Re: hebrew, the movie Pi

da: dirk elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...>
a: Multiple recipients of list CONLANG <CONLANG@...>
inviat: Monday, August 16, 1999 3:17 PM
Subjecte: Re: hebrew, the movie Pi


>On Sat, 15 Aug 1998, Jay Bowks wrote:
>> >>Na "failure" = 51
>> Incidentally most Amerindian language have "na" for the
>> first person pronoun... ouch again this is pretty insulting stuff
>This is a gross overstatement of some rather questionable work done by
>Joseph Greenberg, in which he claimed that the languages of the
>Americas (North, Central, and South) can be lumped into three families:
>Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, and Amerind (the proposed family that makes most
>linguists gag). Having fun with the numerical values of Hebrew letters
>is one thing, but casually repeating dubious "facts" such as the Amerind
>first person pronoun is quite another.
>
My, Dirk, I seem to have hit a nerve. Sorry bud!
I'm only going on what I've read it it's "na" or "nV"
I dunno... but I've only got to go on what I've read
and not taken the trouble of researching myself.
Amerindian languages aren't my forte. However
I do enjoy learning more about them and any
time your willing to make more posts about them
I'm willing to read them. I think the genetic work
done by other scientists is also worthy of note.
Specially now that remains have been found
beneath where there weren't suppossed to be
any remains of cultures at all. The whole Amerindian
family archeology and research has been pretty
badly handled and the attitude that the Northern
Amerindian peoples included other families of
different descent has been a troubled issue for
discussion in Academia.

But ... anyway... thanks for the flaming Alaskan
reply... ;-)

Since,
Jay B.


>More recently, Johanna Nichols (and a author whose name I can't recall
>off-hand) published an article in _Language_ which gives an areal/
>geographical explanation for the higher than expected frequency of first
>person nV- forms which is much more convincing than Greenberg's
>"paradigms".
>
>Let's be careful out there!
>
>Dirk
>
>--
>Dirk Elzinga
>dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu                   "All grammars leak."
>http://www.u.arizona.edu/~elzinga/                 -Edward Sapir
>