longgren@...:
> Bomhard, in THE NOSTRATIC MACROFAMILY, lists a proto-Nostratic >root
>*har-/*her- "to be superior, to be higher in status or rank, to >be above
>or over"
Number #387, to be exact. This reconstruction crumbles at first touch. I've
said before that many of Bomhard's reconstructions have only IE and AA
cognates and it is these items that I generally ignore since they are
unlikely to be Nostratic terms based on their modest morsels of evidence. IE
and AA are seperated by a good expanse of time and geography (probably a
good 15,000 years of seperation). Connections between those two, without
anything in between, makes them good coincidences or possible loanwords at
most.
>In Altaic languages and Japanese there are many words with cognates >in
>Indo-European, especially having to do with "ruler", "king", >"horse",
>"chariot", "wagon", and the like.
Cognates? As in an underlying genetic relationship based on these terms?! I
hardly think so. Chariots and wagons were invented far too late to have been
part of the "UralAltaic" (or what I call "Proto-Steppe") stock which would,
by necessity, have been spoken well before 4000 BCE. I fail to see common
words for "horse" in IE, Uralic and/or Altaic but I game in listening to
your proposal. A nomadic, non-horse-riding, hunter-gatherer people such as
these Steppe-speaking band societies would have been would hardly have a
word for "king" either.
Now, I just hate when people get hasty and reconstruct vocabulary that is
outright impossible for the time period they are trying to reconstruct.
Methinks that your theory needeth adapt to the realities at hand.
- gLeN
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