--- In
Nostratica@yahoogroups.com, "madlinguistics"
<madlinguistics@...> wrote:
> is there any other sites or links you have that
> have the basic information about nostratic for people new to the
> study?
The first thing to know about Nostratic is that there isn't a single
theory. Each researcher has his or her own ideas. Generally it
includes PIE, Afrasian, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, and Dravidian. Of
course Basque gets thrown in a lot too, but there doesn't seem to be
much reason for that.
I personally think we need to take it one step at a time. Too often a
bunch of languages are tossed together and presumed to be related.
Then you hunt and peck through long wordlists looking for words that
look like they might be related. In my opinion we should start with
a couple languages that look close to PIE and try to reconstruct a
parent language (of course we needn't start with PIE, but there's
more knowledge about it than other reconstructed languages). My own
view is that Etruscan is probably the most closely related language
to PIE (Etruscan, Lemnian, and Rhaetic are probably all related but
Etruscan is the best attested and understood of the three). I'd also
put Afrasian close to PIE. So I've been studying these three
languages and group them together in what I call Indo-Mediterranian.
I've found about 15 words that appear to be cognates in all three
languages (Etruscan and PIE have even more, and PIE and Afrasian will
likely have much much more). The big problem with Afrasian is that
there's quite a lot of disagreement about how it should be
reconstructed. I have two books on this (one by Christopher Ehret and
one by Allen Bomhard) and they are very different. The next step
would probably be trying to link Indo-Mediterranian with Uralic. I
haven't really studied Uralic too much but I gather that verbal
morphology is fairly close to PIE.
I do have a link to a website that you'd be interested. I don't agree
with everything there but it definitely worth looking at.
http://glen-gordon.tripod.com/LANGUAGE/main.html