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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Nostratic Date
In-Reply-To: fyzikul@aol.com's message of 6 Aug 1997 12:19:34 GMT
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Date: Wed, 6 Aug 1997 19:27:53 GMT
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In article <19970806121901.IAA22892@ladder02.news.aol.com> fyzikul@aol.com
(Fyzikul) writes:

>Perhaps someone can help me out here.  I'm a screenwriter, and in researching
>a new piece, I find I need to know an approximate date for "Nostratic"--I hope
>I have the correct name for the ancestor of Proto-Indo-European.  Reading the
>FAQs, I am only able to find the approximate date of Proto-Indo-European, 2500
>BC), but nothing about a date for Nostratic.

First off, your date for PIE is about 1500-2000 years too recent, for most of
us Indo-Europeanists.  Better make it c. 4000 BCE.

As for Nostratic, it is postulated that it is roughly as much older than its
reconstructible daughters as PIE is than modern English, so a date around
12,000 BCE shouldn't arouse too much furor among the Nostraticists.  Do be
careful of how you use the name "Nostratic," though--it was coined in 1903 by
Holger Pedersen, from the Latin _nostras, nostratis_ "fellow countryman," and
is by no means ancient.

(I have in mind the use of the word "Kurgan" in the first _Highlander_ film, as
an ethnonym for an Indo-European warrior--when it is an modern archaeological
label for a particular burial style and associated culture...)

[posted and e-mailed]
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
