At 22:04 02.08.03 -0400, H.M. Hubey fwd'ed an:
Article from Fritz Hintze on
Turkic, Uralic, Meroitic, Nilo-Saharan
To finally come up with a few comments rather than letting it all
end with a clarification re how to proceed with uploadings files instead
of sending attchments directly to the list:
One nowadays often has the opportunity to simply do some proto-form
matching, which also gives more security that items indeed are to be
reconstructed for proto-languages and don't just pop up as in the best
case ghost words, in the worst chance resemblances. E.g. for Nilo-Saharan
case suffixes (actually stemming from prepositions as in the Koman
subbranch, which was the first split-off from PNS) one might refer to
Ehret (A historical-comparative reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan.
Köln: Köppe 2001, here pp. 202-209). The case of Uralic and Turkic is
similar. What we, alas, do not yet have is a comprehensive account of
Comparative Mongolian, and that's the problem:
(2) one might have added the ("non-classical", Poppe,
Grammar of Written Mongolian. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz ³1974, p. 75
§ 287 more precisely it's a 13-14th cent. thing) dative-locative
-da/-de/-ta/-te.
(3) the suffix in Uiguro Mongolian is -Gcin (whereby G denotes an uvular
voiced plosive) denoting "colors and names of female animals"
(op.cit..: 41 §120). Also note the morphonology of this type of suffix,
which drops any final consonant. There is, however, a suffix -jin <
*-din / -cin < *-tin which designates female beings (op.cit..: 42
§124), a variant of which we obvioulsy also have in qa-(Ga)-tun and
(a)ma-tun. So sorry, no feminine -k- here.
(5) -(yi)gi pops up as late as in 17-18th cent. UM texts only, the source
from which it was grammaticalized being unknown AFAIK.
(7) UM -yin is the allomorph for vowel stems, maybe Hintze had in mind
the Xalxa form which is written -iyn in the Cyrillica.
(8) UM has a -ra/-re suffix which probably is a detransitivizer. It might
be a match, though, if we were dealing with some underlying
recessive/accessive polysemy. As so often, further research needed
here.
(11) -r-a/-r-e probably derives from a deverbal noun -r + -a/-e
locative.
(12) UM has -Gsan/-gsen here, the Xalxa form is eroded.
(18) UM has a -ki suffix which, like the Turkish equivalent, might be an
Iranian loan.
(19) "what?" is denoted by yaGu. I don't have any slightest
whether a lexeme men occurs in any Mongolian language, and if so, what it
means :-)
As in all, I (without regretting the effort I put into checking the above
stuff :-)) think it's pretty much the amount of chance resemblances a
tour de force through any morphosyntax (especially when abstracting from
systemic aspects, i.e. trying to reconstruct a functionally coherent
system at each p-stage) would yield, not a convincing proof that widely
believed in but barely proven Niger-Saharan (into which we probably
could stuff back problematic stuff like Meroitic, Shabo, Krongo...) and
Nostratic were related.
On this note,
Heike