On Thu, 29 May 2003 16:10:10 +0000, Jens Elmegård Rasmussen
<
jer@...> wrote:
>Are you being attacked by yourself?
It's just that my mind kept coming up with alternative scenario's.
For now, I'll leave it at "Proto-Nostratic had some kind of particle
*ma, either a relative pronoun, a copula or a dative/genitive
postposition, which was specialized as a topic/focus marker (Semitic,
Basque?, Japanese?), an object marker (IE, Uralic, Etruscan) or an
ergative subject marker (Kartvelian[*], Eskimo(-Aleut)).
>I know far too little about comparative Uralic, and my personal
>collection of handbooks belongs in a museum, so I'll have to reserve
>my final verdict until I can get better informed.
I intend to provide some raw data (and of course some personal
interpretations) shortly, when I get around to Uralic in my series of
postings over on the Nostratic list.
[*] I didn't know it was *-man in Old Georgian. What is it in Zan and
Svan?
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...