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

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

> > Sino/Dene-Caucasian as a macrofamily is an even bolder theory than
> > Nostratic, to say the least.
>
> Yes.  Those people try to reconstruct a macrofamily that began to
> diverge
> at least *30,000* years ago!  In fact, Sino-Dene-Caucasian would be
> so old that Nostratic could be a branch of it.  But no; I think that
> long-range comparison is best done in smaller steps, such as
> Indo-Uralic.
Someone named Glen Gordon has devised a family tree showing how he feels the
language families of the world came from Proto-Language (or Proto-World or
Proto-Earth or Proto-Human):

http://www.friesian.com/trees.htm

He hasn't reconstructed Proto-Language; he just came up with a theoretical
process of differentiation. Still a bold proposal. He also has stuff on
racial classification.

> > 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.
>
> Yes.  Kartvelian looks similar to IE in some respects.  It is possible
> that a language related to Kartvelian exerted a substratum influence
> on Indo-European.  But the pronoun roots are similar, too, more similar
> than those of Altaic, which is in turn quite similar to Uralic
> in other respects.  Both Altaic and Kartvelian seem to be better
> candidates for the nearest relationship outside the Indo-Uralic group
> I gave above than Afro-Asiatic (though this has a stative verb paradigm
> strikingly similar to the Indo-European one), let alone Dravidian.
Dravidian also has a much different phonology than the others: no voice
distinction of stops (a feature only shared by Uralic), retroflexes and
alveolars in additions to dentals. Bomhard considers Drav. /t/ to have come
from P-N *t and /t`/ from *d... creating a strange parallel to Klingon,
which has dental /t/ but retroflex /d`/ (Okrand's capital D). But
Afro-Asiatic is considered to have branched off before all others.

And yes, I did rip off Okrand a *little* for Tech phonology. I just *had* to
have /qX)/ (which is actually /q_h/ in Tech, but tends to affricate in
speech). But /tK)/ had nothing to do with Klingon.

> Well, but wouldn't it be more fun to develop a whole family of related
> but distinct languages from Proto-Tech?  At least, that's what I am
> going to do with Albic.
I wanted to base Tech on Proto-World, but it hasn't been constructed yet
(and probably never will be). Nostratic is the closest thing we have to it.
I did incorporate non-Nostratic elements into it, particulary Northwest
Caucasian phonology. I was able to cheat a bit and pad the consonant
phonology by reducing the Old Tech six-vowel system to two (/a/ ~ /@/), then
the diphthongs to monophthongs so I ended up with six vowels again, but the
consonant inventory is (theoretically) tripled in the process. It went like
this:

a > a
@ > @
e > ja
i > j@
o > wa
u > w@

The /j/ and /w/ become secondary features of preceding consonants:
palatization and labiovelarization.

Then the diphthongs became monophthongs:

aj > e
@j > i
aw > o
@w > u

The language, however, is still written (at least in Cyrillic orthography)
like it was in Old Tech, resulting in a bit of Maggelity: a word like _h-ew_
'lack, need' is pronounced [X\_jO], and _k'woj_ 'the act of clothing or
covering something; protection' is [k_>_wE]. The vowel quality changes a
little if the consonant is palatized or labiovelarized: _@j_ 'reception,
greeting' [?i\] vs. _rij_ 'prosperity' [r_ji], etc.

Now I'm digressing, but so far, there's an Old Tech and a modern language,
with some dialectal variation that manifests itself mostly in the use of
borrowed words from various human languages, but so far, no Tech language
family, just an isolate.