John, tsk, tsk:
>Glen rather than having PIE coming into the Pontic region from the
>steppes, I see them as moving onto the Pontic Steppes from over the
>Caucasas, [...] Nostratic [...] moved northwards via three routes
>
>1. Via the Balkans (Pontic Tardenosian and related Koba cultures in
>the forest Boreal zone (Uralic)
>
>2. Via the Caucasas (PIE)
>
>3. Via Iran, Transoxania and hence to the Altai Mountains (Altaic)
>
>This makes sense archaeologically.
It continues to make NO sense linguistically. You've casually dismissed
Yukaghir, Gilyak, ChuckchiKamchatkan and EskimoAleut which are also
important to this discussion. IE (or ITyr) is not distinct enough from these
other Steppe languages to warrant a seperate route at all and has already
been tried by many Nostraticists previous of dubious reasoning skills who
were more concerned with making direct links between IE and Semitic (or AA).
They didn't succeed. I doubt you will either.
Your scenario isn't sensible because all of the splits from Nostratic right
down to IE and other Steppe languages would occur in Anatolia and the
MiddleEast producing a completely outrageous linguistic cramping with
subsequent unlikely survival of ALL these languages in locales far removed
from their supposed source (??).
To get this straight, you're saying that at a particular time there were the
following languages stuffed in the tiny Anatolian/Middle-East area without
any linguistic evidence whatsoever of their fantastic side-by-side
encounters:
Hattic, HurroUrartian, Semitic, Sumerian, Uralic,
IndoTyrrhenian, Elamite, Dravidian, Kartvelian,
EskimoAleut, Gilyak, Altaic, Yukaghir and
ChuckchiKamchatkan.
Sorry, this scenario can never be plausible without overdosing on pills.
You're ranting on, equating the neolithic revolution with IT without a clue
about the languages again. It's not that simple. We can't expect the
relationship between language and archaeology to be that simple. I'm getting
tired of saying this.
>To try to get a pre-IE late mesolithic people from
>north of the PIE area between PIE and Uralics down into the Balkans
>before the kuban incursions that Gambutas identifies, is
>archaeologically very difficult.
I clearly said in the last message: Uralic-Yukaghir, 5000 BCE, Urals. This
might be hard for you to accept but Uralic wasn't always in the same area
and had to have been from further east because of that unfortunate
relationship you're neglecting with Siberian Yukaghir. Uralic-Yukaghir isn't
even my idea but already being considered by Uralicists (who frankly know
alot more than I do on Uralic afterall). The area north of the core Common
IE area was certainly not populated by even Uralic-Yukaghir speaking people
during 7000 BCE, silly! You're getting your time-frames mixed up.
From 7000 to 5500 BCE would see the spread of IT to the south and west. By
the time IE arrived at the Black Sea, core Uralic-Yukaghir arrived only to
the Urals but possibly there could have been a spread even more west taking
over the old Common IT area (after Tyrrhenian had already left the scene).
>Especially since this is the period of post glacial global warming, >and
>cultures were moving from the south to the north, rather than from >the
>north to the south.
Yes, in general, and there's nothing violating this tendency. When the IT
were north of the two Seas, Uralic-Yukaghir was spreading west to the Urals.
Uralic-Yukaghir was occupying the more northerly regions and may have helped
to push the IT south as it spread over the north. On the other hand, it's
not necessary that IT as a whole moved south but rather that the core areas
that would produce Common IE and Tyrrhenian happened to occupy southerly
regions while the northern occupations were later overrun with Uralic or
later by a spreading IE population.
At any rate, there ARE individual north-to-south cultural migrations in the
area, including the one that would bring the IE to the Black Sea, so your
objection is irrelevant because the general tendency for the IT wasn't a
movement southwards anyway but westwards.
>The glacial climate of a high rainfall Mediterranean was giving way to
>the summer drought climate, and it is hard to see why people on the
>forest edge of the northern steppes, adapted to cold winters and >seasonal
>precipitation, would move into an area of increasing aridity, >unless
>driven by population pressure.
Trading contacts. Silver. Wine. Tasty herding animals to milk and eat. Yum.
I feel like a muffin and some tea right now.
>Thus on this basis IE would have developed in the Pontic Steppe
>region between IT (in Northern Anatolia) and Proto-Uralic. I would
> >suggest that if this reconstruction is correct, there should be more
>Proto-Uralic connections in PIE than in IT.
A fantasy. First, the Semitic borrowings make little sense in this
way(Etruscan semph but IE *septm with *-t-??). Second, demonstrate how
Uralic is closer to IE than Etruscan.
Etruscan and IE share the genitive in both *-s and *-l. The only thing close
to this in Uralic is Finnish's underlying *-s- and *-l- being used for
"interior" and "exterior" spaces in combination with *-na or *-ta as in -ssa
(<*-s-na) or -lla (<*-l-na). Not quite the genitive, although I do wonder if
there is a remote link.
Uralic insists strongly on *-m in the definite accusative (indefinite
accusative/ablative *-ta) but IE and Etruscan share zero-termination in the
accusative (cf IE inanimates and most Etruscan nouns). The accusative *-m is
still found however in IE animates (*-m) and Etruscan pronouns and
demonstratives (-n, -ni).
The Etruscan verb cannot be securely linked grammatically with either IE or
Uralic since no endings have been confidentally found but yet again, some
stems appear related and clearly not of Latin origin (IE *kWer-, Etr car-).
Is there a Uralic cognate to this? I haven't found it. It would pop up as
**kur-, quite different from Etruscan AND IE, if it does exist. That's
because IE and Etruscan seem to also share a reduction of medial or enclitic
*i and *u to *e (later producing an overabundance of /e/ and /a/ in
Etruscan) and Uralic rather shows a characteristic reduction of the number
of non-initial vowels while retaining *i and *u in initial syllables.
Etruscan and IE also share a demonstrative with *k (IE *ke, Etr eca) that
doesn't show up in Uralic as far as I'm aware.
The last point is that Etruscan still retains remnants of a stop contrast
(aspiration as in t/th) that has been completely lost in Uralic-Yukaghir (as
well as EskimoAleut, to which Uralic-Yukaghir is better relatable). You're
going to have to deal with this difference in phonology to make this idea
work as well.
Uralic-Yukaghir's differences are too many to shallowly entertain a closer
relationship of Etruscan to U-Y rather than to IE. In contrast to many books
written comparing Tyrrhenian languages particularly with Anatolian, there
are no books I've heard of that seriously relate UY to Etruscan.
So, John, if you're the only one in the world to entertain this, I would
suggest that you heed my advise and really get acquainted with the languages
you're talking about because you're not going to obtain much success at
putting these theories out without doing this first and you're tiring me
out.
>I-T would thus have developed in close proximity to Hattic (Southern
> >Anatolia) rather than Uralic. I would see that
>there would have been borrowings and cognates in this direction, rather
>than between I-T and Uralic. I think from the discussions we have had >on
>list on the topic of the -ss-, -nd-, -nt-, (macro-Pelasgaian
>discussions) found throughout Anatolia, this is definitely the case.
Read up on Hattic, John. It's a wonderful synthetic language but I'm unaware
of any regular -ss-, -nd- or -nt- endings in Hattic. The endings are
internal to IT. This has been convincingly discussed ad nauseum on this list
(and others) already. Read the archives too.
- gLeN
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