In a message dated 11/04/02 20:15:04 GMT Daylight Time,
glengordon01@... writes:

> Lastly, exactly when Kartvelian would have diverged from Nostratic
> is a blur but I notice particular similarities with the Eurasiatic
> languages. I feel there was some special tie between them that
> seperates these languages from AfroAsiatic. Whether this tie is due
> to long-lasting areal influence or due to the fact that Kartvelian
> and Eurasiatic form a grouping on a par with AA sharing special
> linguistic innovations, I can't firmly decide yet.

You seem to be saying the PK homeland was in Anatolia.
Yet Kartvelian specialists seem to be indicating an
expansion *westwards* from central Georgia to account for
PK's break up into dialects. Also, both Bomhard and
Nicholls seem to indicate PK entering the Caucasus from
the SE, Nicholls saying ultimately from central Asia via
the south of the Caspian. Comments?

> Hmm. I'm going to be characteristically stubborn and contrary
> on this one. If we played with this idea that HU and ND were
> undifferentiated until, say, 4000 BCE, that would place the
> parent language in Eastern Anatolia at this time with a very
> late spread of ND northward... But this wreaks havoc on my
> tightly woven web of prehistorical linguistic interactions.

I think your assumed HU/ND homeland is too small and too
far west. What about the Qutians and the EC substrate in
Sumerian? Burney associates the Proto-Hurrians with the
Shulaveri culture in east central Georgia in the 4th
millennium BCE.

> I find that AbAd (Abkhaz-Adyghe) and ND have as many similarities
> as they do differences and I would say that this is caused by
> a long-standing areal influence between two barely related
> languages. With this above scheme, there isn't enough time for
> AbAd and ND to interact enough to gain the similarities that they
> have.

Areal influence certainly, but maybe not necessarily
needing to be as long-standing as you suggest. With the
vertical geography and seasonal migration and associated
exogamy that were associated with agriculture in the North
Caucasus until the climatic changes of the middle ages,
you have intense language contact, yet the upland languages
remain in solid use in their heartlands unthreatened by the
contact languages, but increasingly heavily influenced by
them in possibly a shorter time than might otherwise be
expected.

> Further, there does appear to be cultural influence spreading
> from the South Caspian northwards, stretching to the North Pontic,
> at least up to 7000 BCE. It's mentioned in Mallory's "In Search of
> the Indo-Europeans". There is also mention of certain alien
> ovicaprids from the South Caspian as well. So what's all that about?
> I understand this to be not only a cultural or economic connection
> with the north but a linguistic one as well.

Well, yes. What is it all about indeed? Proto-HU/ND?

> Again, it's all woven into my conceptual tapestry such that this
> economic, cultural and linguistic transcaucasian nexus was very
> gradually demolished in the millenia to come as the
> new IndoEuropean speaking population moved in and culturally
> assimilated themselves with the natives.

I don't think that the IEans can be credited with this
until later, until we have the Ossetians arriving in the
central Caucasus, and Armenian ethnogenesis in the south
Caucasus in the first millennium BCE. Anatolia yes, but
Caucasus no. If we're talking earlier than that, we should
probably be thinking about peoples of Semitic and/or
Sumerian origin being responsible for breaking up the ETC.

> In your mind, what in particular linguistically
> speaking is problematic with the relationship between Nakh and
> Daghest[a]nian?

Well, can *you* reconstruct a common phonology for Nakh
and Daghestanian? They're completely different. Yes, yes,
there are lots of grammatical and lexical points of
contact of considerable time depth that can be reasonably
reconstructed, and for many purposes it makes sense to
regard them as a genetic grouping. But that doesn't mean
that that's all that happened. I am much more familiar
with Nakh than with Daghestanian but a couple of other
things strike me:

a) the nouns and the verbs in Nakh feel as if they come
from two different languages.

b) There's a lot of lexical economy in Nakh, including
relating to kinship terms, if I remember rightly. Which
seems a bit strange in a language in a society where clan
and family is so important. Although maybe my expectations
relate to the modern culture of the area, rather than the
historical one, because Islam didn't reach the highlands
of Chechnya until the 19th century.

c) The noun classes which Nakh and Daghestanian have in
common, and which are sometimes held up as proof of a
genetic relationship, could in actual fact be of relatively
recent borrowed origin. If HU and ND are related, they would
have to be. In fact, the class prefixes could very well be
from Semitic pronouns. They would certainly fit. Diakonov
says some of Urartian's differences from Hurrian can be
accounted for by Assyrian influence. Further east there
would be even more Assyrian influence.

> Wait a minute, I'm no mathematician but something is awry with
> those figures. I didn't say that HU and ND are seperated by 8000
> years. I simply mentioned a date of 8000 BCE for the parent
> language. If Proto-HU can be dated to 3000 BCE, let's say, and ND
> to the same or earlier, we have at most a 5000-year seperation.

What I meant was, with Hurrian being attested around 1400
BCE and Urartian around 800 BCE, whereas none of the Nakh
languages and only one Daghestanian language are attested
before modern times. So that's more than 3000 years difference
between them already. I thought you dated the parent language
for HU and ND as 9000 BCE, which about 8000 years prior to
the attestation of Hurrian and Urartian. If you're now saying 8000
BCE, that's 7000 years, which is still too much.


Ed.