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Re: THEORY: A possible Proto-World phonology

From:Danny Wier <dawier@...>
Date:Thursday, June 29, 2000, 2:32
>From: Oskar Gudlaugsson <hr_oskar@...>
>Lars: > >What's Nostratic? Something Pre-IE? I haven't heard of it, so please inform >me :) > >Oskar
Hi, my name is not Lars. But I'll answer. Nostratic, from Latin _noster_ "our" (that is, "our language"), is a theoretical ancestor of several language familes. The consensus is that it includes the following: Afro-Asiatic > Chadic, Omotic, Cushitic, Berber, Egyptian, Semitic Indo-European > Celtic, Germanic, Italic-Latin, Venetic, Illyrian-Albanian, Hellenic-Greek, Baltic, Slavonic, Anatolian-Hittite, Thracian-Armenian, Indo-Iranian (> Indo-Aryan-Sanskrit and Iranian-Avestan) and Tocharian. Kartvelian > Georgian and three others Uralic > Finno-Ugric (> Finnic, Ugric-Hungarian), Samoyed, Ket-Yukaghir Altaic > Turkic, Mongolian, Tungusic, Korean (?) Dravidian > North, South (> Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam) Some also include Eskimo-Aleut, Gilyak, Ainu, Basque, Sumerian, Burushaski and Japanese. I've even read one who claimed the Penutian languages of California are Nostratic! Though proposed by a Dane about 100 years ago, the most work done on the language, believed to have been spoken 12-15 thousand years ago after the last Ice Age, is a work mostly of Soviet/Russian linguists. The late Vladimir Ilich-Svitych is most well-known. He published a list of a couple thousand reconstructed word roots, which is (as far as I know) only found in Russian and hard to find anyway. Allan Bomhard, an American (?), came up with another list of reconstructions. A third authority, a Russian-Israeli named Aharon Dolgopolsky, is working on his own list of root words, which will probably be published no sooner than 2001 or '02. (I do have one of his works, which gives 125 roots which pertain to what the Nostratics were like geographically, culturally and technologically.) Dolgopolsky postulated that the origin of the Proto-Nostratic people is probably lower Mesopotamia. From there went Afro-Asiatic west and south (through Egypt and Arabia), Indo-European north to Asia Minor then west through Greece, and north through the Caucasus, Altaic east and north into central/eastern Asia including Siberia, and Dravidian east and south into India. I think the culture mentioned was New Stone Age, and the people had a basic understanding of farming, herding and tool use. Daniel A. Wier ¶¦¬þ Lufkin, Texas USA http://communities.msn.com/DannysDoubleWideontheWeb ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com