Re: Odp: Nostratic family

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 669
Date: 1999-12-23

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Alexander Stolbov
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Thursday, December 23, 1999 12:15 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: Nostratic family

[Piotr]: <<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.>>
 
Alexander: I agree, they can't. On the other hand, even 95% of false evidences can't abolish the rest 5% if they are really reliable. And what to do with the regular sounds correspondencies? Some of them don't look trivial: *l- and *r- in all the branches give *n- in Dravidian; Nostratic *q- corresponds to IE *h- and disappears in East-Nostratic (Uralic, Dravidian, Altaic). (Slava Illichu :)
I Dolgopolsky has a hundred really convincing equations, why doesn't he publish THEM in the first place? I'd love to see some of them. What he DOES put forward is what I'd call poor-quality stuff. Is he hiding his light under a bushel?
 
If in somebody's list of etymologies only 5% look good, they may well represent the expected occurrence of chance similarities or ancient loanwords.
 
As for the "regular" sound changes, they turn out to be less regular if you look at the etymologies in detail and see how much liberty Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolski take with individual items. Dolgopolsky uses so many cover symbols for classes of phonemes that occasionally he gets confused himself. As for Nostratic *l, it sometimes gives Dravidian *t as well; *r also suffers an unconditioned split in Tungusic (*r or *n). To account for various correspondence patterns Nostratic consonants are multiplied beyond belief (of course ANYTHING can be compared with ANYTHING ELSE if your inventory of protophonemes is sufficiently large). The current version of Nostratic has 50 (FIFTY) consonants, including eight coronal fricatives and twelve coronal affricates. Its far more complex that the phoneme system of any of its daughters. Such an overgrown inventory simply masks what would otherwise appear to be a lot of irregularity.
 
Piotr