Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!petrich
From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: My List of Nostratic References (was Re: Japanese Koreo-Altaic Roots)
Message-ID: <petrichDoG5vE.Jr0@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <313EF06E.65F3@ppp.bekkoame.or.jp> <DnwxME.LMx@CritPath.Org> <peterm-080396084921@jester.geology.uiuc.edu> <peterm-080396093108@jester.geology.uiuc.edu>
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 04:59:38 GMT
X-Original-Newsgroups: sci.lang
Lines: 436
Sender: petrich@netcom21.netcom.com


	Mention of this subject motivates me to repost my list of 
Nostratic references; nothing has been changed since the last time I had 
posted it some months ago. The only change I've thought of making 
recently is to HTMLify it, so that it will look better. 

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

	[(C) Loren Petrich]

*** Indo-European:

Mallory, J.P., 1989, _In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language,
Archeology, and Myth_. -- A comprehensive discussion of the IE
question, touching on linguistics and archeology, and giving several
examples of text in various IE languages and a very short story
written in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European (PIE). He supports the
Kurgan hypothesis, according to which PIE was spread by horsemen going
outwards from a homeland in the eastern Ukraine, just north of the
Black Sea.

Diamond, Jared "Of Horses and Hittites" in _The Third Chimpanzee_. --
A brief discussion of IE origins that roughly agrees with Mallory.

Scientific American, December 1992(?), an article on the domestication
of the horse. -- A posthumous dental exam on a horse in an early
Kurgan site at Dereivka ca. 4000 BCE revealed that it had had a metal
bit in its mouth, indicating that it had been ridden.

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 (she was the first
to propose the Kurgan -- IE link), as well as reconstructions of their
culture. She has also come up with some speculative proposals about
the culture of the pre-IE peoples of Europe, proposals that some
critics have derided as "Mommy Goddess" tales.

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 proposed revisions of PIE phonology (see below for some
others, courtesy of V. Shevoroshkin et al.).

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

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 Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Language" -- a good article on IE,
including a comparison of some vocabulary items across most of the
families.

The American Heritage Dictionary -- a good intro to a good part of the
reconstructed IE vocabulary: 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". Different editions vary a
bit in what they include; a good feature of it is that it is available
on CD-ROM for both Macintosh and DOS/Windows.

Buck, _Dictionary of Synonyms_. -- This book gives a lot of
fundamental vocabulary in many of the Indo-European languages, ancient
and modern. It is a valuable resource for seeing what the unsifted
vocabulary data really looks like.

Pokorny, Julius, _Indogermanische Wo"rterbuch_ ["Indo-European
Dictionary"; the German word for IE literally means "Indo-Germanic"]
-- This is a fairly comprehensive list of reconstructed IE roots, with
descendants in many of the IE languages listed. In German, though one
will probably not need much more than a basic knowledge and a good
paperback dictionary :-)

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

* One interesting linguistic novelty that nobody seems to have
bothered to write is some simple textbook of it, perhaps to be called
"Teach Yourself Proto-Indo-European" (title inspired by the numerous
"Teach Yourself <language>" books). However, there are a range of
pitfalls:

Pronunciation uncertainties. We don't know for sure exactly how PIE
was pronounced, and some linguists even dismiss this sort of question
as irrelevant.

Vocabulary incompleteness. We don't have complete recovery of the
vocabulary. Some words, like "lightning", tend to suffer numerous
replacements, so while the PIE speakers must have had a word for it,
we may never know what it was.

Semantic uncertainties. Some of the reconstructed roots are listed as
having rather vague meanings; this is because the descendants of some
roots have rather variable semantics.

Grammatical uncertainties.

Independent innovations.

Dialect variations. There is no good reason to believe that PIE was a
homogeneous language. It may have been more like a continuum of
dialects, where innovations can spread in waves (compare the early
history of the Germanic languages for a similar example). Dialect
variations can also contribute to the previous pitfalls. So one might
have to settle for some sort of "consensus" dialect.

* Schleicher's Fable:

[This is taken from the version in Jared Diamond's _The Third
Chimpanzee_, though with a bit of re-spelling]

Owis Ek'wooskwe

Gwrreei owis, kwesyo wl@naa ne eest, ek'woons espeket, oinom ghe
gwrrum woghom weghontm, oinomkwe megam bhorom, oinomkwe ghmmenm ooku
bherontm.

Owis nu ek'womos ewewkwet: "Keer aghnutoi moi ek'woons agontm nerm
widntei".

Ek'woos tu ewewkwont: "Kludhi, owei, keer ghe aghnutoi nsmei widntmos:
neer, potis, owioom r wl@naam sebhi gwhermom westrom kwrnneuti. Neghi
owioom wl@naa esti".

Tod kekluwoos owis agrom ebhuget.

[The] Sheep and [the] Horses

On [a] hill, [a] sheep that had no wool saw horses, one [of them]
pulling [a] heavy wagon, one carrying [a] big load, and one carrying
[a] man quickly.

[The] sheep said to [the] horses: "[My] heart pains me, seeing [a] man
driving horses".

[The] horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see
[this]: [a] man, [the] master, makes [the] wool of [the] sheep into
[a] warm garment for himself. And [the] sheep has no wool".

Having heard this, [the] sheep fled into [the] plain.

[Here, @ = schwa, the "uh" sound, usually represented by an
upside-down e; also, long vowels are written double]


And now, on beyond Indo-European. There are several proposals for
macro-families that contain several of the well-established families,
and which cover wide areas.

