Spoke I (Kaer Glyn) about Nostratic homeland:
>[...]
>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.
Spoke John:
>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" [...]
Yes, exactly, but this is nothing new and is, in fact, what all of us should
be visualizing as the speakers of these ancient languages we are trying to
reconstruct. These are not people we are reconstructing but rather fluidly
moving languages amongst a wide variety of people who obviously weren't as
socially organized as we are today. Nostratic (or Dene-Caucasian speakers or
Indo-European speakers, for that matter) certainly would have been a bunch
of disconnected groups with varying cultural, genetic and technological
attributes. If John can agree to this, maybe he will eventually agree that
using genetics in order to correctly classify languages is severely
misguided, just as it is to use it for the purposes of figuring out IE
itself.
John heiled:
>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) [...]
Yes, you're fighting it. You're fighting the name Nostratic for something
else. Kartvelian is a Nostratic language. Japhetic is an ugly reference to
the Bible and to racism (neither being scientific), and the term hasn't been
used for a hundred years except by:
1. fanatical religious groups
2. racists, neo-NAZIs, skinheads
3. the down-right crazy (or same as 2.)
4. the educationally impaired
This is not a good term to be using for any linguistic theory (which this is
not).
John:
>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.
_Cultures_! It may not necessarily even suggest population movement or
linguistic movement.
Me say:
>>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.
>>[...]
>>You have no linguistical leg to stand on.
Johann wieder:
>[...] Yukaghir has been suggested to be a distant relative of Uralic,
>[...]
>Paleolithic cultures of Malaya and Mal'ta.
Japanese and Korean are Altaic. Chuckchi-Kamchatkan is not tightly related
to Uralic as far as I know but is seperated from Uralic by 10,000 years
maximum. Yukaghir on the other hand is to Uralic as Etrusco-Lemnian is to IE
- very close. The Inuit speak a language of the well-established
Eskimo-Aleut family (Aleut, Inupiaq, Inuktitut) and is indeed closely
related linguistically to Chuckchi-Kamchatkan and to Uralic-Yukaghir. Gilyak
is also part of this group of languages that ultimately sprang from the
Middle-East along with Dravidian under the Nostratic macro-grouping.
Sakhalin and Tsishima are dialects of the Ainu language group which is
showing some affiliation to AN and other Asiatic languages to the south.
What's more, the Amerind languages as distantly related to Dene-Caucasian as
they no doubt are, seem to have the same general pattern in their pronominal
systems that one can observe for DC. Certainly the entire Amerind spectrum
could not have been influenced by Na-Dene nor could Na-Dene have been
influenced that much by Amerind languages. On the other hand, Amerind cannot
for obvious timeline reasons be a Dene-Caucasian group. A very ancient Asian
connection seems imminent.
Of course, you still have Khoisan and Nilo-Saharan to play with (of which
I'm completely unfamiliar with) and all those isolate languages like
Burmeso, Nihali...
No leg, John, no leg.
John:
>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!
And I continue to refer you to the proper research done that acknowledges
that "language can spread on its own without population movement". Movement
of population implies linguistic movement (as you say) BUT NOT VICE-VERSA!!!
I just want to drill that point home.
Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene are examples of a languages that spread into North
America because of population movement. Common modern languages such as
English, French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, etc are examples of languages
that have spread _without_ population movement, due to our high-degree of
communication. Ancient examples of languages that spread all around without
any clear genetic movement but due rather to economic and political bonds
would be Hittite, Egyptian, Sumerian and Akkadian.
In fact, the original popularity and rise of IndoEuropean in the
Pontic-Caspian area may have been because it was used as a lingua franca for
the local economy, not because of physical displacement or spread. And note,
C.S.'s data if I can recall was showing a dispersal of genetics radiating
out from Anatolia and Middle-East thereabouts. The dispersal would have
occured somewhere around 6,000 BCE and with it, European agriculture. If
genetics is supposed to shine light on linguistic affiliation, why do we
have IE speakers in a continent of people who have genetics from speakers of
languages that were obviously part of other language groups? Don't be daft,
John. Give it up.
Here, language spread is not caused by physical displacement but by other
less archaeologically determinable circumstances.
We can't begin to guess the social stresses placed on language spread or
demise as it occured some 15,000 years ago. If you can rid us of all these
ancient-society-related lurking variables, by all means we'll support your
shakey theory.
John again:
>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.
John, obviously you need _linguistic_ research as the _basis_ of your
_linguistic_ theories, just as _genetic_ research must be the _basis_ of
_genetic_ theories. There's nothing more to say on that. Neither you nor
C.S. et alius who squeeze these conclusions out of our DNA seem to go to
that necessary length.
- gLeN
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