Gerry wrote to Glen:

>Here's mud in your eye! Glennie.

Ow! Now why did you do that
>:)


Dear Glennie, in case you don't know the meaning of the "saying",  it's a celebratory toast.  Likely it's wishing you good cheer.
 
Glen:  What do Neanderthals have to do with anything here??

Gerry responds:  Now that's silly.  Someone needs to speak the language before a language can have an identity.
 
Glen:  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.
 
Oh, Dear Glennie.  I thought by the term "word class prefixes" you were referring to the word "class" as in aristocratic vs worker vs slave etc.  Actually most of the early cultures (pre 3,000 y/a) were stratified.
 
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).


Interesting.  What possibly could be the fourth person in Navajo? 
 
love & kisses,
gerry