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