Re: [tied] Anatolia in 7500BC

From: Glen Gordon
Message: 13522
Date: 2002-04-27

John:
>Glen, it if PIE, Uralic and Altaic were all in Anatolia together,
>surely it would have been as Proto-Eurasiatic or Proto-Steppe that
>was present in Anatolia.

Surely no. As I told Steve, even though I'm confident that IE,
Uralic and Altaic are related, a seperation of only 4000 years
(if we are speaking of a movement occuring around 8000 BCE) is
outright ridiculous and doesn't account for the differences that
exist between the languages. As much as they are alike, there
appear to be some big grammatical differences that need time to
develop. The subjective-objective thing comes to mind for example,
which is shared amongst the Boreal languages (Uralic, Yukaghir,
EskimoAleut and Chukchi-Kamchatkan) which are themselves very
different. The large diversity of Steppe languages is not being
appreciated in this out-of-Anatolia scheme.


>It is true that there is no "linguistic evidence" to suggest that
>this is the case, because Anatolia has been such a linguistic
>highway [...] to have expected linguistic evidence of Proto-Steppe
>to have survived all this coming and going would be too much.

Absence isn't evidence.


>By the time the languages were splitting between PIE, Uralic
>and Altaic they had long moved north to the Eurasian steppes
>and forest regions to the north.

There's just not enough time for these languages to develop the
way they did.


- love gLeN


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