With Bahador Alast from now to ancient languages: are linguistic groups and families true?
It's been some years since the first videos in which the youtuber Bahador Alast, an Iranian youngman who lives and works in Toronto, shows two, sometimes four young men & women from different ethnos speaking two different languages among them, that with a little effort understand words similar, with some different sounds, the ones the words of the others, and so thanks to English language they are able to reveal the right comprehension of the meanings for every word.
Sometimes, people talking belong to ethnos that live near one to one, and use language of the same "linguistic families", but it may happen that the "players" belong to different linguistic families and distant places in the world; in that second case the languages may be as in well known contact through themselves, or in not so obvious historic contacts in the past centuries or millenniums.
The "game" is very nice and the young men & women show true happiness and fun to participate; the results are very useful for an idea of possible friendly relations, based on knowledge and comprehension.
But, if some listener knows & practices any ancient language too -like the scholars of ancient Greek, or Latin, or semitic languages, he/she may discover some points for reflection in that "game".
Let's make some examples!
In the video -on 3 october 2021- between two girls speaking the ones Somali and Oromo, languages spoken respectively in Somali and Ethiopian lands, we have a lot of difficulties finding any word similar to words belonging to European or Semitic languages; on the contrary, the two performers understand all the words very fast , although the sounds are similar but not too similar. We may say "the Bible was right!", when it is watching to Sem and Japhet as very different "chief-people", but not strongly distinguished at all, instead Noé curses Cam (because he saw his father naked ): we want to say -obviously- that Semitic and European people were watching to African languages and Africans' kind of life as more different than Europeans' in front of Semitic people, and vcv.
Let's go on!
For the video - on 16 September 2021 - "Similarities Between Spanish and Arabic", we know how Arabic and Spanish people were in close contact in different times...; starting, the two participating compare the Spanish word hasta with Arabic hata, this is "until" ; but "until" in biblical hebrew language is 'd, ad and ad in Latin language it is a word that has a lot to do with the idea of "until"!
So, at minute 5:40, more or less, we may hear the comparisons about the same word jarra (but Spanish pronounce sounds harra, see also Italian giara) : "pitcher"... Well: in biblical Hebrew ancient language (and in Israel now) "pitcher" sounds kad: it may be not-absurdity that jar and cad come from the same basis, but it's not the main thing: we know that in ancient Greek also, "pitcher" was kados: so we have two semitic languages and two "indoeuropean", as languages crossing themselves with the same meaning, in different people and in different times!
For a second example: at minute more or less 17:20, the Spanish word aceitunas ("olives", but this word remembers italian "aceto"= "vinegar") may have a right comparison with Arabic word zeitun; well; but in ancient biblical Hebrew language zait means "olive" too. Come on! In the last minutes of the video, the Arabic word arz ("rice") is immediately recognized by a Spanish girl who plays, as arroz (Spanish "rice" too); but this variation of -rz- is similar with ancient Greek oryza ...
A very interesting video is Similarities Between Hindi and Burmese on 29 August 2021: we are copying here the minutes -more or less- of the words compared, and we are writing a third word every time from different ancient language that permits comparison:
10:32 Burmese yupa - Hindi rupa = "form, appearance", see Hebrew rpim, biblical rapahim=ghost
13:15 Burmese vizza Hindi vidya = wizard
see ancient Greek (v)eid- Hebrew iada like biblical Hebrew yd "wise knowledge", Latin video, from wich Italian veggente
14:27 Burmese marana Hindi marar = death
see Latin mors , Hebrew and biblical Hebrew mawet (for r/w see above rupa/yupa)
Some interesting comparisons between words are in a more recent video which shows two girls speaking Arabic and Chechen languages: through the dialogue we may find kis ("pouch") that maybe recalls the Italian cassa, miskin/misk = "poor", without any doubt like the Italian meschino, ghalta/kalta ="mistake", see Latin culpa (normal p/t in linguistics).
The first notation that a non-scholar in linguistics may think is: "these examples are a few!" Yes, but Bahador also proposes a few words (from 15 to 30 minutes) what might happen if a team of scholars in the world would work in this line?
Let's imagine that: in the very ancient world, when men were very much fewer than now, all in the languages was "linguistic loan", and with these words chiefs, priests, poets, scribas or teachers made that canonic language for that people. The idea is very far from every phylogenetic picture of "groups' ', for me an unconscious imitation of classic darwinism and of stemmatic philology of Lachmann...
