From: Patrick Ryan
Message: 52042
Date: 2008-01-29
----- Original Message -----
From: "fournet.arnaud" <fournet.arnaud@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 2:22 AM
Subject: Re: Re: [tied] Can relationships between languages be determined
after 80,000 years?
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>