Árbók Háskóla Íslands - 02.01.1954, Page 9

SOME REMARKS ON THE ORIGIN
OF THE N-SOUND.
Most philologists deal only with one family of languages,
the Indoeuropean philologists with all the Indoeuropean langu-
ages, which are spoken by aproximately 50% of the inhabi-
tants of the earth, the Germanic philologists with all Germanic
languages, the Chinese philologists with Chinese and related
languages, such as Japanese, the Semitic philologists with the
Semitic languages and so on. By comparing all the Indo-
european languages the Indoeuropean philologists have suc-
ceeded in construing about 2200 roots which are regarded
as the main foundation of the Preindoeuropean languages some
2000 years B.C. In recent years the investigations of the
Tocharian and the Hittite languages have been added and the
comparison of the latter with the Indoeuropean has resulted
in the presumption of a Pre-Indoeuropean-Hittite group1). In
a similar way as the IE.philologists have construed the Pre-
Indoeuropean roots and many Germanic philologists are able
to reconstruct the Pre-Germanic, the Semitic philologists are
comparing all Semitic languages such as Hebrew, Arabic,
Aramaic, Assyrian and Babylonian. But very few of the world’s
philologists have attempted to compare the roots of the so-
called “unrelated” languages as the opinion still prevails that
such a task is in vain and it is well known that the French
“La Société de Linguistique” in Paris has long had a rule
that no papers on this subject may be presented at its ses-
sions. For many years I have studied the comparison of the
roots of various “unrelated” languages such as IE., Hebrew
as representative of the Semitic group, Turkish as representa-
1) E. H. Sturtevant: A comparative grammar of the Hittite language,
Linguistic Society of America. Philadelphia 1933.
— Hittite Giossary. Philadelphia 1933.
— Suppiement to a Hittite Glossary. Philadelphia 1939.