jpahk wrote:i'm a little behind, but debra, congrats on a really fine showing. that's bad luck on the mare's milk, of course, but your wagering was spot-on. and i'm glad you got the FJ (again with a fine, well-reasoned wager). on a different day, things might have worked out better for you, although i was quite impressed by amy as well.
i'm no linguist, but if memory serves, turkish and mongolian are altaic languages, whereas finnish and estonian belong to the finno-ugric family, so while i'm sure the turkish mare's milk concoction you had was related to the mongolian word in the DD clue, i'm less sure about whether baltic milk words have anything to do with it.
Thanks, Joon! It means a lot for great players like you and Stefan to say I did well. Amy was a formidable opponent (Zach too) and she was so calm in all her games. That was a little unnerving. I liked her very much and in fact shared a cab ride with her and her boyfriend?/husband? back to the hotel. They were both super enjoyable to visit with.
I'm no linguist either, just a very casual hobbyist at it, but I was under the impression that finno-ugric and altaic were closely related. Maybe they are two different language families in a larger "order" or "class", if you will (I'm sure there's a real linguistic term for that but I'm too lazy to look right now.) Like English & German are both in the Germanic family, and Portuguese and Romanian in the Romance family, but both those families are in something bigger (Indo-european?) Anyway, I'll have to go investigate that, but at the time, at least, I was under the impression that all those languages were more closely related to each other than to any other European languages for sure.
And I think maybe the key to getting the mare's milk question was stepping out of the dairy product frame of mind and into the realm of "What is the most common animal in this culture?" I know that Mongolia=horses, and if I'd just thought of that at the time I'd have gotten it. I suspect if I'd first seen the clue in the comfort of my living room I'd have gotten it right away and been yelling at the tv and feeling superior in my knowledge that yes, people somewhere drink mare's milk. I will forever have much more sympathy when people blow what seems to be an easy question, because I now know how very much different it is when the lights are on and everyone's looking at you, and those words are just so tiny and so far away...