Hallo conlangers!

On 23/05/2018 18:06, David McCann wrote:

> Oops! that was me, mis-typing. What he wrote was
> Proto-IE: *dhwor- (/*dwor-)
> meaning that the traditional PIE reconstruction was *dh, which he (like
> me) regards as a Sanskritising mistake for *d-

The word is *dhwer- ~ *dhwor-. No "Sanskritizing mistake", the breath on
the initial stop is confirmed by both Germanic (e.g. English _door_) and
Greek (_thýra_) at least.

> I'm relieved to see that you too can mis-copy! the actual Eurasiatic
> entry is *č`Vč`V
> The point here is that he reconstructs Nostratic and Sino-Caucasian as
> having similar sounding roots for "spout". The only way to point that
> out in a database is to subsume them under a common entry for "Borean",
> even though nothing can be reconstructed: the Borean entry is just a
> placeholder.

I admit that I can mis-copy and misinterpret. It seems as if _C_ at
least does not mean 'any consonant' but 'any kind of voiceless
affricate' or something like that. Yet, cover symbols are so abundant in
Starostin's etymologies that they severely weaken the strength of the
entire work.

> I frankly admit that reconstruction at this depth is highly
> conjectural, but it is still worth doing because it can be coupled with
> genetic studies to show early population contacts. The fact that we
> have differing Nostratic reconstructions is no worse than having
> different AfroAsiatic and Sino-Tibetan reconstructions: a spur to work
> harder, not to give up in despair.

Certainly! As I have stated earlier elsewhere, and certainly also in
this very place (I don't remember all my posts, and not always what I
posted where), I feel that what I call "Mitian" (the "core" of
Nostratic/Eurasiatic, consisting of IE, Uralic, Turkic, Mongolic,
Tungusic, Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut) is almost as
good as Afroasiatic, for which, as you say, there are at least two major
and several minor reconstructions on the market; yet, this does not mean
that the family is invalid, but that more work needs to be done. The
morphologies of the six Afroasiatic families match so well that the
validity of the group can hardly be doubted, even if there is no
consensus yet on the sound correspondences.

Likewise, the morphological similarities between the eight Mitian
language families, especially those between IE and Uralic, between
Uralic and Eskimo-Aleut (the Uralic-Yukaghir case, though, IMHO seems to
be one of Samoyedic loanwords in Yukaghir), and among the three Altaic
families, but to a lesser degree across all the eight, are hard to
explain otherwise than by descent from a common ancestor. Sure, pronouns
(the most striking common elements in Mitian, hence the name, from *mi
'I' and *ti 'thou') can be borrowed, but they are unlikely Wanderwörter,
and the notion that an entire *paradigm* of pronominal elements was
borrowed across *eight* different language families within a large but
contiguous area is hardly plausible. The best explanation for this is a
common ancestor. Yet, so far no sound correspondences have been
established beyond doubt, and the thing requires more work.

I am more sceptical about the inclusion of Kartvelian, and have very
strong doubts that Dravidian and Afroasiatic have anything to do with
this. And Dene-Caucasian is IMHO little more than a wastebasket into
which all those languages of northern Eurasia that are not claimed for
Nostratic are tossed ;)

> As for the majority of scholars, within my lifetime the majority
> were dismissing continental drift as rubbish.

Sure. Continental drift was considered a bad hypothesis as long as
nobody had come up with evidence of a plausible mechanism that could
have moved the continents. But eventually, more and more evidence in
favour of it were found, especially through the examination of the ocean
floors, and a plausible mechanism - mantle convection - was proposed
which was confirmed by further data.

> As Max Planck observed,
> advances are not accepted because those who reject them are converted,
> but because they eventually die!

An example of this is Oswald Szemerényi who never accepted the laryngeal
theory as long as he was alive, even if he had to admit that PIE had at
least something like */h/ where Hittite shows indisputable consonantal
reflexes of laryngeals.

--
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"Bêsel asa Éam, a Éam atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Éamal." - SiM 1:1