Re: Cool present!
| From: | Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, March 9, 2004, 1:57 |
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On Sun, 07 Mar 2004 10:28:20 -0600, Danny Wier <dawiertx@...>
wrote:
> And I've LOVE to get my hands on your tapes, Joe... I mean, I'd love to
> learn Inuktitut, since I'm interested in 1) its polysynthetic
> agglutinative
> grammar, and 2) its *possible* (but difficult to ascertain) links to
> Eurasian languages (if Nostratic is for real, it might be a distant
> member).
> Plus it has a lot of uvular consonants.
I've seen some quite convincing work done on Uralic-Eskimo-Aleut
reconstruction. It was *mumble-mumble* ago on the Nostratic mailing list
(back when I was a subscriber), so you've probably seen it too, Danny, but
I thought it might be worth mentioning again. IIRC, it was to do with
verbal personal endings, and required quite a lot of strategic insertions
of zero-phonemes into each language to make the paradigms line up. OTOH,
once they lined up, the shims were all accounted for regularly and tidily.
Paul