Hallo!

On Thu, 10 Jun 2004 15:56:26 -0500,
Danny Wier <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: "Jörg Rhiemeier" <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
>
> > I haven't found anything but his posts to the various incarnations
> > of the Nostratic mailing list and a few other lists (including
> > Cybalist), and a few web pages on pre-PIE and pre-Basque.
> > He posted a sketch of his own version of Nostratic (mostly based
> > on system comparison) on July 2, 2003 to Nostratica (the subject
> > line is "Tour (and 9)", as it was the concluding post of a series
> > of articles on the various branches of Nostratic.  Carrasquer also
> > considers Sumerian, Etruscan and even Basque to be Nostratic.
>
> He includes Basque? I've only read of Basque being related remotely to North
> Caucasian, part of Sino-Caucasian (or Dene-Caucasian if Na-Dene is
> included).

Carrasquer reconstructs pronominal roots for Basque which appear to be
the same as for Afro-Asiatic (1st *n-, 2nd *k-) and includes Basque
in Nostratic on the ground of that: a daredevil conclusion,
if you ask me.  System comparison is a useful way to do long-range
historical linguistics, but it has its pitfalls, too.  The problem
is that you work with morphemes that are *small* - one or two phonemes,
in most cases.  Such tiny morphemes can look similar by chance.
Only when a large number of elements match, or better, entire paradigms,
one can draw valid conclusions.

>       Sumerian is included in Bomhard's Nostratic, and he says Etruscan
> might be related as well, except we have so little data on the language.

Very true.  Etruscan is very much uncharted territory.  I have seen
bits of morphology that look similar to IE and Uralic morphemes,
but apparently, the interpretation of those morphemes is still
controversial.  We had a discussion of that on this list
last November, and I posted the Etruscan morphemes in question.
They are found here:

http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0311C&L=conlang&P=R12370

> Sino/Dene-Caucasian as a macrofamily is an even bolder theory than
> Nostratic, to say the least.

Yes.  Those people try to reconstruct a macrofamily that began to
diverge
at least *30,000* years ago!  In fact, Sino-Dene-Caucasian would be
so old that Nostratic could be a branch of it.  But no; I think that
long-range comparison is best done in smaller steps, such as
Indo-Uralic.

> > I'd group Inuit-Aleut with Uralic, and relate that to Indo-European.
> > Albic would be a coordinate branch to Indo-European:
> >
> >                   +--- Inuit-Aleut
> >                +--+
> >                |  +--- Uralic-Yukaghir
> > Indo-Uralic ---+
> >                |  +--- Indo-European
> >                +--+
> >                   +--- Albic
> >
> > What comes next?  I don't know, perhaps Altaic, perhaps Kartvelian.
>
> I personally think Kartvelian is the 'missing link' in Nostratic and
> Eurasian (though K isn't considered part of Eurasian by Bomhard). The most
> important clue it offers is in its ejectives/glottalics, and I've noticed
> some similarities in Georgian case endings and personal pronoun affixes to
> Indo-European, as I have in Finnish.

Yes.  Kartvelian looks similar to IE in some respects.  It is possible
that a language related to Kartvelian exerted a substratum influence
on Indo-European.  But the pronoun roots are similar, too, more similar
than those of Altaic, which is in turn quite similar to Uralic
in other respects.  Both Altaic and Kartvelian seem to be better
candidates for the nearest relationship outside the Indo-Uralic group
I gave above than Afro-Asiatic (though this has a stative verb paradigm
strikingly similar to the Indo-European one), let alone Dravidian.

BTW: Typologically, Old Albic is probably more similar to Kartvelian
languages than to anything else.  It is on the border between
agglutinating and fusional, has a tense-aspect-mood system that
runs quite parallel to the Georgian screeve inventory (only the
future subjunctive and the whole perfect series are missing,
and the morphology used to encode it is differently organized
and not quite as forbiddingly complex as in Georgian),
and it is an active-stative language like Georgian in the aorist
series (though Old Albic is so in *all* screeves).
It doesn't have those frightening consonant clusters, though,
and it doesn't have ejectives (no longer, that is).

> [ideas for two more Tech languages]
>
> I don't know if there ever will be an 'Afro-Tech' or 'Sino-Tech'. I have to
> finish the original, or at least sufficiently develop it.

Go for it.  Working on too many projects at the same time can bog down
matters royally.  Tech is an interesting project of which I'd like
to see more.

> > [background stuff about the Elbi, or British Elves]
>
> I actually modelled the Techs a lot after the Rroma.

After the Celtic invasion, quite a few Elbi became travelling showmen,
too.  Some Elvish families still adhere to the life on the road today,
and there has been some intermingling with Roma and Irish Travellers
(the Shelta-speaking ones).  These travelling Elves speak a dialect
(not yet worked out) that is shot through with elements from Romani,
Shelta and Polari.  Some Shelta words may also be of Albic origin;
I am planning to mine Shelta word-lists for such words.

>       They were scattered by
> the Great Floods, the most catastrophic being the Black Sea around 7500 BCE,

5500 BCE, give or take 50 years.  Don't confuse BP (`before present',
by convention, before 1950) dates with BCE dates.

> and a Tower of Babel-type event in Mesopotamia a few millennia later.

The `Tower of Babel' for the Elbi was the Celtic invasion of Britain,
which smashed the Albic dialect continuum into several isolated
pockets, sent thousands of Elves onto the road, and left the colonies
along the Atlantic coasts and on the Macaronesian islands
(i.e. Canaries, Azores and Madeira) to fend for themselves.

>       Tiny
> communities of the Caucasian Techs migrated as far as Sri Lanka and
> Scotland, yet somehow preserved their language so well that thousands of
> years later their dialects of the language kept a high level of mutual
> intelligibility with those in Armenia, Turkey and Iran. (But Techs have some
> pretty impressive psychic/magical abilities, so that's not as hard as it
> sounds.)

Well, but wouldn't it be more fun to develop a whole family of related
but distinct languages from Proto-Tech?  At least, that's what I am
going to do with Albic.

Greetings,

Jörg.