Interlingua "con" Latin "cum" Ido "kun" etc. more international than you might think

Saturday, December 06, 2008

In place of an image I'll include this very underrated song by Iron Maiden (the part at the end is the best):



Now to the subject:

For those that don't know much about Turkic / Iranian languages the similarity might not be obvious, but the Latin word cum (with) is cognate with the Persian ham (هم) which also made its way into Turkish as hem, and also into the other Turkic languages, making it a word used from Europe to Central Asia and into western China at least (not knowing any Russian I'm not sure whether there's a Russian equivalent).

Here are some examples of Persian words with ham:

hamkârî kardan (همکاری کردن) - cooperate (kâr = work, kardan = do)
hamsar (همسر) - partner (sar = head)
hamjens (همجنس) - akin (jens = type) <-- Turkish hemcins

Another Turkish site says that Greek homo is also cognate.

Other Turkic languages tend to use Persian words more than Turkish, so you'll see hamkâr as hamkor in Uzbek for example, whereas in Turkish cooperation is işbirliği, but hem remains in standard Turkish too.

And of course you see it in English in words like collaboration, cooperate, and so on.

Conclusion: if you're making a worldlang without this particle, perhaps you should think again.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

When it comes to the borrowed words, in Russian it's much the same as in English:

кооперация [kooperatsiya] cooperation
композиция [kompozitsiya] composition
конференция [konferentsiya] conference

However in the words of Slavic origin prefix со- [so-] is used:

сотрудничество [sotrudnichestvo] collaboration
соавторство [soavtorstvo] co-authorship

Anonymous said...

Slavic "so" comes from IE "kom" ("together", same meaning in sambahsa)and is thus cognate with Latin "cum".
Greek "homos" is not cognate with Parsi "ham", as it rathers comes from the same root as English "same", Russian "samyj" or Sambahsa "sam". On the contrary, Old Greek "syn" (as, for example, in "sympathy") is really a cognate.
I remember Sambahsa has "hamrah" from Parsi "to accompany". Sambahsa verb "kwehr" is of course a cognate of Parsi "kardan", and of Latin "creare".

Olivier
http://sambahsa-mundialect-org.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

Slavic "so" comes from IE "kom" ("together", same meaning in sambahsa)and is thus cognate with Latin "cum".
Greek "homos" is not cognate with Parsi "ham", as it rathers comes from the same root as English "same", Russian "samyj" or Sambahsa "sam". On the contrary, Old Greek "syn" (as, for example, in "sympathy") is really a cognate.
I remember Sambahsa has "hamrah" from Parsi "to accompany". Sambahsa verb "kwehr" is of course a cognate of Parsi "kardan", and of Latin "creare".

Olivier
http://sambahsa-mundialect-org.blogspot.com

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