But many of the food names are cognates for something I’ve heard before: puri is bread, chai is tea, kave is coffee, rhvino is wine. And I have learned lots of the names of things that have cognates only on other planets: milk is rdze, butter is karaki, beer is ludi.
That word for beer struck my Uralophilic eye as being suspiciously similar to Finnish olut, and sure enough, a quick Google search confirmed that both these non-Indo-European tongues have ultimately acquired their terms from proto-Germanic *aluth, i.e. ale.
Anyone interested in these matters will do well to check out Languagehat. Anyone interested in things more obscure should look at Dartmouth's Tungusic Research Group, and also this interesting discussion of the current state of the Altaic hypothesis. And don't miss John Derbyshire's recent meditation on obscenity.
