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

Just a brief reply to David's post - Jörg has already responded with
many of the points I would have made    :)

Alex Fink wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Jan 2009 16:54:32 +0000, David McCann <david@...>
> 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  ;)

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. Is the non-IE lexicon of Insular
Celtic to be attributed to Nostratic or Dene-Caucasian??

IIRC in an earlier mail Jörg has speculated that there might have been
at least 25 different language groups in neolithic Europe. We just don't
know.

>> 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.
I agree that Etruscan won't be Khosian - but that gets us nowhere. To
speak of the odds that Etruscan belongs to one of Nostratic or
Dene-Caucasian is meaningless while the odds that either of these two
super-families existence is IMO not great.

> Er, is isolatehood out of the question a priori, then?
Of course not!

[snip]

>> 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.
What I attempted to show is that _m_ for 1st person occurs in many
places (at least in Africa & Asia) - to many IMO to put any great weight
on it.

Etruscan -c /k/ = Latin -que, Ancient Greek -te (<-- k_we) looks
attractive. But surely then we would expect other examples of PIE *k_w
turning up in Etruscan as /k/. AFAIK they just don't exist. One is
looking for examples of a set of _regular_ sound changes.

This AFAIK is an isolated example. As such it could be co-incidence (or
even borrowing).
------------------------------------------

I won't comment further on Jörg's reply, which I am in agreement with,
except this:

>> >       and ancient population movements can be
>> > reconstructed by molecular biology.
>
> Be careful.  The idea of grafting language family tree on genetic
> trees, as done by Cavalli-Sforza and his followers, is generally
> met with suspicion, as genetic relationship does not necessarily
> imply linguistic relationship, and vice versa.
Yes indeed - *be careful*. Genetic relationship does *not* necessarily
imply linguistic relationship, and vice versa. An obvious example of the
latter is Saami & Suomi (Finnish). No one doubts the two languages are
fairly closely related but they spoken by two rather different ethnic
groups.

--
Ray
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