Re: Odp: Nostratic family

----- Original Message -----

From: Alexander Stolbov

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 1999 12:52 PM

Subject: [cybalist] Re: Nostratic family

[Manuel writes]: <<I'm venezuelan and behind me there are some people gathered on Indoeuropean studies, despite of we are not linguists. Fortunately I have found this and I shall ask you many things to clarify our ideas. Today's question is about Nostratic family. In short, what is the fundamentals of this hypothesis? Was it a language family or rather a human race? What are their daughters?>> [Gerry]: <<Piotr is one of the correct people to ask about the Nostratic family; Alexander Stolbov is the other. Piotr doesn't recognize a Nostratic family while Alexander Stolbov does.>> [Alexander]: I must say that Piotr is a linguist, but I'm a biologist and programmer. So we are not debators of equal qualification (I can bring only extralinguistic considerations or rely on meanings of other linguists). Moreover, Piotr for me is a person of a very high authority not only as a good professional in linguistics, but also as a scholar with accurate and correct sientific views. Nevertheless we differ in opinion on many principal positions. [Piotr again:] May I add that I like to disagree with Sasha (in an entirely friendly way). Our perspectives are complementary and if our opinions seem to clash this may be not because one of us is wrong and the other is right but because my emphasis is on languages and his on populations and cultures. The histories of these entities may be partly but not completely correlated, hence the need to attack the issue from different angles. [Piotr]: <<Here is a typical "word equation" (I quote the forms after Aharon Dolgopolsky and take no responsibility for their validity): Proto-Indo-European *mori 'sea', Egyptian (an Afroasiatic language) mr 'pool, channel', Megrelian (a Kartvelian language) mere 'lake', Proto-Mongolic (a branch of Altaic) *mören 'large river, lake, sea'. Dolgopolsky's Nostratic reconstruction is *moRE, where R = plain or palatalised ('soft') r, and E = an unspecified front vowel.>> [Alexander]: Besides such "word equations" there are cognates among personal and other pronouns, various particles (negative, locative and other), many affixes, terms for body parts, natural objects, many "basic" verbs, some colours, and such words as 'big', 'small', 'high', 'wet', 'young', 'good' etc. Unfortunately I cannot judge whether all these conparisons are covincing enough. But I'm impressed by the number of them. Alas, it's mostly root equations. I wish there were "many affixes" to compare; the case would stand much better. Things like pronouns, negative prticles and case endings match rather nicely between IE and Uralic, but that's about it. The MI/TI phenomenon (the recurrence of the same sounds in 1st and 2nd person pronouns) has been much disputed by linguists but has lost much weight with the advent of improved reconstructions (especially in Afroasiatic studies). As for the rest, let me treat the alleged "body parts" in more detail; the etyma in question are quite amazing. One would expect well-preserved words with meanings like FOOT, HAND, HEART, EYE, MOUTH, TOOTH etc.; instead, we are given two different "protowords" for SPLEEN, plus names for SINCIPUT (crown of the head, in plain English), OCCIPUT (nape), BACK OF THE KNEE/ARMPIT, JUGULAR VERTEBRA, and BILE. Dolgopolsky (1998) assures us that there were words for HEART and LIVER as well, but he doesn't cite the evidence. Still, he claims that "the speakers of Nostratic had a fairly good knowledge of anatomy ... to such details which are not usually distinguished today (by those who are not physicians)". When I read this I can't help thinking that somebody's pulling the back of my knee. The other semantic domains are little or no better. I'm looking forward to the long-promised Nostratic dictionary with 2000 (?!) etymologies, but after seeing the samples published so far I'm not holding my breath. Sheer numbers can't compensate for poor quality. [Piotr]: <<The definition of Nostratic is linguistic, not ethnic, and least of all racial.>> [Alexander]: It's true. And if languages could exist, live and move separately and independently from human bodies nothing to argue about. But every human group using a language has a certain set of social (cultural) and biological (among them racial) features. Of course they are not the same, but they are not statistically independent. Development of some features influences development (and maybe the destiny) of other. We must be carefull when studying it byt we may not ignore it. [Piotr]: <<The Nostratic hypothesis is about the relatedness of the languages in question, not about the shared genetic features of the people who speak them. There may have been an original Nostratic-speaking population in which a specific anthropological type predominated; but its mixing with other groups in the course of Nostratic migrations would have prevented the development of a "Nostratic race".>> [Alexander]: Are not we able to reconstruct the initial racial type as we have reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language? If we found the common genetic complex (maybe "masked" by other) in Chadic, Tungusic, Dravidian and European groups why could not we call it "Nostratic racial type"? [Piotr:] If we did, why not? Do you mean you can detect such a type?