Well, I won't try to sort out your quotes and my quotes...but I'll try to answer your points systematically... You seem to be a pleasant fellow so I'll avoid any more "snarkiness"...
I tend to be suspicious of "romantic" nonsense that is used to support thinly disguised nationalistic agendas...
timtak wrote:
> similar ideas and concerns...
Having similar ideas and concerns is one thing, giving ones idea or concern the same phoneme, and that idea or concern being the idea for a phoneme linked to an idea/concern or entity, that is another.
I think I was reacting to your statement about the bible and Japanese mythology... I, too, am intrigued by the same, or similar, phoneme being commonly used for "name" ...and because of this I don't think it supports the idea of a link between Finnish and Japanese any stronger than a link between Japanese and English... Could it be a phoneme that was so strong, or so well established, that it travelled "out of Africa" 80,000 years ago when the human migrations began?? I don't know...
>someone has already done all the work for you...
Who did the work? Was it you? Is there a paper?
No, and I can't be "arsed" to dig it out again... For anyone seriously interested, I think they would want to check it out for themselves, ...it might be a bit of work, but it would hardly be taxing to the intellect...
And, I was very careful to say at the beginning that "I DO NOT attest to the accuracy of the list"..
I found it rather quickly through a simple Google search...
As you know, the similarity between Japanese and Chinese numbers is no coincidence.
> Or could it be that the ancient pioneers came to Japan from China
> (probably via Korea), retained those early numbers, but adopted
> different words/sounds for newer concepts involving larger numbers...
That sounds quite plausible.
There are some persuasive views that humans "invented" numbering systems in a gradual and logical way... small numbers, say up to four or five, can be easily conceived in the human mind; then, counting on the fingers, initially, to tally larger numbers of items...(fingers and toes)...and so forth...one of the last concepts to penetrate human consciousness was that of "zero" ....a word of Arabic origin... I know how this proceeded in Europe, but not in China (and Korea and Japan).... But my "guess" is that people were in Japan before complex numbers were in use there...
By the same reasoning, looking at your list of name words, it would seem that pioneers went all over the world with a very particularly concept, the concept of attaching phonemes to a concepts/entities/people. The revolutionary nature of that contrivance seems to have been enough to have propelled it all around the world.
Well, I not sure, ...but we might be thinking the same thing here...that the phoneme for "name" was developed early and carried out of Africa by the human "pioneers"...Or more persuasive to me...but I'm openminded on this...it may be a kind of innate phoneme. ...Like phonemes such as "ma-ma" or "da-da"
It would also suggest a similarity between cultures globallly, and open study of human psychology to the suggestion that it is *cultural and yet shared*, rather than natural. Generally things that are shared globally are assumed to be innate but we have evidence of "pioneers" that "came" pretty much everywhere.
Could be and well worth studying, I would say...
As to your earlier reference to "cultural psychology"...that's interesting, though I think it is a bit of a controversial field... People certainly are acculturated to the society they might be born into, but I would be very doubtful that it would be "hardwired" into the brain... even over a long period of time... I live in a country that has been, and still is, full of immigrants from around the world.... And despite what the ancestors might have been expecting, their offspring gradually become "Canadianized", no matter where they come from... The process is fastest for the North Europeans (...almost overnight for some of them it seems...
) , then the East and Southern Europeans, then a little longer for Japanese and Chinese, and maybe a bit longer still for South Asians and Philipinos, then for Africans...but it does happen...and it seems to be inexorable... Significant religious differences and strong cultural traditions, might slow the process, though that doesn't seem to stop it...