, the phrase is quite telling already.


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## tewlwolow

berndf said:


> First, you shouldn't look at form of_ be-/es- _when analysing the stem _wes- _as the Germanic verb_ *beunaN-*wesanaN_ (_beon-wesan_ in Old English) as the two stems are etymologically completely unrelated. The Germanic verb _*beunaN _had no past tense forms of its own which were supplied by the independent verb_ *wesanaN_.
> 
> Second, the_ -r- _in some conjugated in forms of _*wesanaN_ as it occurs in daughter languages is a reflex of an earlier [z] sound that existed in Proto-Germanic but was lost in its later stages. This [z] sound was derived from (probably originally allophonic) voicing of /s/ under the rules of Verner's law.
> 
> Taking this together,  there is nothing more than the _w_ that _wori_ and _were_ have in common. And that is much too little to build a theory upon.



Many thanks! I feel stupid now about not checking proto-Germanic forms before posing the question...




Awwal12 said:


> Not as much as I would like, though. Altaists often tend to, as we Russians say, pull an owl onto the globe. No, there is no doubt that Mongolic, Turkic and Tungusic languages are related, and that they are *somehow* related to Koreanic and Japonic ones. The problem is, it's not sufficient to reconstruct the proto-language, or prove its existance, to that matter. And the methodology of the altaists is often pretty questionable.



I wish not to do an immense offtopic, but if you were so kind as to provide links/data for your claims about flawed Altaic methodology, I'd be most grateful!


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## berndf

tewlwolow said:


> Many thanks! I feel stupid now about not checking proto-Germanic forms before posing the question...


Please don't. Such things happen to all of us.


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## Thanderbolten

Awwal12 said:


> Not as much as I would like, though. Altaists often tend to, as we Russians say, pull an owl onto the globe. No, there is no doubt that Mongolic, Turkic and Tungusic languages are related, and that they are *somehow* related to Koreanic and Japonic ones. The problem is, it's not sufficient to reconstruct the proto-language, or prove its existance, to that matter. And the methodology of the altaists is often pretty questionable.


 True. If you ever bothered to take notice, most linguists are entirely indifferent about most non-PIE families. 

There is a clear PIE bias in the community of linguistics. Has there ever been dedicated so much research for a proto-language, to make educated estimations about their religion, social order, etcetera, as has been done for PIE? What can you say about the religion of PIE? Well, they believed in Dyeus Pater! And their society was a patriarchal one where the wife becomes the family of her husband but not the other way around. What can you say about the religion and social order of the Proto-Afro-Asiatic speakers? *Nothing. *I mean, this is the ancestor-language of Egyptian, Hebrew, Arabic, Akkadian, Berber, Somali, and Hausa, for God's sake! If there has ever been a more supreme, ominous-sounding language super-family, then it is this one! There should be done more research on this.

PIE is the equivalent to Jesus in the academic, historian community. Everyone try to squeeze any theory, any book, any information, they can out of the scarce sources there is about the said entities, no matter how superfluous, repetitive books that amounts to. And nearly any academic work on other topics gets closed down as if they were discredited fringe theories for no reason other than their lack of will to think critically about anything else besides PIE. Hopefully, the hype about PIE will die down so we can focus on other language families more seriously.


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## Awwal12

Thanderbolten said:


> Has there ever been dedicated so much research for a proto-language, to make educated estimations about their religion, social order, etcetera, as has been done for PIE?


PIE is a model proto-language in a sense, since it produced a lot of branches, many of them quite early - and many of its descendants are directly attested rather early and fully (like Latin or Sanskrit). It's not like scholars aren't interested in, say, proto-Uralic - but the picture of it is naturally much less clear (it likely diverged earlier, the number of early branches is very small, and no Uralic language was properly attested until the X century at least; in fact, only Hungarian had left proper written sources before the XVI century).


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## M Mira

Thanderbolten said:


> There is a clear PIE bias in the community of linguistics. Has there ever been dedicated so much research for a proto-language, to make educated estimations about their religion, social order, etcetera, as has been done for PIE? What can you say about the religion of PIE? Well, they believed in Dyeus Pater! And their society was a patriarchal one where the wife becomes the family of her husband but not the other way around. What can you say about the religion and social order of the Proto-Afro-Asiatic speakers? *Nothing. *I mean, this is the ancestor-language of Egyptian, Hebrew, Arabic, Akkadian, Berber, Somali, and Hausa, for God's sake! If there has ever been a more supreme, ominous-sounding language super-family, then it is this one! There should be done more research on this.


Is there another language family with a corpus remotely comparable to Indo-European in size? If there's nothing to research, there aren't going to be researches.


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