Gerry:

>Dear Glennie, what you write above brings a tear to my eye.

Maybe it's just the onions you're slicing.

>Yes, language is as old as life itself. Now on your chart above, you place
>Dene-Asiatic as the lead hypothetical language. Do you have a date for
>Dene-Asiatic?

No firm date. I'd guestimate something on the order of
40,000 to 60,000 years. But this is certainly still not
the "first language". Think of it as the language of
one of Mitochondrial Eve's descendents.

>Guess what? I'll buy your Nostratic at 15,000 BCE (give or take).

That's the Bomhardian date given for Nostratic. I don't
think it could be any earlier than this. More give than
take, I'm afraid.

>BTW, is there a vocabulary associated with Dene-Asiatic?

My speculation about a "Dene-Asiatic" is based mostly on
the pattern I observe concerning pronouns in various
world languages. Looking at pronominal systems, one
can see striking similarities across world languages that
can be broken down into categories and subcategories.
It doesn't seem logical to assume that this has arisen
by chance rather than by a longstanding inheritance. In
other words, I think that, on a whole, pronominal systems
are one of the most change-resistant structures of any
language. Particularly, the first and second person
singular pronoun forms resist change the best. Granted,
though, there are examples of changes even here such
as IndoEuropean's *ego: "I am here" (cf. *e "this, that"
+ *ge [emphatic] plus *-o: [1ps]) which must surely
have replaced an earlier form **mu: (Note *ego/*me but
*tu:/*twe).

Many of the so-called "Amerind" languages have a particular
common pronominal pattern. Yet, we also notice that the
pattern is similar to Old World languages as well. Check
it out. SinoDene languages tend to have a pattern along
the lines of *se/ne "I" and *nge "you" but we find
something similar even in Algonquian (*ni- "I" and
*ki- "you"). Even Nostratic appears to have *nu for
1rst person (absolutive) and *ku for 2nd person, as is
evidenced by both AfroAsiatic and Kartvelian.


- gLeN


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