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

On Mon, 26 Jan 2009 08:30:40 +0000, R A Brown wrote:
>Alex Fink wrote:
>> On Sun, 25 Jan 2009 16:54:32 +0000, David McCann wrote:
>>
>>> 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 main comment is obviously that there is no widely accepted proof of
>that statement. As Jörg pointed out in an earlier post, the Nostratic
>theorists are in (at least) two camps, only one of which can be right -
>and both may well be wrong. As for Dene-Caucasian .... from what I have
>seen of it, there is more evidence for the existence of Santa Claus  ;)
They did get Dene-Yeniseian (Deniseian?) together tho, didn't they?

But anything more will probably be longer in coming. :)


>Our knowledge of neolithic Europe before the spread of IE languages is
>virtually non-existent. Personally, I would be surprised if were
>dominated by just two super-families.
Nobody requires the continent to have ever been dominated by two
proto-languages. They could have been no bigger players than anyone else
back in the day and just the only main lineages to survive (accepting for
the while that they're even valid).

Population genetics is probably valid for some very general conclusions
about the interrelations of the world's languages. If we go to sufficient
time-depth, it should be a safe bet to assume eg. that all current languages
of Eurasia are closer related to each other than to Khoisan, with the
possible exception of Afro-Asiatic and other things in the Middle East. And
something similar should be possible for most of "Amerind". (Not necessarily
every one tho; I wouldn't be surprized either if it eventually turns out
there exists let's say, for a random example, Ainu-Haida-Aymara along the
Pacific coast.)

But *within* a continent? Most dates I've seen for macro-families are
staggeringly young, only a handful of millennia beyond the oldest
reconstructed proto-languages. Should we really expect major expansions such
as IE, or perhaps as a more accurate comparision (since this would almost
certainly be a pre-agricultural period) Algic to have wiped everything else
away in just a few thousand years? I don't think so. There's probably
something to eg. Nostratic that is in the reach of comparativ linguistics,
but beyond that, things like initial consonants associated with pronouns can
be extremely stable (things like /m/ especially so); a "macro-Nostratic"
could easily be simultaneously a valid family (in that the last common
ancestor would not be the last common ancestor of most modern-day language
families) and some 40-50,000 years old.

The alternativ would be that the apparent similarities are just apparent,
and the closest relativ of IE is something like Sumerian-Austronesian. (I am
reasonably sure large-scale groupings must at least exist, even if I don't
expect them necessarily to be resolvable without a time machine.) But in the
meantime, the current proposals are the best clue we have to go on.

BTW, I suspect if Greenberg had been left as the authority of language
classification of continents other than Africa, Nostratic and Dene-Caucasian
would be accepted standards...


>Is the non-IE lexicon of Insular
>Celtic to be attributed to Nostratic or Dene-Caucasian??
No and no, obviously it's Niger-Congo. :b Actually, I don't expect ever
being able to tell, any more than about the pre-Samic substrate of Lappland.

John Vertical