Odp: Re:Nostratic discussion

[Piotr wrote:] My point of view is as follows: any genetically based taxon (whatever we call it) must be defined like the clade in biology -- as a single language plus all the languages descended from it. So Indo-European consists of PIE plus all its offspring, Germanic is PGmc plus all its descendants, etc.
The requirement that a taxon should be monophyletic is important: e.g. Romance is not a valid taxon if it doesn't include Latin. A superfamily is a "normal taxon" if it can be shown that it is an entity of that kind. Nostratic is a well-formed taxon if it can be shown that IE, Uralic, Yukaghir, Mongolic, Turkic, Tungusic, Japanese, Korean, Afroasiatic, Dravidian and Kartvelian go back to a single protolanguage, and that the taxon includes all the languages that derive from that most recent common ancestor.

[Alexander replied:] I completely agree with [the above]. So I don't undestand why you deny the possibility of existing super-families as "normal taxa". OK, all the modern Nostratists could be wrong, and IE had nothing genetically common with the mentioned families. However IN REALITY, when Proto-Indo-European was just a language spoken by ordinary human beings like you and me, who had thousands of preceding generations behind, why should we insist that they had no "linguistic cousins"? Therefore, there MUST be a super-family (from today poin of view) uniting PIE and something else. Another question - is it properly proved or not, that Uralic etc. are those "cousins".

Yes, it goes without saying that PIE must have had more remote ancestors. It doesn't go without saying, however, that it had living relatives contemporaneous with it. After all, it's imaginable that PIE was an isolated language like Ainu, Burushaski or Japanese in modern times. About 50% of languages spoken on earth at present are either isolates or members of very small families. The concentration of isolated languages is highest in areas where archaic ways of life have survived. So, logically, there NEEDN'T be a superfamily uniting IE with anything spoken today. Even assuming that PIE wasn't an isolate synchronically, its hypothetical relatives may have gone extinct long ago. If they haven't, it remains to proved that such remote genetic connections are scientifically demonstrable. If scholarly opinion is so strongly divided on that point, this is precisely because the evidence for remote relationship is so shaky and ambiguous. I'm sorry, but the burden of proof in such cases is with the proponents of Nostratic and other such groupings, and they'd better provide evidence strong enough to convince experts outside their own camp.

 

Unfortunately, much of what gets published is self-flattering propaganda in semi-popular press, aimed at the general public -- that is, interested laymen who are easily impressed and taken in by learned mumbo-jumbo. (Vitaly Shevoroshkin specialises in this kind of salesmanship: The Mother Tongue: How Linguists Have Reconstructed the Ancestor of All Living Languages. The Sciences, May/June 1990, p. 20-27. Doesn't the very title sound a bit hyperbolic?) Far be it from me to insinuate that all Nostratic research is like that, but there does seem to be something sectarian abot Nostraticism (note the personality cult surrounding the late founding father of the school, Vladislav M. ["Slava"] Illich-Svitych, often renamed Vladimir or Ilyich-Svitych in the Nostratic literature: Freudian slips?). One consequence of that is lowered self-criticism and the unjustified sense of belonging to the vanguard. Who would want to waste time trying to convince benighted sceptics? As Shevoroshkin (1999) says, "they simply never learn (though they may be knowledgeable experts in their own field)." This is bloody arrogance, if I may call a spade a spade. I don't find it prudent to quench my thirst by drinking from Shevoroshkin's fountain of wisdom.

 

Since you mention Uralic, my own intuition tells me that if any extant family is related to IE, it must be Uralic. But one must carefully sift the evidence. There are ancient IE loans in Uralic, some of them going back to very early stages in both families. Still, they are demonstrably loanwords rather than cognates; they testify to close contacts between IE and Uralic, partly supported by archaeological findings in northeastern Europe. There are also slightly later loans from Proto-Indo-Iranian, Proto-Iranian, Proto-Germanic and some more recent Iranian and Germanic languages (into the individual branches and groups of Uralic, mainly into Finno-Ugric or Balto-Finnic alone). In this palimpsest of contacts and linguistic diffusion, genuine cognates would be difficult to identify, and lexical evidence in general has relatively little value. An early loanword will undergo all the regular sound changes in the receptor languages and may be indistinguishable from a protoword (cf. my Slavic *korlj- example). Morphological arguments would be more likely to convince critics, but despite much hard work done by excellent specialists, the "Indo-Uralic" question remains unresolved. I believe further attempts are worth making. I would completely endorse this kind of pairwise comparison as distinguished from lumping together most of Eurasia with northern Africa to boot. Perhaps PIE and PU belonged to a network of distantly related dialects spoken by mesolithic groups scattered over post-glacial Eurasia. But let me repeat: the evidence to date is inconclusive.

