Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic,sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!rutgers!uwm.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!howland.erols.net!netcom.com!petrich
From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Re: Finnish related to Turkish?
Message-ID: <petrichE144v1.FLH@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <56qu7k$j9l@chaos.kulnet.kuleuven.ac.be> <NEWTNews.2822.848375660.drmorris@phoenix.phoenix.net> <56rv0m$r4a@halley.pi.net>
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 1996 10:23:25 GMT
Lines: 56
Sender: petrich@netcom2.netcom.com

In article <56rv0m$r4a@halley.pi.net>,
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv@pi.net> wrote:

>The Ural-Altaic hypothesis (combining Uralic and Altaic) is no longer
>seriously considered.  A recent attempt to more or less revive it has
>been undertaken by Joseph Greenberg, who classifies all the above
>languages (except Yeniseian) in one big "Eurasiatic" family, which also
>includes Indo-European. ...

	There is a school of Russian linguists who propose the 
"Nostratic" hypothesis, which overlaps Greenberg's Eurasiatic; Nostratic 
includes Afro-Asiatic, Kartvelian, and Dravidian, which Greenberg exclude 
from Eurasiatic. I have some references on it in:

http://www.webcom.com/petrich/writings/NostraticRefs.txt

[hasn't been updated in months]

	[Negative reception of Greenberg's New-World claims...]

	However, the Nostraticists are careful to look for sound
correspondences, instead of doing crude Greenbergian eyeballing, and they
claim to have found some interesting nontrivial ones. Here are some examples:

In Indo-European, the velars come in three types: labialized (Kw), palatal
(K' or Ky), and plain (K) [K I use as the generic symbol for them]. In the
centum langs (Germanic, Celtic, Italic, Greek, Tocharian, Hittite), the
second kind becomes plain K, while in the satem (or sat@m) langs (Slavic,
Indo-Iranian, Armenian), the first kind becomes plain K, while the second
kind turns into something like s or sh and their voiced variants. However,
some IE K's seem to be plain K in both centum and satem langs, which 
means three articulations of K in proto-IE.

What the Nostraticists propose is something interesting, and they claim 
that they were not looking for it when they found it; these different K's 
correspond to K + different vowels in the "East Nostratic" (Uralic, 
Altaic, Dravidian) langs. Here they are:

IE *Kw ~ ENostr Ku, Ko
IE *K ~ ENostr Ka
IE *K' ~ ENostr Ke, Ki

Also, Nostratic appears to have had three voicings of its stop 
consonants, which suggest the following reinterpretation of the IE stops:

T -> T(h) (strong)
D -> T (weak)
Dh -> D(h)

There is also possible resolution of such riddles as the IE laryngeals, 
which have been one of the most controversial subjects in IE studies.
-- 
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


