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Igel

(37,068 posts)
9. Nice passive.
Thu Aug 22, 2019, 10:54 PM
Aug 2019

NASB is regarded by some (best to say who) as the most accurate.

The problem I've always had with regarding any ME culture as wholly derived from a cognate culture is simple.

Consider Ukrainian. It's similar to Russian. At one point it was considered a dialect of Russian. As being derived from Russian.

However, Ukrainian is every bit as old as Russian. As you go back in time, they look more and more similar until you're left with something that also includes Belorusian. Common East Slavic.

Go back further, and you find that all the Slavic languages merge. There are dialectal differences, but even those seem to have starting points. And you have Common Slavic.

Go back further, and there's no sense in which Slavic languages derive from Baltic languages, they simply started at the same point. A bit further back, and you lose the distinctiveness of Latin and Greek, Germanic languages, Indic and Iranian.

Which is older, Latin, attested a few hundred BC, or Russian, first attested in 1065, or Lithuanian, first attested in the 1500s? None of them. There is no "oldest language" because, as far as we can tell, they all go back to a common source. And that source was as much the origin of English as of Mandarin.

So you have legends attested early in Sumeria. Are they the source of other legends in the area? There's no evidence for this at all: It's unlikely that all the surrounding peoples had no legends at all and were waiting (like having all the Slavic peoples sitting around, without any language at all until a Baltic speaker came along and said, "Here, have my language"--or, borrowing Chomsky's analogy, it's like having a group of birds with wings and feather, able to fly but without knowledge of flight, until they see a bird in flight and think, "I can do that"--and take off as a fully-flighted flock).

What would be necessary is to show that the Sumerians innovated those particular legends. At best there's date of first attestation, which frequently just means, "This group had writing first." To which I say that there are Lithuanian words first attested in the 1600s that are directly and unequivocally descended from Indo-European, c. 4000 BC, that couldn't have been borrowed from any other language. But, since they're not attested, the easy (facile) and simple (simplistic) explanation is that they were somehow borrowed.

But that's okay. I've seen people try to claim that since there's the "Germanic interpretation" of Roman and Greek gods, and a set of analogies between Greek and Roman and Greek and Egyptian deities, that really all the Europeans were sitting around, godless, until suddenly Egyptian gods spread to them. Upon which, of course, it can only be concluded that each culture set up a commission to devise new names and different histories for them. Then again, these were scholars in the 1700s and 1800s. Nobody after 1920 would be so butt-brained as to try to make that kind of allegation.

We make an exception for Xianity. And, really, only Xianity.

Recommendations

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lol ! stonecutter357 Aug 2019 #4
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It is pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity . stonecutter357 Aug 2019 #5
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You Were Born That Way ! stonecutter357 Aug 2019 #7
Nice passive. Igel Aug 2019 #9
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