Talk:хэл

Etymology

Is anyone else here perturbed by the fact that this word is very close to the Finnish word for language, 'kieli'? 209.184.141.61 19:33, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

It goes even closer to the Proto-Uralic *kele (“language”). This may be a coincidence, but it's not impossible that Proto-Uralic and Mongolian would have common words. The swadesh list for Mongolian [1] does not generally indicate a kinship between Finnish and Mongolian although there are some intriguing words like ус ("water") and эм ("woman") which resemble the Finnish words vesi (“water”) and ämmä (“old woman”). But then again, Proto-Uralic for water is *wete and em-sounds are common in words meaning mother or woman in many unrelated languages. --Hekaheka (talk) 05:08, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

The similarity has been noted long ago and it's in principle possible that the word is e.g. an old loan from Uralic to Mongolian, or vice versa, or common inheritance from some deeper time-period. --Tropylium (talk) 12:31, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

They are related via Nostratic *kʰil- (~ *kʰel-) "to make a sound or a noise; to say, to speak, to talk" [2] [3]. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 12:36, 7 August 2015 (UTC)