From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: Re: Ted Holden on Linguistics and Evolution
Organization: LLNL
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1992 09:37:01 GMT

In article <1007@tdat.teradata.COM> swf@tdat.teradata.com (Stanley Friesen) writes:
>Good article.  I like it.

	Thank you.

>In article <1992Sep3.052648.11821@s1.gov> lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich) writes:

>Hmm, I cannot remember clearly - is Mongolian a member of the Sino-Tibetan
>family, or is it part of the Siberian branch of Nostratic?

	Specifically, it's a branch of Altaic. The other two are
Turkic and Manchu-Tungus; Korean, Ryukyuan, and Japanese are probably
also members.

@ 	Amerind is another suggested macro-family, but its principal
@ advocate, Joseph Greenberg, uses relatively imprecise and subjective
@ methods, compared with the efforts to find sound correspondences that
@ the Nostraticists have made.

>A small nit here.  Greenberg's methods are *statistical*, and are thus
>potential very precise - they just do not help in identifiying *specific*
>*correspondences*.  Given that the time depth of the uncontroversial
>major Amerindian language families seems to be on the order of 4K, some
>higher level of connection is clearly likely.

	Having read Greenberg's book, I note that he lists as
correspondences words that seem rather similar phonetically and
semantically. Linguists who prefer greater precision have not been
very kind to him, not surprisingly.

@ 	The ultimate is the ultimate ancestor of all human languages,
@ if there ever was a single such language; it has been given the name
@ "Proto-World". However, the question of humanity's first language has
@ been so contaminated with crackpottery that even some Nostraticists
@ would prefer to avoid bringing the subject up.

>The difficulty here is that it may be unreachable.  That is all currently
>living, or attested, languages may have a common ancestor far more recent
>than the first human language(s).  That is all older lineages may have
>been supplanted by more recent ones.

	That's possible in principle. But even then, one _might_ be
able to address the question of what was the youngest common ancestor
of all _known_ languages.

@ 	I have a whole list of references on Nostratic and related
@ subjects that I am willing to post or e-mail.

>Any in English?  Please do mail me a copy.

	Here is my list (all in English, happy to say :-):

Here are some references on some interesting recent work on
Indo-European, Nostratic, and related subjects:

Indo-European:

Scientific American, March 1990, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, "The Early
History of Indo-European Languages" [A departure from the Kurgan
hypothesis; the IE homeland was in the Kura-Araxes area. It also
presents some of their revisions of IE phonology.]

Scientific American, October 1989, Colin Renfrew, "The Origins of
Indo-European Languages" [presenting the hypothesis discussed in more
detail in his book, see below]

Mallory, J.P., 1989, _In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language,
Archeology, and Myth_ [a comprehensive discussion of the Indo-European
question, relating linguistics to historical and archeological
evidence.]

Renfrew, Colin, 1988 _Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of
Indo-European Origins_ [an alternative proposal: a much earlier
departure from the Indo-European homeland than the standard (Kurgan)
picture would allow. I personally think that the evidence he presents
most likely fits an earlier, pre-Indo-European, dispersal; the "Old
Europeans" of Marija Gimbutas. His knowledge of linguistics also seems
rather weak.]

The American Heritage Dictionary [a good intro: it includes about 1500
Indo-European roots (about all those that are ancestral to English words
listed in it) and a guide to what can be reconstructed of the culture of
the Indo-European speakers, judging from what they had words for, such as
their worship of a god named "Father Sky".].

Baldi, Philip, _An Introduction to the Indo-European Languages_ [a
good comparative discussion of the older members of the various
Indo-European subfamilies.]

Gimbutas, Marija, _The Journal of Indo-European Studies_ (several
articles over the years) and _The Civilization of the Goddess_ [An
abundance of work on the archeology of the Kurgans, whom she proposes
as Proto-Indo-European, as well as reconstructions of their culture;
she has also done reconstructions of the culture of the pre-IE
Europeans, the "Old Europeans".]


Macro-linguistics: Nostratic, Sino-Caucasian, Proto-World, and related
subjects.

Proposed members of Nostratic:

Indo-European
Kartvelian (S Caucasian)
Afro-Asiatic
  Semitic
  Egyptian
  Berber
  Cushitic
  Chadic
Uralic (with Yukaghir)
Dravidian (with Elamite)
Altaic
  Turkic
  Mongolian
  Manchu-Tungus
  Korean
  Ryukyu
  Japanese
Chukchi-Kamchatkan
Eskimo-Aleut

Joseph Greenberg's Eurasiatic includes all of Nostratic except
Kartvelian, Afro-Asiatic, and Dravidian, but includes:

Ainu
Gilyak a.k.a. Nivkh

NOTE: Afro-Asiatic could well be a group comparable to the rest of
Nostratic and to Sino-Caucasian, as some Nostraticists are starting to
conclude. Discrepancies in proposed schemes like this are probably not
fatal; similar problems have existed for years in well-known language
families.

Sino-Caucasian (or Dene-Caucasian):

North Caucasian
  NE Caucasian (incl. Hurrian-Urartian and Etruscan)
  Abkhazo-Adyghian (incl. Hattic)
Sino-Tibetan
Yeniseian
Burushaski
Basque
Sumerian
Na-Dene
Some other Native American languages (?)

There are other big groupings proposed, such as Amerind (most Native
American languages), Austric (Austro-Thai and Austro-Asiatic), and
Congo-Saharan (Niger-Congo, Kordofanian, and Nilo-Saharan).

