Re: Can relationships between languages be determined after 80,000 y

tsalam? t?ob

For the same reason,
it's absurd to connect Uralic and PIE
because of just of *me and *te
while being unable to offer
more than *wed "water" as cognates.

And I don't mention the fact that these reconstructions
are dubious for Uralic in the first place.

CF. Samoyed forms with #b- as initial ...

Arnaud

----- Original Message -----
From: Piotr Gasiorowski
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 2:32 AM
Subject: [Courrier indésirable] Re: [tied] Can relationships between
languages be determined after 80,000 years?


On 2008-01-28 18:52, mkelkar2003 wrote:

> http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001037.html

The Andamanese languages were assigned to the Indo-Pacific superfamily
by Joseph Greenberg (together with Tasmanian, for example). I, for one,
find such classifications unacceptable. The Andamanese peoples have
probably lived there for tens of thousands of years and speak languages
belonging to at least two endemic families. Not all their pronoun
systems are similar to that of Juwoi, so the argument involves some
cherrypicking (BTW, Kusunda has <gina>, not <gida> for 'he', which makes
the similarity to Juwoi kitE slightly less striking, and I'm sorry to
report that the similarity does not extend to the plural).

We have no proof that the Kusunda have lived just where they still live
for time immemorial; their language may once have had relatives all over
India. With all these reservation the idea that a small segment of the
basic vocabulary, such as the pronoun system, can remain in existence
for tens of millennia, is not absurd. I mentioned this very possibility
a few days ago, commenting on the word-evolution study by Pagel et al.
However, to DETERMINE relationships between distant languages which have
pronoun systems that look as if they might be related one would have to
look for further matches following the same pattern. After all, striking
as the similarity is, it MAY be accidental. A correspondence like tui :
tsi, gen. tii-ye : tsi-yi seems to indicate that both languages are
incredibly conservative -- almost no change over millennia upon
millennia. It looks closer than the agreement between, say, Greek and
Gothic! If so, cognates should be very easy to find, and if they haven't
been found outside the pronoun system -- well, we may be dealing with
another BD/BD case (barely detectable but beyond demonstration), or
merely a ghost relationship.

Piotr