Re: Nostratic (was Re: Etymology of English 'black'), Tech, and Albic

From: "Jörg Rhiemeier" <joerg_rhiemeier@...>

> I haven't found anything but his posts to the various incarnations
> of the Nostratic mailing list and a few other lists (including
> Cybalist), and a few web pages on pre-PIE and pre-Basque.
> He posted a sketch of his own version of Nostratic (mostly based
> on system comparison) on July 2, 2003 to Nostratica (the subject
> line is "Tour (and 9)", as it was the concluding post of a series
> of articles on the various branches of Nostratic.  Carrasquer also
> considers Sumerian, Etruscan and even Basque to be Nostratic.
He includes Basque? I've only read of Basque being related remotely to North
Caucasian, part of Sino-Caucasian (or Dene-Caucasian if Na-Dene is
included). Sumerian is included in Bomhard's Nostratic, and he says Etruscan
might be related as well, except we have so little data on the language.

Sino/Dene-Caucasian as a macrofamily is an even bolder theory than
Nostratic, to say the least.

> I'd group Inuit-Aleut with Uralic, and relate that to Indo-European.
> Albic would be a coordinate branch to Indo-European:
>
>                   +--- Inuit-Aleut
>                +--+
>                |  +--- Uralic-Yukaghir
> Indo-Uralic ---+
>                |  +--- Indo-European
>                +--+
>                   +--- Albic
>
> What comes next?  I don't know, perhaps Altaic, perhaps Kartvelian.
I personally think Kartvelian is the 'missing link' in Nostratic and
Eurasian (though K isn't considered part of Eurasian by Bomhard). The most
important clue it offers is in its ejectives/glottalics, and I've noticed
some similarities in Georgian case endings and personal pronoun affixes to
Indo-European, as I have in Finnish.

(I wrote:)

> > They ran afoul of humans and ended up flocking to the Caucasus or the
> > Himalayas. The rest is a mythological blur.
And some time in the future, I might create two more 'Tech' languages, all
three being unrelated to each other. When the Techs fled into mountains,
forests and deserts away from human civilization, they split into three
groups: Caucasian, African and Himalayan. The African Techs, which settled
in the mountains of Ethiopia, then Kenya and Tanzania, changed their skin
color to 'fit in' a little more with the dark-skinned humans, thus becoming
known as the 'Black Elves'. Their language would probably be a mix of
Niger-Kordofanian, Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan, and like (Caucasian) Tech,
consonant-rich, but unlike Tech, it'll have clicks in its inventory, and
also vowels with tones. The Himalayan Techs will probably have a more Asian
appearance, and their language will be based on Sino-Tibetan, North
Caucasian, Burushaski, Ket-Yenisseian and Hmong-Mien - and again, it'll have
plenty of consonants, but whether or not it'll be tonal is uncertain.

I don't know if there ever will be an 'Afro-Tech' or 'Sino-Tech'. I have to
finish the original, or at least sufficiently develop it.

> The Elbi (that's the plural of _alba_) were no special race at all,
> but mere humans, the bearers of an ancient civilization in the
> British Isles that fell some time around 500 BC, leaving traces in
> Celtic and Germanic mythology as "Elves".  Their ancestors evidently
> entered the British Isles from the east, some time between 1500
> and 2000 BC.  Their mythology tells of a lush, fertile homeland
> on the shore of a large lake far in the east, which was destroyed
> by a cataclysm.  This might be a memory of the Black Sea Flood,
> which sent refugees into a large area in central and eastern Europe,
> who introduced farming into that area.
I actually modelled the Techs a lot after the Rroma. They were scattered by
the Great Floods, the most catastrophic being the Black Sea around 7500 BCE,
and a Tower of Babel-type event in Mesopotamia a few millennia later. Tiny
communities of the Caucasian Techs migrated as far as Sri Lanka and
Scotland, yet somehow preserved their language so well that thousands of
years later their dialects of the language kept a high level of mutual
intelligibility with those in Armenia, Turkey and Iran. (But Techs have some
pretty impressive psychic/magical abilities, so that's not as hard as it
sounds.)

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