Danny Wier:
>Starostin has some reconstructed Chukchi-Kamchatkan roots on his >Tower of
>Babel website. Is there a reconstructed Proto-Eskimo-Aleut?
According to Bomhard, there isn't but "great progress has been
made in reconstructing Proto-Eskimo" (p.80 "Indo-European and the
Nostratic Hypothesis" 1996). Unfortunately, the resources at my
university library are so pathetic that I can search for virtually
any non-IE language and get nothing at all. So, Bomhard uses a
Proto-Eskimo (or should we say Proto-Inuit, just to be politically correct?
:P) reconstruction. Here's what he says in
the above mentioned book, my only book on Nostratic so far :(
"The Proto-Eskimo vowel system was relatively simple (Proto-
Eskimo had only four vowels: *i, *a, *u, *@ - phonemic
length did not exist), while the consonant system resembled
that of Proto-Uralic."
Danny Wier:
>Right now I'm just asking what everybody's opinions are on the
> >relationship of Inuit-Aleut and Chukchi-Kamchatkan are: 1) to each other,
>2) to Nostratic, 3) specifically to Uralic or any other Nostratic family,
>4) to Dene-Caucasian or Ainu or whatever, if not Nostratic.
I know little about ChukchiKamchatkan but many relate it closely
with EskAleut so until I have reason (and bloody information!) in
order to doubt the claim, I'll do the same.
I further connect EA and CK to Uralic-Yukaghir, and, in my scheme
of things, the three language groups are part of the "Boreal"
subgrouping of Proto-Steppe. I believe that there are common
features amongst this subgrouping like subjective-objective
conjugation or remnants thereof. One noticable phonological
commonality is the collapse of voiced and voiceless stops to
voiceless which sets them apart as well. What makes things
difficult in relating EskAleut to Uralic, however, is the fact
that EskAleut would seem to have reinvented the Steppe
first and second pronouns. Both Aleut and Inuit
agree on using sentences like "I am here" (note the same meaning
underlying IE *eg^o: < *e-g^e "here" + -o: "I") rather than the
familiar 1ps *mu. Thus, Inuit /uva-nga/ and Aleut /ti-ng/ for
first person singular. The conjugational system, however, shows
traces of the original pronouns, as it does in IndoEuropean.
Under the Boreal subgrouping, they are within a branch of Steppe
which is in turn a branch of Eurasiatic (consisting of Sumerian,
ElamoDravidian and Steppe) which is finally, a branch of Nostratic.
Consult my Nostratic page at
http://glen_gordon.tripod.com/LANGUAGE/NOSTRATIC/nostratic.html
Now, as for the fourth part of your question, I find the connection
between Nostratic and Dene-Caucasian the most intriguing. Kerns
apparently thinks that Nostratic is itself Dene-Caucasian. That
is, Nostratic is under the Dene-Caucasian umbrella. I'm inclined
to agree with this view but I've been trying to develop it further.
So far, I feel that Nostratic should be most closely related
to Buru-Yen (Burushaski-Yeneseian) and Niger-Kordofanian. At any
rate, while it's certain that Dene-Caucasian must have had word
classes with prefixed elements to nominal roots based on their
gender, Nostratic appears to have lost these prefixes although
gender distinction might still be present. If we are to relate
Nostratic to external macrofamilies properly, I feel we must make
note of these grammatical peculiarities.
Ainu isn't even Dene-Caucasian, let alone Nostratic, as far as I'm
concerned. It is better placed beside the Austronesian languages.
Greenberg's mass comparison is probably to blame for this continuing
non-issue concerning the relationship between Ainu and other Eurasiatic
languages. Ainu is definitely beyond a shadow of doubt
UNCONNECTED to EskAleut, Uralic and Altaic aside from early
linguistic exchanges between it and Japanese.
- gLeN
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