Congratulations! I think Hintze wrote this as satire.
Heike Bödeker wrote:
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
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--
Mark Hubey
hubeyh@...
http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey