In a message dated 12/04/02 21:58:20 GMT Daylight Time,
glengordon01@... writes:

> As for Bomhard's ideas on Kartvelian, having lost my
> "Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis" as of late (gee,
> I hope I find it soon...) I'll have trouble commenting deeply,
> but I don't recall Bomhard having very specific viewpoints on
> the origin of Kartvelian. I don't think his views on this, both
> archaeologically and linguistically, are solidly thought out anyway.

I only have his "Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic" but he
doesn't give a lot of details about what he thinks about
the origin of Kartvelian. My own opinion is that maybe
Afroasiatic is ultimately related to Nostratic and DC,
and maybe Kartvelian is more closely related than it is,
but I am not convinced that Kartvelian should be regarded
as being more closely related to IE than some familes that
are usually classified as DC - unless you can come up with
a (central) Asian origin for it :-)

> As for the Gutians, the first question is what is their
> language like?? It could be something related to Elamite, it
> could be Caucasic or it could be something else. I desperately
> need information on that language in order to develop any
> theory at all on them.

Diakonov & Starostin say: "Qutian ... is known practically
only from a few dozens of proper names, but there are also
borrowings in Sumerian which can be traced to an EC
language different from Hurrian ... It is a safe guess
that these are borrowings from Qutian; the latter may have
been rather close to [the Lezgian branch]. There has even
been made a suggestion that the name Udi is a reflex of
*quti". D & S give *quti with diacritics not reproducible
here: a dot above the q meaning "abruptive, glottalised
("emphatic"), a dot after the t meaning "intensive"
(geminated?) and a macron above the i. The say PEC
/glottalic q/ > Udi /zero/ and PEC /intensive t/ > Udi /d/.
Other people link the Qutians with the Hurrians, and
Schulze links the ancestors of the Udi with the Urartian
ethnonym Etiu and with the ancient "Albanian" inscriptions
in Azerbaijan.

> Concerning the prehistoric transcaucasian cultural movement:

...

> Yes, that's what I think, or rather, just ND.

Which is why I don't think some very ancient contact
between it and IE can be ruled out.

> So... the IEs would seem to be the cause of the reversal. Wait
> a minute, what does ETC stand for?

Early-Trans-Caucasian (cultural zone). Burney says this is
the HU homeland.

> >a) the nouns and the verbs in Nakh feel as if they come
> >from two different languages.
>
> You can't go on feelings. What is the basis for this feeling?
> Is it a reaction to some non-subjective fact that you can express?

Ok. Verbs in Nakh cannot be borrowed. Unless they are
native they have to take the form noun+"to do". All verbs
are monosyllabic. A proportion of nouns are polysyllabic,
even if transparent loans from Arabic, Turkish, Russian
etc. are excluded. The phonological structural preferences
of nouns and verbs are different - see Johanna Nicholls
"Chechen" for further details.

> >b) There's a lot of lexical economy in Nakh, including
> >relating to kinship terms, if I remember rightly.
>
>Lexical economy? How do you mean?

I mean that words for certain concepts tend to be
derivations or compounds of other words rather than
independent roots. Thus "aunt" is "mother's sister" or
"father's sister". Lexical economy is a feature associated
normally with pidgins and creoles, but a measure of this has
happened in Nakh for some reason.

> How can an entire noun-class system be borrowed? There certainly
> nothing Semitic about ND noun classes.

No, but Semitic does have personal pronouns. For example,
the 3rd person singular masculine pronoun in Semitic tends
to feature /w/ prominently and the feminine /j/. The native
Nakh pronouns don't have a gender distinction, but funnily
enough the male and female class markers (used only in some
adjective and verb agreements, not in the nouns themselves,
except in one or two words) are ... /w/ and /j/ respectively.

Inserting a pronoun is what often happens in a language
contact situation to clarify the sentence landscape. Compare:

Standard German: der Mann geht / die Frau geht
Gastarbeiterdeutsch/std. German "foreigner talk register":
der Mann er gehen / die Frau sie gehen

Something similar could have happened in Nakh (and in
Daghestanian, where I think that /w/ and /j/ are often the
male and female class prefixes too) except that the pronoun
used is borrowed rather than native. Thus there might have
been a move from (using Chechen as an example)

*i stag oghu/*i zuda oghu to the modern
i stag w-oghu/i zuda j-oghu

The noun class system isn't as systematic as you suggest
anyway. Only 10% of adjectives and 30% of verbs exhibit
class agreement in Nakh. There are strange aspects to the
behaviour of noun classes in Nakh that could point to an
external pronominal origin. For example the class marker
used by J and V (i.e. /w/) classes in the plural varies
between /b/ and /d/ depending on whether the noun is used
in the 3rd person or not. In all ND languages, no matter
the number of classes, there are only ever 4 different
class markers. One could speculate that where these are
/b/ and /d/ (as in Nakh at any rate) these are from *m
and *n respectively which feature prominently in the other
personal pronouns in Semitic languages. The fact that
class agreement in transitive sentences is with the object/
patient, rather than with the subject/agent is also another
pointer that pronominal focus is involved, and that the
feature has been bolted on from external influences, rather
than being the eroded remains of a native system.

> It seems like you're using anything to deny the relationship
> even though evidence exists to the contrary.

No, I'm not trying to deny a relationship between N and D.
There probably is one. I just don't think the story can simply
be "Nakh and Daghestanian (and HU) are descended from a common
ancestor. The End." It's like trying to reconstruct IE if only
Anatolian, Albanian and Slavonic were attested. Either Nakh and
Daghestanian were more distantly related and then got pushed
together again, or something funny happened to one or other of them,
like the intervention of some other influence.

> I think that a good
> phonological system can be worked out for ND and just looking at
> Starostin's icky reconstructions gives me a sense that there
> is much room for improvement.

As long as you keep remembering that in order to do
reconstruction, you need to know that what you are comparing
is related, I am sure you could make a better job of it than
Starostin. You would at least be unburdened by the obligation
to prove a relationship with NWC and incorporate it into the
reconstruction as well.


Ed.