Re: [TIED] Nakh-Daghestanian linguistic family ; Celtic & Afro-Asia

>Now, however, linguist Johanna Nichols of the University of California,
>Berkeley, has used language to connect modern people of the Caucasus
> >region to the ancient farmers of the Fertile Crescent.

Ever get the feeling that people are copying you? Doesn't my linguistic map
show this already? The languages are hanging around the area and I purposely
laid the purple out to imply that the centre of the spread of Hattic,
HurroUrartian and NEC lie in the North Fertile Crescent area. Damn I'm good.
Excuse me while I toot my horn.

>she dated the ancestral language to about 8000 years ago.

Sounds descent. Good ol' Nichols.

>Nichols also found that the ancestral language contains a host of >words
>for farming. The Chechen words muq (barley), stu (bull), and >tkha (wool),
>for example, all have closely related forms in the >earliest branches of
>Daghestanian, as do words for pear, apple, dairy >product, and oxen
>yoke--all elements of the farming package developed >in the Fertile
>Crescent. Thus location, time, and vocabulary all >suggest that the farmers
>of the region were proto-Nakh-Daghestanians.

Hmm. I wonder how Semitic obtained the word *Tawru if it's an NEC word
(Chechen /stu/).

>Nichols is now reconstructing the ancestral language,

Good, that language is a mess and Starostin's far-flung phonologies aren't
helping matters.

>Overall, Gensler found that about half the shared features are
>rare elsewhere. "I think the case against coincidence is about as good >as
>it could be," he says.
>[...]
>Although others are interested in Gensler's idea, so far "there is no
>significant northwest African genetic signature ... in Celtic
> >populations,"

Sounds like there are others like John who can't seperate language from
genetics. It doesn't necessarily follow that we should see an "African
genetic signature" in the British Isles. It's only necessary for Africans to
have arrived into Spain. From there, a language can spread amongst the
existant population. This language would no doubt be the same one that has
given Basque the words /sei/ "six" and /zazpi/ "seven". What's more, these
two AfroAsiatic words seem to have "shifted" the meaning of /zortzi/ "eight"
and /bederatzi/ "nine" which correlate with "seven" and "eight" respectively
in other DeneCaucasian languages like SinoTibetan.

>But in this instance, he adds, the linguists may be ahead of the
>geneticists, for researchers need more genetic markers before they can
>confirm or refute Gensler's idea.

ARRRRRGGHHHHHHH!!!!!! Are geneticists on drugs or are they just born that
way??

- gLeN

________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com