Jose's an EAist, eh? Cool. I have questions. Good ol' Bomhard mentions
vaguely the functionings of the Proto-Eskimo language and uses it for
a handful of his Nostratic reconstructions. If I recall correctly,
he mentions nothing about _EskimoAleut_ phonology in his "Indo-European
and the Nostratic Hypothesis". So here I go asking things:


1. What is the basis for voiceless nasals and semivowels?
2. Do the voiced fricatives *D, *v and *R occur only medially?
3. What is the basis for *r' as opposed to *l, or are they
allophones?

Please excuse my ignorance but I can't live without knowing. I may
very well hang myself if I don't get an answer! :P At any rate, I
don't see what's particularly "odd" in the phonology aside from the
voiceless *M and *W.

I remember taking a looky at EskimoAleut and thinking about how it
relates to Nostratic. I concluded that it has close affiliations
to Uralic-Yukaghir, especially phonologically, and that Proto-Steppe
*k might have been sometimes palatalized to ProtoEskimo *c (kinda
like those IE Satem languages). Say! How come ProtoEA doesn't have
*c (dental affricate)?? How does this relate to the ProtoEskimo used
in Bomhard's work?

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gLeNny gEe
...wEbDeVEr gOne bEsErK!

home: http://glen_gordon.tripod.com
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