>Here's mud in your eye! Glennie.

Ow! Now why did you do that >:)

>As I tried explaining to you Glennie, the so called Neanderthals
>lived in lots of places other than the Middle-East or southern Asia. And
>the time frame of 40-60,000 years ago just doesn't fit
>with present dates for "Neanderthal". Don't you remember:

Why is it supposed to?? What do Neanderthals have to do with
anything here??

>QUESTION-- What do you mean by "word class prefixes"?

Their prefixes like that of Swahili or Proto-SinoTibetan. Basically
we can call them gender prefixes if you like. However they don't
have to distinguish masculine and feminine. For instance *m- marks
many biological terms in SinoTibetan. Swahili uses differing
prefixes that make an impact on the plural of any given word
(eg: mtu "person"/watu "people", jicho "eye"/macho "eyes",
ngombe "cow"/ngombe "cows"). Get it? Well, I think the same
system existed in DeneAsiatic and later in DeneCaucasian.

Now what happened between DeneCaucasian and Nostratic? I think
that the _grammatical_ distinction of these word classes still
continued to exist in Nostratic, however the prefixal markers
tacked on to nouns such as *m- for biological terms were all
dropped. I suspect that Nostratic had many third person pronouns
that distinguished these now unmarked word classes, something
like what we see in Navajo with the obviative or "fourth person",
or even in English with "he" (masculine), "she" (feminine) and
"it" (neuter).


- gLeN






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