From: swf@teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Ted Holden on Linguistics and Evolution
Date: 4 Sep 92 19:10:01 GMT
Reply-To: swf@tdat.teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: NCR Teradata Database Business Unit

Good article.  I like it.

In article <1992Sep3.052648.11821@s1.gov> lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich) writes:
|
|	Another such macro-family is Sino-Caucasian or Dene-Caucasian,
|which includes North Caucasian (Northeast Caucasian and
|Abkhazo-Adyghian), Sino-Tibetan, Basque, Yeniseian, Burushaski,
|Na-Dene, probably Hurrian-Urartian and Etruscan, and possibly
|Sumerian. I've been trying to investigate the hypothesis that Minoan
|is a member, without much success.

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

|	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.

|	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.

|	Another proposed identification is Colin Renfrew's hypothesis
|of the origin and spread of Indo-European, that it started out from
|Anatolia, and spread of Europe as agriculturalists went searching for
|more land for themselves. Although there is genetic evidence for this
|type of spreading, derived from how much mixing there has been with
|the local populations, there are serious difficulties with that IE
|hypothesis. In particular, the branching order inferred from the IE
|dialects is all wrong for this theory, and there are serious cultural
|discrepancies, which Renfrew waves away. ...

Excellent summary of Renfrew.

| Perhaps the first people to ride horses were the Kurgan
|people of South Russia, about 4500-2500 BCE (they fade off into the
|Scythians, Sarmatians, and others of historical times); they also had
|wheeled vehicles; both are unknown before their presence.

It is now possible to be even more precise in this.  The origin of horse
*riding* seems to be within the early (?proto-) Kurgan culture called
the Sredny Stog Culture.  And the spread of horse riding, and probably
wheeled vehicles, seems to be associated with the immediately succeeding
Yamnaya Culture.  I think this corresponence is getting strong enough now
that the Yamnaya culture can be tentatively identified as the bearer of
the early seperate dialect period of PIE.

|	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.


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Newsgroups: talk.origins