by তন্ময় ভট (guest)
2/23/2008, 10:50 AM
No connection is far more difficult to establish than finding evidence of connection. In this case, we know that word-initial nasals and reduplications have very curious distribution in world's languages which are difficult to explain away as borrowing or sound symbolism, yet occur in groups of languages which are very hard to relate.
The semantic relationship between fish and shining may also repeat in unrelated situations, though less work exists on that.
So, `seems' to be no connection is probably the closest we will get to in some time.