Re: dating of aryans

On 2008-04-10 06:51, Rick McCallister wrote:

> There aren't many technologically primitive people
> left. But many Native American languages will give you
> a run for your money.
> There are some languages in New Guinea and Australia
> that make IE and Sanskrit look like child's play with
> "trial" number, totally bizarre case morphemes, etc.
> that surpass anything out of the Caucasus.
> See Facts on File's book coffee table book on
> languages. I forgot the name but it gives you a lot of
> interesting examples.

Or take, for example, Tundra Nenets, spoken by tent-dwelling nomadic
reindeer herders with an animistic-shamanistic system of beliefs. It has
16 (yes, sixteen) verb moods (including e.g. the probablitative, the
superprobablilitative and the hyperprobabilitative), seven cases and
three numbers in nouns (almost like Sanskrit), a fairly complex
morphophonology and a very rich derivational system.

Piotr