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

Hallo!

On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 22:14:46 -0500,
Danny Wier <dawiertx@...> wrote:

> 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 know that guy from the Cybalist and Nostratic mailing lists
(I am not a member, but I occasionally browse their archives).
His views are a mix of interesting ideas and wrong turns,
and he has the habit of flaming those who contradict him.
However, he isn't as far off the rocker as Patrick Ryan with his
infamous "Proto-Language".  But as far as global human language
family trees go, it is all pure conjecture, and I am not sure
whether grafting language trees reconstructed by linguists onto
genetic trees in a Cavalli-Sforza manner is really a good idea.
Sure, most people in history have learned their first language
from their genetic parents, but language replacement is far from
uncommon (and mismatches indeed occur in Cavalli-Sforza's diagrams).
I am an example for that myself.  My native language
is High German, but my 19th-century ancestors all were native
speakers of Low German - somewhere in between, my ancestors
acquired High German, and later decided to raise their children
in it.

> > 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),
...which (Uralic) looks as if it had lost it, turning voiced stops
into fricativces in some environments and devoicing them in others;
it even appears as if Uralic geminates evolved from ejectives.

>       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).
Now this is what I call a brute-force match!  I don't really see
how voicing should transmute into retroflexion, if one doesn't
posit a Klingon-like intermediate stage with /t/ and /d`/
- which isn't very plausible.  It is also unsystematic: Nostratic
*b and *g haven't undergone corresponding shifts (it escapes my
mind what corresponding shifts would have looked like anyway
- what is to labial or to velar what retroflex is to dental?).

I think that the inclusion of Dravidian into Nostratic is a historical
baggage - earlier scholars have tried to link Dravidian to "Ural-Altaic"
on mainly typological grounds, and found some alleged Dravidian-Uralic
and Dravidian-Altaic cognates (which probably were just chance
resemblances, as they occur in *any* pair of languages);
and the Nostraticists of today just don't like to drop a language
family from their list.

>       But
> Afro-Asiatic is considered to have branched off before all others.
Though it has more in common with IE or Kartvelian than Dravidian.
The similarity of the IE and AA stative paradigms is striking:

        AA     IE

1sg.    *-ku   *-h2a
2sg.m.  *-tka: *-th2a
    f.  *-tki:
3sg.    *-a    *-e

But that's about all that matches of morphology.  The active
conjugation, verb aspects, noun cases and number markers are all
very different.  The Afro-Asiatic languages use consonant-only
roots into which vowels are inserted to make concrete word-forms;
some people have claimed that IE (and Kartvelian) ablaut is
essentially the same, but it isn't (it is a vowel gradation
that was conditioned by a pitch accent that - in my opinion -
originally fell on the penultimate syllable, before vowels
were lost and the accent shifted in some forms).

And Afro-Asiatic is a macrofamily in itself; each of its branches
(Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic-Omotic) has a time depth
comparable to that of Indo-European, and the reconstruction of
Proto-Afro-Asiatic is AFAIK *very* incomplete and uncertain
(there is still much work needed on Cushitic and Chadic, I have heard).
If Afro-Asiatic is related to Indo-European and thereabouts,
the relationship is more distant than the ones between IE and Uralic
or IE and Kartvelian.

> 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.
Why should it?  /tK)/ occurs in several Northwest Caucasian languages,
and in some reconstructions of Proto-Afro-Asiatic and Proto-Nostratic.

> > 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 have noticed that.

>       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.
Is this also what happened in Northwest Caucasian languages?

> Then the diphthongs became monophthongs:
>
> aj > e
> @j > i
> aw > o
> @w > u
In earlier versions, I remember you also had front rounded and I think
also back unrounded vowels.  Are they still there, and if yes, where
do they come from?  Umlaut?  Vowel harmony?

Proto-Albic has seven vowels /a e i o ø u y/; these evolved from an
Pre-Proto-Albic (Proto-Indo-Albic) 3-vowel system /a i u/ by some
fairly complicated processes.  First, the vowel features [+open],
[+front] and [+round] became autosegmental, attaching to morphemes
rather than phonemes.  The vowels /e/ and /o/ resulted from two
features ([+open] and [+front] in case of /e/, [+open] and [+round]
in case of /o/) attaching to the same morpheme.  Some derivational
and inflectional morphemes, being unaccented, then lost the feature
[+open], which in many cases led to morphemes with unspecified vowels.
These morphemes undergo vowel harmony, borrowing the vowel features
from the word stem.  And what's more, there is a-umlaut, i-umlaut
and u-umlaut.  If only one of the three vowel features is attached
to a vowel position (i.e., the vowel is /a/, /i/ or /u/),
the feature spreads leftward.  This creates more instances of
/e/ and /o/ as well as the front rounded vowels /ø/ and /y/.
Umlaut takes precedence from right to left, if for example,
a word contains the vowels /a...i...u/ in this order, the /u/
umlauts the /i/ to /y/, which thus does not umlaut the /a/ to /e/.
The result is thus /a...y...u/, not **/e...y...u/.

> The language, however, is still written (at least in Cyrillic orthography)
> like it was in Old Tech,
When did the aforementioned vowel changes happen, and when was Tech
alphabetized?  Spellings may reflect older states of the language
(as in English, French or Irish), but the sound changes that do not
show up in writing are such that occured *after* the language
was alphabetized (or were transparent enough to be allophonic
rather than phonemic, as i-umlaut in Old High German).

>       resulting in a bit of Maggelity:
Or rather, Etabnannery: the rules are complicated, but regular.

>       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.
Nice!

> 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.
For Albic, I currently have plans for: Proto-Albic (the reconstructed
protolanguage of the family, which of course is really the language
I derive all the others from; quite advanced), Old Albic (the standard
literary form of Albic during the heyday of Elvish civilization,
which is conservative, but not identical to Proto-Albic, think of it
as an Albic `Sanskrit'; also quite advanced), and four (so far)
modern languages that evolved from various Albic dialects, one of them
more or less the direct descendant of Old Albic (yet only sketchy).
Given the number of Elvish tradeposts all around the northern Atlantic,
I can always add more languages later.  Now this sounds like enough
to do for years to come!

Greetings,

Jörg.

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