John:
>It is interesting that Hurro-Urartuean of the Middle East is supposed
>to have a genetic link with the same NW Caucasian family.
No, John. Yet again, you make painful linguistic goof-ups without consulting
an encyclopaedia before you speak. Another "tsk" for you. You should notice
that Nakh-Daghestinian equals NorthEAST Caucasian and not NorthWEST. If I
had my way, NWC would be far removed by 15,000 years or more from NEC,
Hattic and HurroUrartian. They are very different languages. (Consult my
long-range linguistic tree.)
The NEC, Hattic and HurroUrartian languages (whose parent-language name I
must invent to alleviate typing them all every time) are found on my map
together in the color purple (or "lavender" for the fashion-oriented :).
(Consult my linguistic map of 6000 BCE.) I place NWC to the north (since it
would have migrated there from a direction different than NEC).
>*stu (bull) in NW Caucasian sounds very much like PIE *(s)teuro- to
>me.
To me too. However, I'd be cautious. I haven't seen the associated cognate
series of the NEC languages yet. They tend to interborrow alot and I can't
be sure whether this is truely an inherited term from NEC or borrowed into
certain languages and then dispersed amongst others.
Note that Chechen lacks the *-r- found in Semitic and even IE! We also have
initial *st- that would correlate with the Semitic *T (voiceless dental
fricative "th") but even better with IE *st-.
Let's take a walk-through. Mid IE would have validly borrowed the term
*Tawru as *steure or *teure (later with nominative *-s and the recognizable
apophony caused by accent). We find both variants in IE languages which show
that the IndoEuropeans didn't know what to make of the sound *T. I find it
interesting that this same characteristic consonant cluster that we find in
IE, shows up in Chechen, as if it were borrowed from an IE dialect....
Perhaps some later IE dialect with **stur ends up in some later NEC dialect
as *stu. On the other hand, there are other words in Chechen with /st-/
which do not seem to derive from NEC *st-. I have to look into that.
>I can remember a previous posting in which I gave the cognates for
>Semitic Indo-European
>weino- waynu "wine"
>
>in Karvellian, Hurrian and other languages,
Which is true. However, in light of the many other words that are blatantly
Semitic, it seems like an unnecessary complication to assume a different
source of this important item. It's also very impossible for IE to have
borrowed the term from Kartvelian for phonetic reasons and Hurrian never was
in contact with IE... ever! Where would wine be most likely cultivated?
Maybe... the Balkans? By who? Maybe... the agricultural-oriented Semitish?
>I wonder if the NW Caucasian agricultural terms that Nichols is >finding
>[...]
NEC, John, not NWC.
>Have a look at the arrows for the maps I posted up on Indo-European
> >Neighbours.
Can you send me the file, John. I don't know how to access your map from the
link you gave and I would like to see what you have done so that I can
understand a bit more on what you're saying.
- gLeN
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