Dear Jon, you wrote:
> I assume, Arto, that when you refer to the difference between Italian and > Spanish in the context of language, that you mean a difference among the Just that a Finnish speaker and an Estonian speaker understand each other as much as an Italian speaker and a Spanish speaker. Actually I suppose Finnish and Estonian are a bit more different than Italian and Spanish. > But I do think there is no Finno-Urgic in English, It might be wrong, but I have heard that the word "boy" would come from Swedish/Scandinavish word "pojke", which would come from the Finnish word "poika". They all have the same meaning. > and no one has answered me on the Basque. Is that of that Finno family? > Or is it another separate language. Basque is certainly not Fenno-Ugrian language!! I guess some Indo-Europeans just have heard something they do not understand at all, and they thought those languages must have something in common: their "un-understability"...;-) All this is quit off from lutes. So here is something to come back: In Finnish the word language, tongue, and STRING are all "kieli"! So a "lute string" is "luutun kieli", "English language" is "englannin kieli", and "cat's tongue" is "kissan kieli". "String instrument" is "kielisoitin", etc. Arto