	The ultimate in large-scale groupings is all of humanity's
languages, whose hypothetical ancestor has been named Proto-World.
However, this last subject has been a natural magnet for an assortment
of enthusiasts and crackpots, and some Nostraticists would prefer not
to make too big an issue out of Proto-World for that very reason.
Although any current or historically attested language can confidently
be ruled out, due to the inevitability of linguistic change, proposed
candidates in the past have included

	Phrygian, Hebrew, Arabic, Irish, Dutch, Sanskrit, Japanese,
and Turkish.


The New York Times, November 24, 1987, p. C1, "Linguists Dig Deeper
into the Origins of Language"

Natural History, March 1987, The First Americans series: "Voices from
the Past", by Merritt Ruhlen

Joseph Greenberg, 1987(?), _Language in the Americas_ [His controversial
work on Native American language classification; it also contains
attempts to justify his methodology by doing some Indo-European
examples.]

I.M. Diakonov and S.A. Starostin, 1986, _Hurro_Urartian as an Eastern
Caucasian language_ [peripherally mentions other such comparisons, for
example, with Hattic, Etruscan, and the non-Indo-European component of
the Greek vocabulary].

Brown, R.A., 1985, _Pre-Greek Speech on Crete from Greek Alphabetic
Sources_ [attempt to find features of (a) pre-Indo-European
language(s) there, using borrowings in Greek, Cretan place names, and
Eteo-Cretan inscriptions. Etruscan and various borrowings elsewhere
are also discussed in it; the author proposes an "Aegeo-Asianic"
family, which survived in the languages discussed.]

Sorin Paliga 1989 and Martin Huld 1990, _The Journal of Indo-European
Studies_ [two articles on attempts to reconstruct some
pre-Indo-European roots from European languages.]

Sydney M. Lamb and E. Douglas Mitchell 1991, _Sprung from some Common
Source: Investigations into the Prehistory of Language_ [Papers for
the 200th anniversary of that famous statement by Sir William Jones
about the Indo-European languages; topics include his career as a
linguist, Indo-European religious vocabulary and possible connections
with other language families, the question of the relatedness of the
Altaic languages, Japanese, and Korean, and mathematical methods for
constructing family trees and for long-distance comparison.]

Annual Reviews of Anthropology, 1988, Mark Kaiser and Vitaly
Shevoroshkin, "Nostratic" [A detailed discussion of the results of the
Soviet Nostratic school; it includes some vocabulary and a lot of
sound correspondences.]

Vitaly Shevoroshkin and T.L. Markey, eds., 1986, _Typology,
Relationship, and Time; A Collection of Papers on Language Change and
Relationship by Soviet Linguists_ [A rather technical collection, but
it does feature an interesting statistical study by Dolgopolsky of
what words are least replaced in languages over time.]

Vitaly Shevoroshkin and M. Kaiser, late 1980's, _The Journal of
Indo-European Studies_ (The Journal of Indo-European Studies:
v13, n3/4, p377, 1985 and v14, n3/4, p365, 1986) [Some discussions of
Indo-European phonology in the light of Nostratic comparisons.]

Vitaly Shevoroshkin, ed., 1988, _Reconstructing Languages and
Cultures_ [Several papers on Nostratic and other such protolanguages,
including Proto-World, most by known advocates. It includes 600
Nostratic roots.]

Vitaly Shevoroshkin, ed., 1989, _Explorations in Language
Macrofamilies_ [More such papers; though mostly on details of
comparison.]

Vitaly Shevoroshkin, ed., 1990, _Proto-Languages and Proto-Cultures_
[Still more such papers; presents the hypotheses that Sumerian and
Etruscan belong in the Sino-Caucasian group, and also Joseph
Greenberg's discussion of "Eurasiatic"]

The Sciences (NY Academy of Sciences), May-June 1990, Vitaly
Shevoroshkin, "The Mother Tongue". [A good introduction to Nostratic
and Proto-World, from the point of view of an advocate.]

Scientific American, April 1991 [A rather brief discussion of the
controversy that Nostratic and Proto-World have started.]

The Atlantic, April 1991 [A more detailed discussion of this controversy.]


	Here is a poem in reconstructed Nostratic composed by the late
Nostraticist Vladislav Illich-Svitych:

K'elHa"		wet'e-i		`aK'u-n		ka"hla
Tongue		time-of		water-of	path/ford

k'ala-i		palhV-k'V	na		wete
gone-of		dwelling-to	us		lead(s)

s'a da		'a-k'V		'ejV		'a"la"
he but		there-to	come(s)		no(t)

ja-k'o		pele		t'uba		wete
which-who	fear(s)		deep		water


Language is a ford through the river of time
It leads us to the dwelling of the ancestors
But he does not arrive there
Who is afraid of deep water

Note: V is an uncertain vowel, K is k/q, a" is a with " on top, and s'
is s with ' on top. The ' after a stop consonant (t, k, etc.) denotes
a glottalized consonant (with a stricture in the throat).

Several of these words have Indo-European cognates; I give them both
in the traditional transcription and a modified one closer to
Nostratic due to Shevoroshkin et al, following a /, when it is
different. I will give only the more common offshoots; the Latin and
Greek words should be familiar from borrowings. You may have fun
looking for other offshoot words.

`aK'u	IE akwa- / akwha-	Latin: aqua, "water"
palhV	IE pelH- / phelH-	Greek: polis, "city"
na	IE nes, nos		English: us; Latin: nos
wete	IE wedh- / wed(h)-	English: wed
k'o	IE kw(o/i)- / kwh(o/i)-	English: who, what, other wh's; Latin: qu-
t'uba	IE dheub- / d(h)eup-	English: deep
wete	IE wed- / wet-		English: water, wet;
					Greek: hudor, hudr-, "water";
					Russian: voda, "water"