Regarding a "two times" discovery of agriculture, Glen suggested
> Interesting... but what if Nostratic is associated with both? It's
not as if
> Nostratic-speakers were glued under a single government in a single
place
> with a border. It's next to impossible to connect Nostratic with the
> archaeology. How can we be absolutely sure a word meant "goat"
instead of
> "sheep", and so on. This requires long debates about each etymology
and
> being secure in its reconstruction.
> Then, we can talk specifics like Zagros.
I strongly agree with this. Perhaps instead of thinking of Nostratic
as a single language, we could think of it as a number of
multidimensional "dialect chains" in which either the intermediate
languages have since been covered over by subsequent movements of
peoples and cultures, or else the intermediate languages have evolved
into something else (another member of the Nostratic family).
I wrote:
> >Excellent point, except I would think that this division separates
> >between the Anatolian and the Iranian branches of my hypothetical
> >Caucasian-Japethic family.
Glen replied
> Look, John, this Caucasian-Japhetic family is cute and all but if you
don't
> explain it properly, how are we supposed to infuse realism into it? I
am
> curious as to why you're fighting the well-known name "Nostratic"
with an
> obscure racist one. It would be nice if this theory was based on
> _linguistics_ first BEFORE any archaeology or genetics were used to
further
> confuse this topic.
Glen, first of all I am NOT fighting against Nostratic Theory (see my
post of last night). My Caucasian-Japethic family (or more properly a
Karvellian-Japethic theory) is suggesting that Agriculture developed
out of a single substrate Nostratic language that stretched probably
from Palestine to the Zagros in the late Ice Age. This group, shown
culturally by the Kabellan-Zarzian cultures expanded north and west
into Anatolia and expanded southwards and eastwards into Plateau Iran
in mesolithic times. The related Hissar and Keltimaran mesolithic
cultures were displaced north and east (perhaps bearing the
proto-Altaic languages into Central Asia and forested Eastern Siberia).
To the west, microlithic Pontic Tardenoisian cultures (I am at work so
don't have their names here) spread north from the Balkans to the
Ukraine and trans Ural regions. These could have been the origins of
the proto-Uralic and proto-PIE peoples.
> Secondly, there is absolutely no linguistic evidence to warrant a
linguistic
> division of "Arctic". Eskimo-Aleut, Chuckchi-Kamchatkan and Yukaghir
> (closely related to Uralic) are Nostratic. Yeniseian and Burushaski
appear
> to share close ties and are part of the larger Dene-Caucasian group.
Being
> that I accuse Nostratic of being in reality a DC language itself
means that
> all the Arctic languages are potentially of Dene-Caucasian origin.
You have
> no linguistical leg to stand on.
Ultimately, I suppose all northern Eurasian languages relate to one
another via the spread of Homo-sapiens into this region 40,000 years
ago. Yukaghir has been suggested to be a distant relative of Uralic,
but I haven't seen the same claim made for Chuckchi-Kamchatkan. There
is also the remnant language of Northern Sakhalin that seems to fit
nowhere, and the problem of the affiliations of the Koreans and the
Japanese. Given that I don't accept a Nostratic connection for Amerind
Languages, and given that Innuit seems to be connected ultimately (both
genetically and linguistically) to Chuckchi-Kamchatkan, it would seem
that there is a large autochonous language family here much displaced
by Altaic Nostratics, that derives ultimately from the language spoken
by the people of the Upper Paleolithic cultures of Malaya and Mal'ta.
I would see what you call the Dene-Caucasians as SCAN peoples
(Sino-Caucasian-Amerind-Nostratics) - the original Aurignacian culture
which expanded into the lands occupied by Neanderthals, coming north
from Africa and the Levant, across Anatlia and then north east across
the Urasian steppe 40,000 years ago.
This group, I hypothesise, split into three large blocks -
1. the Basque-Caucasian-SinoTibetan-NaDene, which became the big game
hunters and cave painters who stretched from the Dordogne to Mongolia,
2. the Arctic group which moved eastward into Berengaria and the
Cordilleran coridor into America, or split to move southward from the
Amur as a litorial culture into the Sakhalin and the Japanese
archipelago and
3. the Nostratics who occupied the area stretching from Iran to the
Balkans and from Georgia to North East Africa.
The subsequent history, I suggest, is that at the end of the ice age,
group one either moved north (following the retreating herds of
reindeer (eg the Maglemosian cultures, Yeniseian and Na Dene) or became
confined to mountain refuge areas (Basque, Caucasian, Burushkasi, and
Sino-Tibetan), by the spread northwards and eastwards (or westwards
along the North African shore) of mesolithic Nostratic people.
Glen a écrit:
> Malheureusement, John a continué avec:
> >This is certainly what the genetic evidence suggests, (and yes Glen,
>I am
> >aware that language and genetics do spread differently, but as
> >Carvalli-Sforza showed in the History and Geography of Human
>Genetics -
> >there is a moderately close corelation between the >genetic
phylogeny of
> >the human race and reconstructed linguistic >ones.)
>
> John, if you are so aware of the basic, inescapable fact that
language and
> genetics spread differently, then why do you insist on genetical
arguements
> over linguistical ones? Whether or not there is a "moderately close
> correlation" between genetics and linguistics, your acknowledgement
that
> they are different things diffuses your whole point and brands you
> irrational. If you supply linguistical evidence to support your
outlandish
> assumptions, I for one will not consider you the racist that you
appear to
> be for holding on to groundless fantasies.
I would refer you to the research done on the fact that "speakers
spread language" and that "people spread genes". And surprisingly
speakers are people! As people move they tend to spread both their
languages and their genes with them. The evidence shows that there is
a fair corelation between genes and language in most cases. In the
exceptions where they don't fit well, it has been shown that one of two
factors operate.
1. Either a small dominant elite succeeds in instilling its language
over the tops of a sub-dominant genetic majority (the case of English
in West Africa for instance), or else
2. A language group manages to maintain itself as unique, despite a
slow genetic influx from its neighbours (the case of Basque (and even
to a lesser extent, Saami).
Glen, I think we need to look at more than linguistic evidence over
time. We need to consider linguistic evidence, genetic evidence and
cultural evidence if we are to successfully uncover what happened in
the past. To include only linguistic etymology as the source of your
information is to buildfold yourself and work only by a sense of touch.
Hope this helps
John