Miguel, I have
read your Tours with a great interest, but hesitated to start asking
my (probably naive) questions.
Now they follow:
1) How do you think the results of you
investigation depend on the fact that a few "classical" Nostratic families
(Altaic, Dravidian, Elamic) were not taken into account? You did explain why,
and I hope that soon you will be able to include them in the review. Should we
expect a considerable correction of the conclusions?
2) You took into the consideration a number of
disputable members of the Nostratic superfamily - Etruscan, Sumerian, Basque,
Eskimo-Aleut.
How would you rank them taking as the criterion
the probability that each of them belong to this superfamily in reality?
(Just for example: most probably - Etruscan, then
Sumerian, then Eskimo-Aleut, minimal probability - Basque. If you could estimate
these probabilities quantitatively it would be great)
3) How sensitive are your conclusions to the
presence of these hypothetical members in the investigated group? What would
change if we exclude them?
4) How do you imagine the inner structure
of the Nostratic superfamily?
(For
example: PN
/
\
Af-As
\
/ \
/
\
West-N East-N
/
\ / | \
Kartv. IE / |
\
/ | \
Drav. Ural. Altaic )
5) And what about the inner structure of
Afro-Asiatic?
Warm regards,
Alexander
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, June 09, 2003 6:08 AM
Subject: Re: [Nostratica] Re: Tour (and
9)
On Mon, 09 Jun 2003 00:57:18 +0000, Richard
Wordingham
<richard.wordingham@...>
wrote:
>In view of Piotr's personal attack on the relatedness
of Basque and
>Georgian at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/22876
, I
>am impelled to ask. Do you think Basque and Georgian are
related,
>albeit only in the context of the Nostratic group?
In
the context of Nostratic, I'd say probably yes. The Basque
personal
pronouns/affixes are so similar to the Afro-Asiatic ones, that
there must
in my opinion be a relationship somehow. Especially the
existence in
Basque of a 2nd. p. sg. feminine suffix *-n(a)- (cf.
Berber/Chadic *-m), in
a language that otherwise doesn't mark the feminine
gender anywhere is
remarkable.
I don't think there's any special
relationship between Basque and Georgian.
About the only thing that is
worth noting is Basque gu, -gu "we" vs.
Kartvelian *gw- "us" (in the
verb).
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer
Vidal
mcv@...