Knut:

>I agree that steppe propably was of the sov-type. But then steppe
>has to be compared with semittic/hamittic, [...]

First: It's spelled "Semitic" and "Hamitic".
Second: The language family you are refering to is called
"Hamito-Semitic" or "Afro-Asiatic".
Third: I don't believe that AfroAsiatic has all the answers
and there are closer languages to compare Steppe to,
like Dravidian, Elamite or Sumerian.

My view is that Nostratic was probably SOV, but I don't dismiss
the possibility of SVO. On the other hand, I fail to see the
justification for prepositions (as opposed to postpositions).
I also doubt that the "case endings" were anything more than
postpositions. In other words, they were not bound to the noun
stem.

So, for example, the ergative case (the origin of the
accusative *-m seen in Steppe and Dravidian) would have been
marked with a _postposition_ *ma and not with a suffix. The
meaning of *ma would be equivalent to English "via" or
"by means of" and used for transitive verbs to convey the agent
of an action.

>In the Indo-european group there has been a development towards the
>VSO-type, but this has been extreemely slow, and nowhere completed.

You're perhaps thinking of the Celtic branch of IndoEuropean which
has developed features that some suspect to be caused by contact
with a previous population in Western Europe speaking some sort
of AfroAsiatic language ("The Atlantiker Hypothesis") where VSO
word order is more typical.

- love gLeN


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