Ed:

>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.

Nope. I guess he just hasn't thought a lot about it.

>My own opinion is that maybe Afroasiatic is ultimately related
>to Nostratic and DC, and maybe Kartvelian is more closely related
>than it is, [...]

Kartvelian is more closely related to what than what?

>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 :-)

Linguistics determines language relationships, not archaeology.

>There has even been made a suggestion that the name Udi is a
>reflex of *quti".

Interesting. How come it isn't on Starostin's site? How many
words are reconstructed?

>>>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.

I doubt PreIE was anywhere near the Caucasus at any time, so
as a consequence I doubt ND loans exist in PreIE except via an
intermediate language like AbAd or one of its ancestral forms.

>Ok. Verbs in Nakh cannot be borrowed.

There's no such thing as a language that can't borrow verbs.
There are languages that might resist foreign influences by
tending towards creating native terminology for new things
(like Finnish or German) but there are no impenetrable language
fortresses that avoid foreign influence altogether.

>The phonological structural preferences of nouns and verbs are
>different - see Johanna Nicholls "Chechen" for further details.

Perhaps but how does this prove borrowing as opposed to a million
and one other reasons for the differences?

>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".

Means nothing. It happens in Swedish (farmor, morfar, farbror,
faster, etc) and we all know that Swedish is not a creole.

>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/.

Yes, I forgot about that connection. Okay, that could be an
exception but I still am not sure how Semitic suffixes can end
up as prefixes in Nakh. Something is bizarre there.

>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.

That's inherited. Check out NaDene's obviative and the pronouns
used there. I also believe that both of these pronouns exist in
Nostratic and that they had something to do with word classes.
(I propose that Nostratic had grammatical gender.)

>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.

Don't forget AbAd's influence.

>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.

One thing that pains me the most about Starostin's reconstructions
are the most simplest things. The pronouns are so hideously
reconstructed I have to bite my tongue to hold back the bad words.
What is he thinking? Look at this. He reconstructs *zo: as the
word for "I". First, why is there a long vowel? There's no need
for it if there is no **zo to distinguish it from. And I don't
know about anyone else but... well, why the hell would you use
an otherwise unattested phoneme *z to reconstruct "I"?? Does this
raise alarm bells about typology for anyone else? Finally, we
might notice that the majority of pronouns are also reconstructed
with voiced consonants. What's going on??

I have a solution. First, split ND and AbAd apart and let's never
speak of "North Caucasian" again. Second, group Hattic with AbAd
("Abadha") and HurroUrartian with ND ("Caucasic"). Now, let's
try and get further to the truth here. Maybe something like:


Abadha Caucasic
------ --------
1ps *s� *ci (erg. *aci; gen. *ici)
2ps *w� *xu (erg. *axu; gen. *ixu)

1pp *txa *La
2pp *sywa *s'u

Just a thought.

The voicing in ND pronouns would be simply the result of lenition
starting in the ergative/genitive stems (*eci, oxu > *ezi, *oGu)
and spreading in some branches to the entire pronominal paradigm
(*zi/azi, *Gu/*aGu). I think that Caucasic is closer to BuruYen
than it is to Abadha and the 1ps is an interesting link between
the two groups. Thoughts?

- love gLeN




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