Re: Odp: Odp: Nostratic family

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 673
Date: 1999-12-24

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Gwydionash@...
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Friday, December 24, 1999 9:43 AM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: Odp: Nostratic family

In a message dated 12/23/99 7:49:26 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
gpiotr@... writes:

<< The current version of Nostratic has 50 (FIFTY) consonants, including 
eight coronal fricatives and twelve coronal affricates. >>

I hate to jump in here, and I must admit that I am not very familiar with the 
theory of the Nostratic family, BUT, if they are postulating 50 consonants 
for Nostratic, doesn't this seem a bit ridiculous?  Nostratic is supposed to 
be the, for lack of a better term, more "primitive" ancestor of the various 
languages that it is hypothesized as preceding.  As such, wouldn't it's 
phonemic structure be more simplified than its "daughter" languages?  It 
seems to me that by hypothesizing so many consonants that the supporters of 
the Nostratic theory are stretching the limits in order to make the theory 
more believeable.  It is as if  they took all of the consonants of the 
languages that are "descendants" of Nostratic and lumped them together to 
form a phonemic system for Nostratic so that it strengthens their case, even 
if it isn't very logical.  Or am I just off base on this one?

Chad Brown
I don't believe languages spoken 10000 or even 20000 yrs ago were very different from those spoken today in terms of grammatical and phonological complexity (they probably had somewhat smaller vocabularies for purely cultural reasons). At any rate no gradient of growing complexity has been detected in the documented history of human language. But as regards the size of the Nostratic and the logic behind it, I entirely agree with what you're saying.
 
Piotr