Dan Jones:
>Although the debate has been sleeping for a month or so, I came up >with a
>question. We have a reconstructed PIE kinship system, is there >a Nostratic
>one? Do we have any kinship terms at all, and if so what? >I know this
>should be posted to a Nostratic List, but Nostratic has >been discussed
>here before and, quite frankly, the people here seem >friendlier than on
>Nostratic-L, from what I've heard!
So true. I've tried many times to provide discussion on that list but any
time that a thought is uttered, it gets shot down and labeled absurd each
time. Fie on them, I say! :P
Anyways, I personally would love to know the same thing. Bomhard doesn't say
anything about the structure of these kinship terms in his "IndoEuropean and
the Nostratic Hypothesis".
In fact, I highly doubt anything terribly substantial has been done on it
anyways, even though many kinship terms have been reconstructed. Afterall,
take a simple issue like Nostratic pronouns. Many pronouns (sometimes far
too many for my liking) have been reconstructed for Nostratic without any
real analyses of their exact functions. For instance, Bomhard has four
reconstructions for the first person alone - *mi, *na, *?a and *wa! And my
attempts at bringing order to the chaos by proposing an ergative/absolutive
suppletive pronominal system, which would reduce things to only the ergative
1ps *nu (yeilding later forms in both *m- and *n-) and the absolutive 1ps *u
(yielding forms in both *w- and *?-), have been ignored so far (Boohoo...)
As for kinship terms, basically Bomhard has:
*?ab- father
*?at(t)- father
*?am(m)- mother
*?an'- mother, aunt
*?ay(y)- mother, female relative
*?ak(k)- older female relative
*xaw- a maternal relative
... I think that's it. At any rate, we may notice that there are far too
many words here for "mother" and "father". Some things need to be
reorganized and weeded out. I personally distrust the existence of certain
phonemes in Nostratic, such as the lateral afficates/fricatives and palatal
nasals.
Looking at *?an'-, something looks fishy to me. It's based on:
Uralic *an'a "mother, aunt"
Dravidian *an.n.- "a woman, mother"
Altaic:Turkish ana "mother"
AfroAs:PSC *?aN- "father's sister" (N = ing)
Uralic, Dravidian and Altaic are part of the Eurasiatic subbranch while
AfroAsiatic would only be remotely related. The fact that only one branch of
this group is attested makes me suspicious. This leaves only Uralic,
Dravidian and Altaic. Assuming for the moment that Nostratic *n' doesn't
exist (which I think is a healthy assumption based on other floppy
attestations), Altaic hints more at *n. Dravidian then might also be placed
alongside Altaic. We should expect Uralic *ana - I could swear that this
does exist. If there is a Uralic *an'a too however, perhaps it should be
linked with *?ak(k)-. (Coincidentally, there is no Uralic attestation of
*?ak(k)-...)
I would think that *?ay(y)- should be labeled at the very least "female
relative" and not simply "mother".
Perhaps we could reconstruct the following diagram until somebody thinks up
something better:
*aba === *aka *aba === *aka
(g-fa) | (g-mo) (g-fa) | (g-mo)
| |
|-----------| |-----------|
| | | |
*ahwi *ata === *ama *aya
(fa-br/fa-si) (fa) | (mo) (mo-br/mo-si)
|
*u
(EGO)
...which would look kinda Eskimo-ish or something. I don't there's any Omaha
pattern here, but I could be wrong.
- gLeN
Just thoughts, folks. They never tell
you that you're a bad little boy or
steal your lunch money like people do...
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