Knut:

>Does anyone in this group have some knowledge about the gramatical
>structure of nostratic? Was it s-o-v, s-v-o or v-s-o?

Eeeny-meeney-mynie-moe... SOV, I guess... I don't think anyone
truely knows because it doesn't appear that Nostraticists have
bothered themselves too much with grammatical comparison. Lots
of nuts doing the typical, half ad-hoc vocabulary comparisons
though.

>Did it use mostly case endings, prepositions, postpositions, or
>some mixture?

Personal opinion: It was an ergative, highly analytic language,
using postpositions and very few suffixes.

>Indo-european: s-o-v, but developing into s-v-o/v-s-o, using
>case endings
>
>Uralic: I think s-v-o. [...]
>[...]
>Looking at the facts, I am inclined to think that nostratic was
>s-v-o and used a mixture of case endings and prepositions.

Taking the features of word order and use of case endings from
all the Nostratic languages is exactly like using mass comparison
for vocabulary items. It doesn't yield any meaningful conclusion.
It needs to be understood that some Nostratic languages need
to be further grouped into branches and subbranches. Nostratic
family has an INTERNAL structure which has already been defined
to some degree.

IE, Altaic and Uralic all belong to Steppe branch (or Bomhard's
"Eurasiatic" branch). So, these three language groups tend
towards suffixation of case endings and an SOV word order. They
share particular features because of their closer relationship
amongst themselves than to other Nostratic lgs.

Other language groups need to also be properly classified to
understand the difference between true Nostratic features and
those shared amongst only a smaller grouping within Nostratic due
to later innovation.

- love gLeN







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