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[Piotr wrote:] I have already cited examples of mesolithic peoples who didn't lose the game but joined the winners. Perhaps you underestimate their resourcefulness or overestimate the fierceness of the competition and the dramatic character of the neolithic revolution. Many societies acquired only selected elements of the neolithic -- e.g. Uralic and Turkic speakers adopted nomadic pastoralism and pottery, but no agriculture. This didn't lead to their extinction. What is advantageous to a given society depends on the ecological conditions. Agricultural technologies developed in the Middle East may not have worked very well in the forests of central Europe. Perhaps people who brought them to Europe were not greatly interested in colonising hostile environments and hung on to what they found familiar. But the local hunter-gatherers who had learnt (e.g. through trade contacts) the use of crops and animal husbandry were ideal colonisers. How do you like this scenario?

[Alexander replied:] Indeed, I consider the transition from hunting-gathering to farming as a highly dramatical event for a society. It could be compared with the change of the sex for a human. Selfidentity would be lost.

Look, I, a person of post-Neolithic society, wrote that "from the ecological point of view they [Mesolithic people] can be considered just as public animals". I tried to imagine what would I say about Neolitic people (I stress - Neolithic, not people of later epoques, when wealth was already kept), if I were a Mesoliyhic person. Something like the following: "I am a free and proud hunter. When I need something I just go and take this. They (Neolithics) spend their lifes in digging shit and attending upon their swine. They are people of the second sort. Better to die than to become them." 

 
So I think such transitions happened rather seldom. Ethnography shows that when hanter-gatherer have economical contacts with civilized neighbours, they, as a rule, first lose their native language and start to use the language of the neighbours, and than they (or a part of them) could adapt farming i.e. actually become an ethnic subgroup of another folk. This is a typical way, however exceptions exist, of course. For instant, an argument you brought - Apachee - is very strong. I must accept it. With Xinca (and Lenca) it is not so obvious. Are you sure that they did not practice a primitive horticulture (pepper, gourds or something like this) before they met Mayan-speaking advanced miaze cultivators? I have no data. 

However, you can say: "Apachee is a typical case and your scheme is an exception". Indeed, rules and exceptions is a question of statistics. I suggest to compete in a way "list against list" (I think all the examples should be from the history before XVI-XVIII centuries) . In your list at the moment are Apachee in doubtless part and Xinca in problematical (for me at the moment) part. I have already given you examples of Pygmy (Africa), Kubu (Sumatra) and Kadar (India). I can add now people of Poabin' culture (North Viet Nam), Gaoshan' (I'm afraid, English spelling isn't right; Taiwan), Mrabri (Thailand), Aeta (Philippines). All of them were and mainly are hunter-gatherers and they had lost their native languages. Please attest these examples as doubtless or problematical.

My comment will be brief. I don't question the likelihood of cultural and linguistic assimilation in contacts with "superior" ethnic groups. The question whether they are mesolithic, neolithic or still more advanced is relatively unimportant as long as there is a clear material advantage of one of the societies in contact over the other, making their language prestigious. Political and economic pressures may be enough: Belarus is not a primitive country (despite Aleksandr Grigorevich's best efforts to reintroduce neolithic farming there), but it has lost much of its ethnic and linguistic identity. There was a time when the English ruled Ireland, and one visible consequence of that is the nearly complete extinction of Irish -- the language of a nation with a proud history and a rich culture. I would go as far as to admit that language death is the usual outcome of unequal contacts. But I hope I have shown that counterexamples also exist, and since I'm talking of a single case (PIE), I'm not afraid of statistics.

