Re: Stacking up on standard works

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>
> > Considering most Vasco-Caucasian languages have become extinct and

only

> > survive in loanwords to other families such as IE, a direct
> > reconstruction of Proto-VC would very difficult if not impossible.
> > However, it looks like Starostin's PNC (actually Proto-NEC with
> > Proto-NWC fitted in) is a much older entity than commonly though, so
> > IMHO it constitutes a good approximation to the real PVC.
>
> I take this to be an admission of defeat. Though you pretend to stick

to

> the comparative method, you have presented no shred of comparative
> evidence that there is a plausible connection between Basque and NEC.
>

I've got a number of correspondences between both, but I'm afraid this
isn't the appropriate place nor time to show them. Meanwhile I could
refer you to Bengtson's articles.

> Starostin's PNC (never mind its credibility and the validity of a NC
> node) was not reconstructed using any external data, so how on earth

can

> it "approximate" Proto-Vasco-Caucasian? Perhaps you believe Basque is
> nested deep within North Caucasian, in which case "Vasco-Caucasian"

and

> "North Caucasian" would mean the same thing, but that too would

require

> some sort of proof.
>

I must repeat Basque isn't part of NEC or North Caucasian, but in any
case a somewhat distant relative.

AFAIK, the first person to propose a grouping of Basque, (North)
Caucasian and Burushaski was the Polish geographer Bogdan Zaborski c.
1970. He called this grouping "Asianitic". Then came Bengtson in the
'90s and coined the term "Macro-Caucasian" or "Vasco-Caucasian", later
abandoned in the context of a wider "Sino-Caucasian" or "Dene-Caussian"
phylum.

IMHO Vasco-Caucasian would include extinct languages such as Iberian,
Etruscan, Hurro-Urartian ans possibly also Sumerian and Elamite. The
languages brought to Europe by Near East farmers were probably from this
stock.