Re: Long-range protolinguistics (was Re: Q (Caucasian Elf))

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote in reply to me:

> 3. There can be little doubt that Proto-AA was spoken in or near
> Ethiopia, quite far off the area where Proto-Nostratic might have been
> spoken (somewhere in the Black Sea/Caucasus/Caspian Sea area).
In the book I have on Nostratic, one of the authors postulated a link
between Nostratic and Nilo-Saharan and Bantu.  Because of the obvious
geographical separation of AA from IE, Altaic, etc., this might offer a
better explanation of the genesis of AA.

> 4. AA seems to lack the morphological features characteristic of
> Nostratic, such as MTS pronouns, -m accusative, etc.
I used to think that Semitic and Indo-European marked feminine gender in
similar ways.  But the common AA feminine marker is -t, while in IE
it's -h2.  Unless IE picked it up from later Semitic where the -t suffix
became -h (that's what happened to Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic but the -t
re-emerges up in feminine duals and plurals).  But I don't think they're
related now.

Anyway, the case system of IE, Kartvelian, Uralic, Altaic and even Sumerian
show likely genetic relationships for what it's worth, but AA case marking
is greatly simplified; Arabic marks nominatives with -u(n), accusative
with -a(n), and genitive with -i(n).  No eight-case Sanskrit system or
ninety-two whatever cases of Hungarian...

> Regarding the noun cases of Kartvelian, there seem to be some odd shifts
> and reversals.  How did it come that -m marks the accusative case in IE
> and Uralic, but the *ergative* in Kartvelian?  This flip is paralleled
> by the fact that the object agreement markers in Kartvelian resemble the
> present/aorist personal endings in IE, while the object agreement
> markers resemble the perfect personal endings, which are by some
> interpreted as old stative personal endings (< older object agreement
> markers?).  What happened in Kartvelian to turn the entire system
> upside-down?
Well ergative and accusative are both more marked than nominative and
absolutive.  Also, remember that Georgian is really a split-ergative
language, and absolutive case is used for subjects of intransitive verbs.
Only certain screeves of transitive verbs (a screeve is an array of tense,
aspect, mood and voice) use the ergative case in the subject slot; some
screeves use other cases and I'll have to look up which ones...

> PIE might once have had something similar, if one accepts Lehmann's idea
> that it also had active alignment earlier.
I think the theorized process is active > ergative > nominative, which has
precedent in real world languages.

> It seems that Uralic sits at the "hub" between IE, Altaic and
> Dravidian.  I haven't seen any pairing of two of the latter at the
> exclusion of Uralic, but Uralic-IE, Uralic-Altaic and Uralic-Dravidian
> have all been proposed and discussed.
That's a possibility.  Except Uralic languages migrated further north than
the other families.  I'm tempted to start promoting Sumerian as the "hub"
withing Nostratic or at least East Nostratic.  (It's been done, I'm sure.)

But maybe it is Uralic in the middle, since IE went west, Altaic went east
and Dravidian went south.  The homeland being lower Mesopotamia, which was
first called Sumer...

> (BTW: In Ill Bethisad, all sorts of crackpot theories are in circulation
> about Quendian as well.  A popular one is that the Elves came from
> Atlantis long ago; others try to link Quendian with Basque, Sumerian or
> just about anything else, even proposing that the Elves were North
> American Indians who somehow wound up in western Europe.)
People say those things about Basque itself.

> Inuit-Aleut makes sense, but I won't buy Greenberg's proposal that the
> whole Amerind "family" is Nostratic.  Etruscan, OTOH, seems to fit into
> Nostratic nicely.
The most likely links of indigenous American languages to those outside
America are Inuit-Aleut to Uralic et al, and, much less probable, Na-Dene to
Sino-Tibetan and North Caucasian (and according to some, guess what,
Basque).  I never knew of Greenberg linking Amerind to Nostratic or anything
else, but that sounds like the kind of spurious theories coming from him.

Danny Boy


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