>Origins of the Nostratic Group.
Oh-oh...
>The Nostratic family has been considered to be divided
>into two - a western group, comprising Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic >and
>Kartvelian, and an Eastern Group consisting of Dravidian,
>Uralic-Yukaghir and Altaic.
By who exactly? It's incorrect. IE is most definitely more related to
Uralic-Yukaghir and Altaic then it could ever possibly be to Kartvelian and
AA. Even people that are not in support of an IE-Uralic relationship will
agree here.
The link is made no doubt because of the casual coincidence of ablaut in all
three language groups but I dare anyone to define adequately the connection
between all of them. Bomhard has tried a Nostratic reconstruction with
ablaut (which only serves to complicate his reconstruction efforts),
pretending that ablaut was inherited in all the languages and hoping that no
one questions why exactly he's doing this (I haven't seen a good explanation
for this at all from him). However, even he links IE closer to Uralic than
Kartvelian or AA.
The fact is, ablaut can arise in different languages independantly due to
stress accent without their existing ablaut in the parent language. Stress
accent obviously helps to erode unstressed vowels to schwa and preserve
stressed ones. IE ablaut happened long after it had branched out from
Nostratic. Can anyone explain in detail the relationship between IE stress
and AA stress to prove me wrong? No takers? I rest my case. There is no
direct relationship either between their accent or ablaut and thus, there is
no other rational arguement left to link IE to AA's bosom.
>Carvalli-Sforza's Genetic Tree of Human Populations shows that there >is
>some justification to this division.
A genetic tree will never serve as justification for any linguistics theory.
Stop with these racist assumptions, please John. Until you whip out
linguistics as proof, no one with a brain will get passed your flawed use of
C.S.'s genetic theories (in themselves flawed) as an excuse for dreamy-eyed
research.
- gLeN
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