Re: languages of pre-I.E. Europe and onwards

On Fri, 2009-01-23 at 08:23 +0000, R A Brown wrote:

> I see. So Swahili _mimi_ = "I, me" is a pretty good start to classifying
> it as Nostratic?
> Unless I'm mistaken, /t/ surely occurs with demonstratives elsewhere,
> e.g. Malay/Indonesian _itu_ "this"; Tamil _aDu_ /atu/ "that", _iDu_
> /itu/ "this".
There's nothing like a discussion of language families to get people
going!

Seriously, Ray (and others), you have to take things in a wider,
non-linguistic context. If you read a book on the history of alphabets,
Brahmi may be compared to both the Phoenician version of North Semitic
and to South Semitic. The point forgotten there is that the Indians
traded with Arabia but not with Phoenicia. How then were they supposed
to have learnt the Phoenician script?

With languages, there is similarly a limit to how far people wandered
before modern times, and ancient population movements can be
reconstructed by molecular biology.

Etruscan is spoken in Europe. All other European languages are either
Nostratic or Dene-Caucasian (that should be good for a few more
comments :-). The odds are that Etruscan is going to be one or the
other. The one thing we certainly know is that it won't be Khoisan.

Similarly, genetics links the Malays with the other peoples of
South-East Asia, even with the Papuans and Australians, rather than with
the populations of Northern Eurasia. With no evidence for migrations
between the two areas, there is no reason to consider Malay as a
possible Nostratic language, regardless of what may contain.

Also remember cumulative probability. If the odds against a language
having m- for "I" are 25:1, and the odds against -k for "and" are 25:1,
the odds against both are getting a bit steep.

On the question of loans, a good test is whether the similarities are
too close, or confined to adjacent languages. It was finally realised
that the Tai were not Sino-Tibetan when it was pointed out that the
"cognates" were all with Chinese, never with Tibetan. There are obvious
loans into and out of Etruscan. But tur- "to give" is unlikely to be a
loan from Indo-European, since there the -r extension is only found used
to derive a noun, not to extend the verbal root. Similarly, tul "stone"
is Altaic, not Indo-European.