Veda - Joke? -

From a magazine my wife was reading today:

I get the distinct impression that there is a joke in this beyond Veda. What say our resident linguists?

I thought Finnish was outside the Indo-Aryan family, in a league of its own, so to speak.

But from veda ==> wit seems reasonable. From "smart" to "smart-ass," or from "wise" to "wise-guy," is not such a long voyage.

It is. Hungary is related, and some obscure languages scattered around the backwoods of the former Soviet Union are related. We do have some identical words with Sanskrit, such as sata being "hundred" or sama being "same", but I believe they are more of a random occurence than actual derived words.

Most of this stuff is more of a make-believe, such as Suomi (the native name of Finland) being derived from Swami because of the somewhat ascetic nature of people, and Scandinavia derived from skanda-nAbha, the navel or central place of Skanda, the god of war - a reference to the warring Viking tribes of the past.

Knowing is weten (Eng. pronunciation way-tun) in Dutch, which closely resembles the word Veda.

How far can we take mere resemblance as indicative of the actual roots of a word?

As far as it vorks, I think.

Anyone recall the term vedavid? Veda-vit, knower of the Veda. Interesting connection there.

We need to distinguish two types of relationships between related words. Two words in two different languages are called cognates if they developed from a common ancestor (Proto-Indo-European, for example). If a word is borrowed by one language from another it is called a derivative. To give an example, English to carve is cognate with Greek graphô (infinitive, graphein), whereas English graphic is a derivative from the same (through Latin).

English wit and Sanskrit vid (from which we get veda) are cognates, both deriving from a common ancestor in Proto-Indo-European.

There are a number of derivatives from Greek in Sanskrit.

Finnish is a member of the so-called Finno-Ugrian language group. Besides Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian, most of the Finno-Ugrian languages are minority languages within what is now the Russian Federation. While the Finno-Ugrian languages are not a part of the Indo-European family of languages, there has been contact between the two groups for several millennia. Finnish sata is, in fact, a borrowing from Indo-European, and there are numerous other such borrowings. (While on the subject of sata, then Indo-European is divided into two major groups: the satem languages and the centum languages. The former use some form of satem to denote hundred; this group includes Indo-Iranian and Slavic. The latter use some form of centum to denote hundred; Greek and Italic belong to this group.)

I do not know the origin of Finnish vitsi. It could possibly have a connection with Indo-European. In Danish knowledge is viden and joke is vittighed or vits.

By the way, Madhava, would you be able to more or less understand spoken Estonian, or are Finnish and Estonian more removed from each other?

Regarding mere resemblances between words, then they do not in themselves necessarily say much about the actual roots of the words.

Sincerely,
Elpis

Probably a bit more to the lesser side, but basically I believe we would be able to communicate like Danes and Swedes can. I believe it'd be one notch more difficult. Hard to estimate, since I am not a Swede. It wouldn't be a very fluent at any rate. I am just now trying to read a website in Estonian, and it is quite difficult. I can basically figure out what's going on, but I miss words and I need to think quite a bit to make sense of it. Spoken communication would probably be a bit easier.

When Vyasa dictated the vedas to Ganesha a few Finnish saw him writing and considered - an elephant writing? That must be a vitsi (=joke)!

Yes, this is probably the case.

The Finnish word vitsa, referring to a small tree-branch used for spanking naughty kids, must also be derived from the same source. Some Finnish seers went to India and read the Manu-samhita, realizing: Oh, this is veda, giving vitsa.

The word vitsaus, referring to a nuisance or a plague, is probably also related. The word viisaus, meaning knowledge and wisdom, seems awfully close.

The situation with the "experts" on language development is that they are way off on so much.

A few examples:

Hebrew is not indo-european according to the wisdom of the day, yet Hebrew has a huge collection of sanskrit cognant and derivative words, as do other semetic languages.

Basque is supposedly unique, yet it is clearly very closely related to dravidian languages.

The Proto-indo european [PIE] thing is a case study of the sorry state of linguistic history in academia, there is no evidence whatsoever of such a language, the theory was created as part of a political scheme to rewrite Indian history by British colonial leadership, the entire PIE or as it used to be called "Aryan" theory has been shown to be manufactured and has been discredited, curiously enough the secularists in India have taken the side of the colonial revisionists in their scathing indictment of the BJP's reworking of India's history schoolbooks to change the British created false history of the PIE culture and subsequent Aryan invasion of India.

So I take with a grain of salt whenever "experts" tell us that this or that language is such and such or from here or there.

Lithuanian of course has retained the most similarities of any european language to sanskrit, and it's proximity to Finland gives us a good idea that those langauges were no doubt also influenced by Vedic incursions to northern europe, even though the prevailing wisdom by academics who prefer to repeat the "authorized" histories may disagree.