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[Alexander wrote:] I have a request. Could you estimate, how strong are phonological correspondance laws in Germanic or Slavic group (actually the percentage of exclusions)?

Do you mean between Germanic and Slavic, or within each branch? In either case the correspondences are as regular as one could wish, with the usual allowance for interdialectal loans, analogical reshaping, onomatopeia etc. I can't give you any exact numbers, but my intuitive assessment is that "exceptionless sound laws" work quite well in these particular groups. If you want examples, I'd prefer to provide them independently for reasons of space.

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An afterthought:

 

Talking of regularity: it should be distinguished from superficial similarity. One point worth making is that perfectly regular correspondences are frequently non-obvious. Sanskrit cakram corresponds to English wheel, and Russian snoxa to Latin nurus 'daughter-in-law'; Greek khtho:n 'earth' is related to Russian zeml'a, English egg to Latin ovum, and Welsh edrydd contains the root of Latin pater. There are no raised eyebrows when I tell my students that Polish dwa is a relative of Latin duo, English two, Sanskrit dva: etc., but they do find it surprising that Armenian erku '2' belongs here as well. The fact that such etymologies are far from obvious makes them all the more convincing. They can't have been among the similarities on the basis of which the languages in question were first grouped into a family. It was only the discovery of regular sound correspondences ("laws") that made the above equations possible, thus confirming the genetic relationship hypothesis. They provide a means of escape from circular reasoning in the comparative method.Lack of surface similarity also helps to distinguish between authentic cognates and loanwords or examples of independently operating onomatopoeic formation.

 

By comparison, most Nostratic and Proto-World etymologies look rather unimaginative, and the forms compared show too much boring surface similarity. This is often coupled with loose phonology and still looser semantics. I've copied the following excerpt from a web page devoted to Proto-World (http://hometown.aol.com/yahyam/page24/protoworld.htm):

*KUAN--'dog' ---- canine; cynic; hound; !Kung /gwi 'hyena'; Proto-Afro-Asiatic *k(y)n 'dog, wolf'; Proto-Indo-European *kwon- 'dog' > Sanskrit s'van, Phrygian kan, Latin canis, Greek kuon, Germanic hund; Proto-Uralic *küinä 'wolf'; Old Turkish qanchiq 'bitch'; Monglian qani 'wild dog'; Proto-Tungus-Manchu *khina 'dog'; Korean ka 'dog' (< kani); Gilyak kan 'dog'; Chinese kou 'dog' (<Archaic Chinese khiwen); Tibetan khyi 'dog'; Proto-Oceanic *nkaun 'dog'; Taos kwiane-, Tewa tukhwana 'fox, coyote'

Even assuming that the wolf had already become domesticated by Proto-World, and that the primordial etymon actually meant domestic dog, and not wolf (in the latter case we would have to think of a reason why the wolf was called *w@... rather than *k'uo:n in PIE or why the semantic shift 'wolf' > 'dog' has been so common in different language families), the stability of the word over 150, 100 or (at an improbably low estimate) 50 millennia is just incredible, especially if we reflect on the many interesting changes it has undergone in various IE languages over a much shorter period. On the same page we read:

*AYA--'mother; older female relative' ---- ayah; !Kung 'ai 'mother'; Somali hooyo 'mother'; Tamil âyaL 'mother'; Malay ayah 'father'; Nez Perce ayat 'grandmother'

Never mind the fact that lexemes suspected of being nursery words should be treated with utmost care by serious etymologists -- especially when short and composed of universally common sounds -- the author doesn't even allude to the wanderings of Portuguese aia (< Latin avia 'grandmother'), borrowed into Hindi as a:ya:, and finally into the English of the British Empire as ayah 'Indian or Malay nursemaid'. Of course the original Latin avia would compare rather badly with primordial aya, which may be why it isn't mentioned. The author goes on to say (apparently after Shevoroshkin):

Note that the words ayah, man, and aqua have remained virtually the same since the beginning of time.

Oh, really? Virtually no change for 100 000 years? A HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS?? A thousand centuries? A hundred millennia? Can you blame me if I refuse to suspend my disbelief?

Yours,

 

Piotrek