Re: Kentum/satem (was: The future of Sturnan)

> Date:         Mon, 29 Apr 2002 13:31:55 +0100
> From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Jan=20van=20Steenbergen?= <ijzeren_jan@...>
>
>  --- Keith wrote:
>
> > PIE sister languages? Huh? I didn't think there was anything like that?
>
> There is such a theory, that links some big language families with
> each other. IIRC: Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Semitic, Caucasian,
> Etruscan, and perhaps a few others. They call it "Nostratic".
> I don't know how widely this theory is accepted among scientists; I
> know too little about it to give my own opinion.
From what I see, there's some consensus that the question is worth
investigating, but people most emphatically do not agree on the list
of languages to include, or even the putative sound correspondences.

> But if it were true, it would mean that Proto-Indo-European actually
> did have sister languages.
Indeed. And even if not, smaller groupings might still be found valid.

Miguel Carrasquer Vidal has made a case for Etruscan as the closest
relative of IE within Nostratic, to mention one attempt.

And then there's Basque, of course. There's the intriguing parallel of
one stop series lacking a labial member in the reconstructions of the
two proto-languages. MCV (again) suggested a correspondence between
(glottalic) PIE and Proto-Basque, and even Larry Trask didn't trash
the effort, as far as it went. The problem is that the time depth of
Proto-Basque as reconstructed is much less than PIE, and there's very
little of the lexicon that's ancient --- so we will probably never get
further than intriguing suggestions.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)