Hi ya Glennie,
>Maybe it's just
the onions you're slicing.
No don't think so. It's only one slice for my
tomato sandwich.
>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.
Oh? This puts it
somewhere in the middle of Neanderthal (Mousterian) but the dates differ for
geographic locations:
<<The first people who look like Neanderthals
appear about 300 to 230,000 years ago with evidence from the sites of Atapuerca
(Spain), Ehringsdorf (Germany) and Biache-Saint-Vaast (France). They apparently
evolved in Europe from earlier populations of Homo heidelbergensis (Archaic Homo
Sapiens) before spreading to western Asia and the Levant at the beginning of the
Last Glaciation, some 75,000 years ago.>>
Yet even though "Russian" Neanderthal is associated
with Mousterian, recent studies show that Neanderthals are represented by
Mousterian, Châtelperronian, Szeletian, Bohunician and Uluzzian; modern humans
by Aurignacian, Bachokirian and Olchevian.
So much for Mousterian; but hey, what happens when
some noteworthy paleoanthrolologist like C. Loring Brace eliminates Neanderthal
all together and instead claims that they are simply robust Homo
sapiens.
> 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.
We'll, since we've just about ditzed
Neanderthal (I happen to agree with Brace)and since proto-Nostratic mothers must
have sung lullabies to their children, I think I'll also disagree with
Bomhard.
>--snip--
>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.
In one of your last posts you
mentioned pronouns in "Dene-Asiatic" as consisting of human, animate, and
inanimate. Would you kindly give more information about this?
BTW, if you're nice, I'll share my tomato sandwich (with
one slice of onion).
Love and kisses,
Gerry