Relations To Other Language Families
Elamite is regarded by the vast majority of linguists as a language isolate and has no close relation to the neighbouring Semitic languages, Indo-European languages or to Sumerian (a fellow isolate), even though it adopted the Sumerian-Akkadian cuneiform script. A minority of linguists have attempted to link Elamite with other language groups; David McAlpin proposed an Elamo-Dravidian family with the Dravidian languages of India, Vaclav Blazek proposed a relation with Semitic languages of the Near East, and George Starostin published lexicostatistics finding Elamite to be approximately equidistant from Nostratic and Semitic but more distant from Sino-Caucasian.
Read more about this topic: Elamite Language
Famous quotes containing the words relations to, relations, language and/or families:
“The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“In today’s world parents find themselves at the mercy of a society which imposes pressures and priorities that allow neither time nor place for meaningful activities and relations between children and adults, which downgrade the role of parents and the functions of parenthood, and which prevent the parent from doing things he wants to do as a guide, friend, and companion to his children.”
—Urie Bronfenbrenner (b. 1917)
“If fancy then
Unequal fails beneath the pleasing task,
Ah, what shall language do?”
—James Thomson (1700–1748)
“Notwithstanding the unaccountable apathy with which of late years the Indians have been sometimes abandoned to their enemies, it is not to be doubted that it is the good pleasure and the understanding of all humane persons in the Republic, of the men and the matrons sitting in the thriving independent families all over the land, that they shall be duly cared for; that they shall taste justice and love from all to whom we have delegated the office of dealing with them.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)