Hakan:
>Hmm... this looks like you're reasoning in a circle. It would be easy >to
>"reconstruct" a Nostratic grammar that proves just what you want to >prove,
>wouldn't it?
It would be easy to make-up a grammar for such a purpose, Hakan, if we were
only dealing with IE and AA which are, I REPEAT, very, very, very remotely
related languages to begin with. The power in such a circumstance is
overwhelming.
As with Hindi & English, direct comparisons are futile because there is too
great a rift. Indo-European and its (gasp!) _reconstructed grammar_ (!!)
brings us to a better understanding about the relationship of these two
languages. Now, I doubt IE grammar was simply devised as a ruse. Of course,
IE is hardly based on these two languages alone either. After employing many
other languages (Hittite, German, Italian, Greek, Armenian, ...) to boost
this theory, nobody seems to dare question the validity of IE or its
proposed grammar.
Now, why should Nostratic be any different here? We have two remote
languages, IE and AA. A grammar has been proposed that is not only based on
these two, but on Etruscan, Uralic, Altaic, InuktitutAleut, Kartvelian,
Sumerian and ElamoDravidian (not necessarily in that order) with careful
respect to all the intermediary steps and exact internal relationships as I
have laid out clearly already on my site.
The point is Nostratic ISN'T any different. We have here the same situation
between IE and AA as we do between English and Hindi.
How easy is it to flounder through a grammatical proposal that acknowledges
all other Nostratic languages and all intermediary steps? That can be
justified with attestations in the daughter languages with careful sound
correspondances? Where entire sets of pronouns/demonstratives as well as
their functions can be explained not only on their own but as evolving
_systems_? Not so easy anymore, is it?
- gLeN
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