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

David McCann wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-01-21 at 21:21 +0100, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
>
>> Yes.  One cognate set is no cognate set.  You can always find
>> chance similarities.  In order to prove a relationship between
>> languages, you need at least about 100 cognate sets displaying
>> regular sound correspondences.
>
> There are a lot of relationships accepted on far less than that.
> Consider the words vhraterei "to the brother", leuzorophos "children",
> and zonasto 'he gave". If they were all that survived of Venetic, it
> still wouldn't be too difficult to guess that it was Indo-European.
IMO on such scanty evidence it still be a *guess*. One might just as
well say that if _uncle_, _infants_ and _donated_ were all that survived
of English, it still wouldn't be too difficult to guess that it was a
Romance language.

> For me, the Etruscan mi "I" is a pretty good start towards classing it
> as Nostratic. Consider the probabilities. If the average language has 25
> consonants, any consonant should occur for "I" in about 6000 / 25 = 240
> languages, randomly distributed. The facts that m- and k- are absent
> from South America, and p- and r- are absent everywhere shows that the
> distribution is non-random, and hence significant.
I see. So Swahili _mimi_ = "I, me" is a pretty good start to classifying
it as Nostratic?

> When we also see an
> oblique form mini, comparable with Turkic and Uralic min-, it becomes
> even more difficult to take the Etruscan forms as coincidental.
The Swahili verbal prefixes _ni-_ "I" and _ni_ "us" then makes it even
more difficult to take these forms as coincidental?

> Then we
> have  Etruscan -c "and", ati "mother",
Which of course is nothing like the common IE words for "mother". So how
come the Nostratic is apparently so different? True, the Etruscan word
bares a resemblance to Finnish _äiti_, but Hungarian _anya_ and Estonian
_ema_ seem to point to other origins.

> ta "this",
Unless I'm mistaken, /t/ surely occurs with demonstratives elsewhere,
e.g. Malay/Indonesian _itu_ "this"; Tamil _aDu_ /atu/ "that", _iDu_
/itu/ "this".

> tur- "give", tul
> "stone". One could be coincidence, like the Australian language that has
> the word dog, but the odds against half a dozen similarities is very
> large.
Personally, I remain unconvinced. I am very much in agreement with Jörg
that one needs at least about 100 cognate sets displaying _regular_
sound correspondences.

--
Ray
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CENEDL HEB IAITH, CENEDL HEB GALON.
(A nation without a language is a
nation without a heart)
[Welsh proverb]

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