Re: [tied] Sino-Caucasian and Nostratic

Miguel:

> I agree completely. I'm perhaps somewhat more confident
> about Afro-Asiatic and Kartvelian (but I haven't looked at
> Dravidian enough to be sure). I would add Etruscan, as far
> as it's known, and Yukaghir.

Etruscan being closer to IE and Yukaghir closer to Uralic.

> The Basque personal pronouns are virtually identical (in the
> singular) with the Afro-Asiatic ones,

Yeah except you have to account for the bizarre plural ones like
/gu/ and /zuek/. No one else relates Basque to Nostratic. I tried
once. It began to unravel quickly. I accepted the inadequacies of the
proposal and moved on.

> so I'm pretty sure Basque belongs here too, although the details
> of a how the rest of Basque grammar ties in with Nostratic still
> remain a bit unclear.

Of course they will, because you don't realize yet that you're
trying to peer into a very remote layer of "Nostrato-Caucasic"
well beyond what you think is Nostratic.

> That is the picture I have at the moment, but I have not looked
> seriously at the alternatives, i.e. what degree of similarity one
> perceives between a member of Nostratic and a member of Sino-
> Caucasian, or between elements reconstructed for the two
> superprotolanguages.

I had already considered the relationship of Caucasic, Nostratic,
Burushaski-Yeneseian and Sino-Dene as a large spectrum of
"Nostrato-Caucasic". The language would have originally had
word class prefixes like in Swahili but were later lost in
Nostratic. They survive in SinoTibetan. I've also suspected that
Nostratic had a three-gender system of human, animate and inanimate.
Just a thought.

> I discovered some striking resemblances between the
> Sino-Tibetan, NW and NE Caucasian numerals some 10 years
> ago, but that doesn't decide the issue whether the
> connection is one of borrowing (on the assumption that NW/NE
> Caucasian occupied the Western part and Sino-Tibetan the
> Eastern part of the Eurasiatic steppe), or a genetic one.

I think it does. There's no reason for the commonality. Certainly,
trade couldn't spread these numerals that far and wide. Rather,
we have to cede to the obvious, that early peoples weren't stupid
and _could_ count to ten if they needed to.

> I don't know anything about Na-Dene, except that its
> existence (Haida, Tlingit) is disputed.

Not really, just how Haida and Tlingit are related. There must be
something there that we can call "Na-Dene" or "Athabascan" to
explain the common features, vocabulary and grammar. This is just
like the crap about Altaic vis-a-vis Japanese and Korean. A bunch
of critics will pick on some tiny thing and then say that the family
doesn't exist based on that. Like with Japanese, people will say,
"Well it has Austronesian-ish grammar so it can't be Altaic".
Whatever. There's still Altaic vocabulary and grammar present in
these languages so there must be something we can "Altaic". Some
dolts I think especially have trouble grasping how the "Chinese-
looking" Japanese can have a language related to that of Near-Eastern
folk. "Yes, little Billy, languages and genetics can go seperate
paths!" So what else is Haida supposed to be? Salish?


= gLeN