Re: Japanese from Tungus

Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
> Ray wrote:
> > As far as I know, that Japanese and Korean are related is not proven.
>
> I agree to that. I am also skeptical about their inclusion into Altaic,
> which I think has been done mainly for typological reasons. (Greenberg
> does not include Japanese and Korean into Altaic, but he nevertheless
> includes them into his Eurasiatic macrofamily.) [...]
> Indeed.  In the case of Celtic and Semitic, we of course know that
> the Celtic languages are Indo-European and acquired their "Semitic"
> features secondarily, possibly from an unknown substratum.  (And the
> Semitic languages are known to be Afro-Asiatic, which probably did
> not display all of the "typically Semitic" features, either.)
Might I point out, however, that finding lautgesetze is not the end-all-
be-all for hypothesizing genetic relationships.  A case in point is
Afro-Asiatic.  Although it is widely recognized as a genetic unit,
it is not because of an abundance of cognates or shared lautgesetze, but
rather primarily the bizarre morphological typology that all (or most all)
the AA languages share.  The time-depth of AA is usually held to
be considerably older than Indo-European, more something on the order
of 7-10k YBP.  AA is thus more comprable to Eurasiatic than to traditional
language families like IE.

Anyways, this does not, of course prove that Japanese and Korean must
thus be related to Altaic, which is a separate question.  But I have to
disagree with Ray, in that such a relationship cannot be discounted on
the grounds that most of the similarities are typological.  In this
particular case though, although I am by no means an expert in the
languages in question, the kind of typology being invoked as evidence
is so widespread that I would think it constitutes a much weaker parallel
than in the case of AA.

-----------------------------------------
Joerg also wrote:
> Personally, I think that there is some evidence for a distant
> relationship of Indo-European, [etc ...]
>
> A. Europic
>   1. Indo-European
>   2. Etruscan? [...]
>
> The inclusion of Etruscan is uncertain as there is so frustratingly
> little known of the language, though it looks in many ways similar
> to IE without actually being IE.
I agree that this is rather odd.  In looking through my grammar of
Etruscan, that by Bonfante and Bonfante, there were no particularly
obvious similarities other than, say, a nominative-accusative alignment,
which of course many many unrelated languages have.

> The Nostraticists consider Eurasiatic to be a subbranch of Nostratic;
> the additional members of Nostratic would be Kartvelian, Sumerian,
> Elamo-Dravidian (if those two are related at all) and Afro-Asiatic.
> The inclusion of the latter two seems especially doubtful to me.
Actually, John Colarusso (certainly no Nostraticist) thinks that
Indo-European and Northwest Caucasian, though not Northeast
Caucasian, might be related to Indo-European, and he has come up
with a number of cognates and sound change, including the word
for "horse". He calls this grouping "Pontic", for its putative
homeland near the Black Sea. Also, someone as conservative as Eric
Hamp has said that it is possible that Kartvelian is related to IE,
based on their similar systems of verbal ablaut, and a number of
shared typological properties like syllable structure.

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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