Danny,

Cool, we seem to be following the same wavelength but I still
have trouble with this placement of Kartvelian, Sumerian and
ElamoDravidian. I know that my thoughts differ in this respect
from those of Bomhard but I don't care, dammit! Nobody seems to
offer good reason why my following thoughts are incorrect...

Certainly, AfroAsiatic looks to be one of the topmost branches,
so perhaps we can all agree on this. However, let's take a lookey
at ElamoDravidian, for example. My feeling is that the only reason
why Bomhard places ED in such a topmost branch is because:

a) he knows little about Elamite and Dravidian
b) ED has diverged a bunch from the Nostratic norm

Yet again, I will state my view that Drav.*yan- "I" and *nin- "you"
derive from Nost.*u and *nu respectively, which are _absolutive_
pronouns.

Most other Nostratic languages kept the ergative pronouns *nu "I"
and *ku/tu "you" (later *mu & *tu in Eurasiatic). Since Dravidian
has eventually favoured these absolutive pronouns, Nostraticists
(who do not yet understand that the Nostratic pronimal system was
suppletive between absolutive and ergative!!) don't know what to do
with ED.

The only thing to do is to place it with Sumerian out of
desperation, simply because Sumerian and ED share this feature of
"strangeness" within the Nostratic family. As far as I know,
strangeness is not a valid linguistic arguement to support a close
genetic relationship between language groups.

Again, the positioning of Sumerian is likewise tentative along the
same reasons. Sumerian is odd as well and Nostraticists don't have a
flippin' clue as to where to put it.

What to do? Well, I think that it's high time that Nostraticists
start looking for common features that define a particular branch
or subbranch of Nostratic in order to better classify these
languages.

Sumerian does not have a trace of any accusative *-m. ED does.
In fact, all of Bomhard's Eurasiatic languages also have accusative
*-m. In Kartvelian, again, there is no accusative *-m but there
appears to be an _ergative_ *-ma suffix. This in itself suggests
that Sumerian is closer to Kartvelian than to "Eurasiatic" or ElamoDravidian
due to this ergative feature, and that ElamoDravidian
is closer to "Eurasiatic" than to Sumerian due to accusativity.

Hence we should shuffle everything around this way:

Nostratic
AfroAsiatic
Berber
Chadic
Cushitic
Egyptian
Omotic
Semitoid
Semitic
Semitish
Kartvelian
Eurasiatic
Sumerian
Emegir
Emesal
ElamoDravidian
Elamite
Dravidian
Steppe
IndoTyrrhenian
IndoEuropean
Tyrrhenian
Camunic
EteoCypriot
EtruscoLemnian
Etruscan
Lemnian
Rhaetic
Boreal
ChukchiKamchatkan
EskimoAleut
UralicYukaghir

Here, of the Eurasiatic languages as I define them, Sumerian
represents the most ancient branch to split away from Eurasiatic
and hence retains ergativity and the lack of accusative *-m. It
is an _ergative_ language as it we find amongst other ancient
Nostratic branches like Kartvelian and AfroAsiatic. When Sumerian
split away, Eurasiatic made a change, making a previous ergative
postclitic *ma an accusative case ending (c.12000 BCE). Hence, the
famous accusative *-m.

There are other innovations shared only by Late Eurasiatic languages
(w/o Sumerian) such as the agglutination of the pronouns only to the
_end_ of verbs, later developing into a fullfledged conjugational
system in Steppe. On the other hand, all Eurasiatic languages
including Sumerian show the loss of ejectives while Kartvelian and
AfroAsiatic clearly retained these sounds.

Eg: Sumerian /b/ < Eurasiatic *b, *p: < Nostratic *b, *p?

The End



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