Re: A SinoTibetan-Vasconic Comparison: A very, very, very, very len

Sorry, I don't have time to go through your basque comparisons at the
moment.
"

> Well apparently someone I read thinks that ST had a uvular /R/, I'll

find

> out who soon enough. I distinctly remember this and I wouldn't bother

making

> it up. So I know you can't be too caught up on theory of SinoTibetan.
> Perhaps this is not the case in Chinese which I agree would have to

have a

> coronal "r". What about TibetoBurman? Uvular or nyet?

Not in tibetan, in kachin, in limbu, in burmese... no language I have
heard of, but there might always be, even in one single language. Many
speakers of russian, for instance, pronounce their r's as an uvular
trills. The acoutic difference is not great; uvular and dental trills
are different mainly because of their articulation. So there are surely
speakers of TB languages that do have uvuar trills. However, the
general tendency (in tibetan and kachin, for example) is to pronounce
the r's with a friction; it sometimes sounds like a french j, sometimes
like a czech r^.

>
>
> Lower than DC? Ugh. Well, TibetoBurman would be the closest but even

I am

> not too read on that family all too well. Taking TB away, there's

nothing

> but remote language families like Na-Dene and Burushaski-Yeneseian.

They are

> both vastly different from ST but my position is that ST simplified

alot of

> DC grammar. I believe Burushaski does have a causitive s-. Na-Dene

languages

Well, semitic also has something like that, the s^-stem of akkadian.
DOes it suffices you to compare afroasiatic with chinese ?
So you think (like Starostin) that yenisean is closely related to
chinese and TB ?

> Interesting. Starostin appears to acknowledge your "hmyj?" to some

degree

> under his ST *me:jH with *sm[e:]j?...

Of course he does. Everybody does. Staorostin reconstructs sm- because
he reconstructed already aspirated nasals in th wrong place (I told you
already). What I call a/ he calls "long vowels", and b/ "short vowels".
The notation I use is more agnostic as to the phonetic reality of this
feature.

>
> >I think body parts, basic verbs of action, are the most conservative
> >words, not numerals. As for pronoms and grammar words, the issue is
>not
> >settled.
>
> Why do you ignore *m-hutL which is a wonderfully preserved body part

term?

> It shows regular change to Vasconic *mik: (> *mik:i > *bigi > Basque

begi)

> by the way just as *tLu becomes Vasconic *k:u (Basque gu). What do

you need

> in order for you to be satisfied with a) Dene-Caucasian and b)

Sino-Tibetan?

well, you correspondance is not so convincing mriwk ~ m-huk < m-hutl
??? What is the phonological system of your DC ?

>
> Anyways, the *m-hutL saga goes on. I was in the library today and

glimpsed

> at a book "Atlas of Languages" (1996). I found quite by accident, a

page

> where it openly talked about "Austric" and coincidentally cited an

example

> of "eye":
>
> Austronesian MonKhmer Kam-Thai
> *mata *mat *taa
>
> It said that the Kam-Thai example shows it's loss of the word class

prefix

> in this Austric hypothesis (hmm...) Now compare my Dene-Caucasian

*m-hutL

> for "eye". You start to wonder. That makes two tentative

correspondances

> that would show *tL = *t between DC and these SEast-Asia-based

languages:

>
> DeneCaucasian Austric
> eye *m-hutL(a) *m-hutL *m-ata
> we *tLu *tLu *ta

Aie aie aie. In fact, AN is matsa (cf paiwan), but
proto-malayo-polynesian has mata, because -ts- -t- merged. The AN
language that became proto-Kam-Dai was a PMP language. We have the well
know pair :
AN Thai
matsa taa "eye"
matsay taay "die"

In saek, a arcvhaic thai language, these words pop up as pra and pray :
mata > mta > pta > pra.
This was shown by Haudricourt.
So the comparison AN <-> Kam/Dai is genuine. However, I am not sure the
comparison with AA is a good idea, because in asia, words tend to get
shorter by dropping the first syllable, not the last. I would accept
the comparison if we had mta or mca in AA.

> So what's the problem? Why do you fight the obvious with a catch-all

excuse

> of borrowing? How many is enough?? Argh, I'll ask on a similar note

as

> above: What will it take for you to accept Indo-Uralic (or rather
> ProtoSteppe)? The pronouns, the subjective/objective in Uralic vs
> imperfective/perfective in IE, many verb roots, etc. show

relationship. The

Anyway, I need to read some more on uralic and IE before I can give my
opinion on the subject.

Guillaume