It's gLenNy gEe again, talking to you about IndoEuropean-AfroAsiatic
relationship. I believe it was Marc/Dennis (who are in reality the same
person disguised as seperate internet personas in order to confuse the
unsuspecting internet community) who asked me about this earlier. :)
At any rate, first things first. Let's face it - To ask how IE and AA are
related is like asking how Hindi and Armenian are related. We need to get
into all the intermediate steps between the two languages in order to
succesfully understand their remote relationships. And even then, we may
still be scratching our heads if we attempt a direct comparison.
In order to explain AA and IE relationship, the place to start is "grammar".
But... in order to understand the grammatical relationships, we have to talk
_Nostratic_ grammar (the proposed parent language of the two). But... in
order to talk about Nostratic grammar, we have to first reconstruct it! No
one seems to have succesfully done it to any realistic degree to this date.
Nostraticists are generally a bizarre lot who would rather propose a
plethora of individual reconstructions ad absurdum without any deep analysis
as to what language they are reconstructing. So...
Please visit my proposal on Nostratic grammar at:
http://glen-gordon.tripod.com/LANGUAGE/nostratic_sketch.html
Now that you see how the Nostratic language functions the "gLeNny" way, I
can explain how we derive AA out of this. First, the so-called perfective
1p/2p/3p prefixes [*a-, *ta-, *ya-] are mostly connected to Nostratic's
absolutive pronoun set [*u, *nu, *i]. The pronoun *ku survives beautifully
in AA (Egyptian -k "your", etc), as well as in Kartvelian for that matter
because Kartvelian and AA are two of the most ancient branches of Nostratic.
They are the only ones that preserve this pronoun *ku - it was replaced with
*tu in the third Eurasiatic branch (from which we derive IE). As you can see
above, AA also retains the 2nd person *tu.
AA retains the interrogatives, notably *mi-, and the demonstratives like *cu
(Akkadian -s^u "his"). As for declension, some of the postclitics are
retained but certainly the analytic character of Nostratic was preserved in
AA. Thus, there is little in way of prefixes and suffixes to be expected
here. No declensional synthetic madness like we find in IE.
As for Nostratic to IE, we have a different and _longer_ picture. Afterall,
IE is seperated from Nostratic by some 9,000 years or so while AA is only
seperated by 2-5,000. See the difference?
IE is derivable from "Eurasiatic". Eurasiatic evolved in a more radical way
than AA. First off and most importantly, the 1st person ergative *nu became
the more familiar *mu through accidental labialisation of *n- and in order
to distinguish it from the otherwise identical second person absolutive *nu.
This *mu is the pronoun we see across the board in Sumerian (men), Altaic
(*ben), Uralic (*mi-), Inuktitut (-nga), Aleut (-ng), Etruscan (mi) and yes,
even IndoEuropean (*me, *-m). All these languages fall under my Eurasiatic
subfamily. The second person *ku was lost forever in this branch and
replaced by the stem *tu- which was, afterall, found in both singular AND
plural to begin with.
The absolutive/ergative pronominal contrast was retained in Eurasiatic and
looked something like this before Sumerian split from the grouping, although
Sumerian itself doesn't seem to have preserved the absolutive set:
ABSOLUTIVE ERGATIVE
SING PL SING PL
1p *u *wi *mu *mui
2p *nu *nui *tu *tui
Note: Dravidian's 1ps *yan-/2ps *nin- versus the absolutive *u/*nu
Late Eurasiatic (from which ElamoDravidian would split from) apparently
developed something different from the rest of the Nostratic languages: a
subjective/objective conjugation. The conjugation is obviously derived from
the above absolutive/ergative contrast above, both functionally and
phonetically. This conjugation was used basically to distinguish
intransitive verbs from transitive ones.
After ElamoDravidian left, ProtoSteppe moved northward into Central Asia.
The absolutive pronouns were then disgarded, not without some lingering
evidence of their previous existence, of course (cf. IE *wei & 1ppl
*-me-/*-we- < Steppe *mi/*wi "we").
The pronominal system, conjugational suffixes and declension, all very much
derived from Nostratic, are outlined on my site at:
http://glen-gordon.tripod.com/LANGUAGE/steppe_sketch.html
From there, it's easy to see some resemblance to IE. The
subjective/objective, for instance, gave way to a "mi-class/hi-class" thing
in IE with a different grammatical function than what was intended
originally. Some declensional suffixes are related to IE's set, although the
IE genitive is derived in part from what may have originally been an
"inessive" case (cf. Sumerian terminative -s^e). Now, in order to understand
the _exact_ sound changes involved from Steppe to IndoEuropean would require
that you become familiar with my "Middle IndoEuropean penultimate theory"
which, in itself, is a breath and half.
So, as you can see... IE and AA have very little in common. What the hell do
you expect?? However, there IS a connection... remotely. Therefore, I
personally would avoid the bright-eyed expectation that my Semitish should
explain _every_ similarity that exists between the two language groups.
It's always more complex than that.
- gLeN
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