*** 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 have
concluded. Discrepancies in proposed schemes like this are probably
not fatal; similar problems have existed for a long time in well-known
language families.

*** Proposed members of Sino-Caucasian (or Dene-Caucasian):

* North Caucasian
	NE Caucasian (incl. Hurrian-Urartian and Etruscan)
	Abkhazo-Adyghian (incl. Hattic)
* Burushaski
* Basque
* Yeniseian
* Sino-Tibetan
* Sumerian
* Na-Dene
* "Iberian" [pre-IE in Spain/Portugal]
* "Pelasgian" [pre-IE in Greece]
* Nahali (?)
* Chukchi-Kamchatkan (?)
* 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).

*** Comments

	The evidence proposed for these macro-families is of varying
quality. Nostratic/Eurasiatic would seem to be the best supported,
since the Nostraticists propose a sizable number of roots and
grammatical affixes, all related by reasonably regular sound
correspondences. This methodology is simply that which
Indo-Europeanists and other mainstream linguists use. The same is true
of Sino-Caucasian, though there is the problem that much of the work
on the North Caucasian languages has been unpublished outside of the
xUSSR (they have complicated consonant systems, which makes comparison
_very_ difficult). However, Joseph Greenberg's methods for classifying
the New World languages are rather far from mainstream -- he collects
big word lists and then does eyeball comparisons of them -- and he has
been seriously criticized for subjectivity and lack of
exactitude. Even the Nostraticist Shevoroshkin has criticized him.

	Archeological correlations? For the most part, there seems no
clear correlation between the archeological evidence and
macro-linguistic grouping, with the possibile exception of the
Americas, where there is evidence of three migrations from the Old
World which correspond rather roughly to the Amerind, Na-Dene, and
Eskimo-Aleut families. But to me, the most interesting is the
possibility of resolving the question of the pre-Indo-European
languages of Europe. Basque and a lot of European "substratum"
vocabulary would appear to be Sino-Caucasian, and the estimated date
of Sino-Caucasian's breakup is approximately that of the beginning of
the European Neolithic dispersion. So we might conclude that the
European Neolithic farmers spoke SC languages before the IE speakers
arrived. Likewise, it has been proposed that the early-Neolithic
Natufians of Syria-Palestine were speakers of the ancestral
Afro-Asiatic language.

	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, the list of proposed candidates does include such languages,
including

Phrygian
Hebrew
Arabic
Irish
Dutch
Sanskrit
Japanese
Turkish

	The hypothesis of Punctuated Equilibrium and the "Out of
Africa" hypothesis both suggest that humanity originated in some
relatively small population somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. According
to Punc-Eq, the genetic innovations that define our species can most
easily spread in some relatively small population. However, language
is a human universal and this initial group of people would have had
language. Since it would have been fairly small, and successfully
interbreeding, it would very likely have been linguistically
homogeneous or nearly so. Thus, one can conclude that Proto-World
almost certainly existed. Whether or not any of it is recoverable is
another question entirely, since this initial group lived somewhere
around 100,000 -- 200,000 years ago, and most mainstream linguists
think that there is too much opportunity for Proto-World to have
become garbled beyond recognition in all of its descendants.

	Incidentally, a lower limit to this initial group's size is
provided by the diversity of Human Leukocyte Antigen molecules, which
provide an Identification, Friend or Foe system for immune-system
cells. They are selected for diversity; if a bug escapes one host's
immune system by looking like one version, it will not escape the
immune system of another host with a different version. This diversity
suggests a minimum population-bottleneck size significantly greater
than two (I forget the precise number).


*** Nostratic and Other Macro-Linguistic References:

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

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.

Natural History, March 1987, The First Americans series: "Voices from
the Past", by Merritt Ruhlen. Presents Greenberg's views.

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, on such subjects as Etruscan as a Northeast
Caucasian language, Uralic-Dravidian comparisons, and Greenberg's
Eurasiatic.

Vitaly Shevoroshkin, ed., 1991, _Dene-Sino-Caucasian Languages_ --
Papers on that subject, covering primarily North Caucasian,
Burushaski, Basque, Sino-Tibetan, and Na-Dene. It contains a list of
North Caucasian roots and proposals of DSC ancestor of some European
subtratum words, including some Germanic ones.

Vitaly Shevoroshkin, ed., 1992, _Nostratic, Dene-Caucasian, Austric,
and Amerind_ -- Papers on all of these, covering such subjects as
Cushitic, Chadic and Egyptian relationships, Dravidian relationships
to Afro-Asiatic and Australian, Hokan (an American Indian language
family), and a bit on Proto-World. At the end, there is a
comprehensive bibliography of Nostratic and related subjects, and also
a cumulative index to this series.

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 speculation about Nostratic and Proto-World have
started.

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

Ruhlen, Merritt, 1994 _The Origin of Language(s)_ -- a pair of books,
one relatively technical, and one nontechnical, putting forth
proposals by him and Greenberg for long-range comparisons, including
the ultimate, Proto-World. In the nontechnical one, you get to do some
Greenbergian eyeball comparisons.


	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"

-- 
Loren Petrich				Happiness is a fast Macintosh
petrich@netcom.com			And a fast train
My home page: http://www.webcom.com/~petrich/home.html
Mirrored at: ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/pe/petrich/home.html


