From curculio@glasscity.net Mon May 14 11:33:24 2001 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.04) with ESMTP id f4EIXK093756 for ; Mon, 14 May 2001 11:33:20 -0700 Received: from mailcore1.oh.voyager.net (mailcore1.oh.voyager.net [207.0.229.19]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.04) with ESMTP id f4EIXJs10065 for ; Mon, 14 May 2001 11:33:19 -0700 Received: from t9q0o0 (d3.as0.bwlg.oh.voyager.net [208.13.20.68]) by mailcore1.oh.voyager.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id OAA53021 for ; Mon, 14 May 2001 14:33:17 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <000d01c0dca4$79ea0120$44140dd0@t9q0o0> From: "Michael Hendry" To: References: Subject: Re: Cantonese and Greek Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 14:34:12 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2314.1300 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 Catherine Mori wrote: > > I've just started Greek in my spare time with a few grade eights. Upon learning the word "oikos" for "house", one of the grade eleven kibbitzers remarked that the Cantonese word for "house" is "okay". > > Any comments on the apparent similarity of these words. > My comment: almost certainly utterly coincidental. A language book I read several years ago alleges that in one of the Australian aboriginal languages, the word for "dog" before Europeans ever arrived was . . . . "dog". Since there are 600 aboriginal languages, it is really not surprising that one of them should use the same relatively simple combination of sounds as English to represent the same quite common beast. The coincidence proves nothing about the relation between the two languages, which are otherwise quite different. As Aristotle said, "one swallow does not make a summer". So, unless someone can point to a lot more similarities between Greek and Cantonese -- which seems unlikely -- I think we can put this one down to coincidence. Michael Hendry Department of Romance Languages 203 Shatzel Hall Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, Ohio 43403-0230 Telephone: (419) 372-2667 Fax: (419) 372-7332 E-mail: curculio@glasscity.net Web-page: http://www.curculio.org .