Re: PIE and Nostratic

Hallo!

James Comer wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> Glad to see the articles on pre-Greek and posts on PIE.  I had a question
> about the Nostratic hypothesis, as I based Urasti on Nostratic.  How
> seriously is Nostratic taken nowadays?
The majority of historical linguists are sceptical about Nostratic;
the evidence is generally considered insufficient.  Few, however,
would say that it is impossible.

>        Where are the Nostratic speakers
> supposed to have lived? I have read very early dates for them, and that
> they were hunter-gatherers.
If Nostratic is real, then Proto-Nostratic would have been spoken
somewhen between 12,000 and 15,000 years ago if not earlier,
and the most likely location is northeastern Africa.  At any rate,
it seems to predate the invention of agriculture.

> I am harvesting words in Tocharian A from a Buddhist text posted with an
> online translation to create Yorash, a conlang for human tribes who live
> in symbiosis with giant carnivorous lizards. As Tocharian is distantly
> related to Nostratic,
Tocharian is not merely "distantly related to Nostratic", it is
Indo-European.

>        there will be some similarity, but also major
> differences. I find that gathering a few hundred basic word roots is
> necessary to start a conlang. How do others on this list start?
I found it helpful not to keep an alphabetic word list but a thematic
one, i.e. one organized by fields of discourse.  For example, the
words for animals are grouped together, as are the colour terms, etc.;
this way, you can see where you already have a good set of basic
words and where more works needs to be done.  An example of a
thematic dictionary (and indeed the one that gave me the idea) is

http://www.zompist.com/thematic.htm

> I LOVE the comitative case. I even harvested a few examples of it.
Greetings,

Jörg.

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