Re: Stacking up on standard works

From: Rick McCallister
Message: 69266
Date: 2012-04-07

Kerns is his name. All he did was include Nostratic in what he saw as a larger entity. But first Nostratic needs to be proven. Of all the mega-families, it's the only one that has much going for it --yet it needs much more work.
VC is a sandcastle built on a foundation of cards. No one has even demonstrated the viability of Northern Caucasian, so how can you go even farther back?
Only Starostin is really working on it. Bengtsen puts his hypothesis before any inconvenient facts. So VC is only a wisp of a dream at present.
OTOH, many brillian people have worked on Nostratic and its constituent families --it's a century more advanced than work on VC.

From: Tavi <oalexandre@...>
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, April 6, 2012 7:40 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Stacking up on standard works

 
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister gabaroo6958@ wrote:
>
> Look at Bomhard, he takes the conzertmeister route. He trusts the
> authority of world famous linguists and lets them do a lot of the heavy
> lifting. He then picks up his baton and choreographs a Nostratic
> symphony by incorporating what he considers as complementary and
> coherent relationships. Now, he has to rely on the often glacial and
> very uneven pace of historical linguistics in various families and has
> to rewrite and rethink sections when theories are overturned, but it's a
> wise place to be if you're dealing with such vast fields of information.
>
Actually, I hired him as a concertino in my own orchestra. :-) 
> > Rick, did you have you read this?
> > http://vasco-caucasian.blogspot.com/2011/11/indo-european-horses.html
>
As you can see, it was Krens (a former partner of Bomhard) who rooted "Nostratic" in the Dene-Caucasian phylum. But I'm afraid this "Proto-Nostratic" wasn't the mother tongue of a plethora of languages (like in a modern version of the diaspora of Noah's sons), but only the source of Neolithic loanwords such as Semitic 'goat', 'pig' and Kartvelian 'pig', which I derive from a root which originally designated ungulates (i.e. hoofed animals). Interestingly, this root gave 'horse' in NEC (which then passed to the paleo-IE dialect of the Steppes) and 'donkey' in Sumerian.
The IE words for 'male goat' (Latin caper) and 'boar' (Latin aper), not derived from traditional PIE due to irregular sound correspondences, stem from the autochthonous European Neolithic, from where they were exported to Semitic:  Arabic Gafr-, Gufr- 'young of chamois or goat', ?\ifr-, ?\ufr- 'pig, boar, piglet'.