Re: CHAT: Pre-Celtic substrate (was: CHAT: RE: R: Italian Particles)

> Date:         Mon, 1 May 2000 11:12:17 +0100
> From: And Rosta <a.rosta@...>
> The idea of a family with that distribution mightn't be implausible, but
> why Basque and why Kartvelian? First, why Basque rather than Iberian or
> Tartessian? Second, why Kartvelian rather than N or NE Caucasian, since
> (a) a 'Vasco-Caucasian' connection has traditionally been the most popular/
> least foolish of theories of Basque connections (though Trask's _History
> of Basque_ rubbishes every such theory, mainly on the grounds of their
> utter ignorance of the reconstructible history of Basque), and (b) as
> longrange speculations go, an IE-Kartvelian connection is relatively less
> baseless. About the only theory of Basque connections that I know of that
> does work from reconstructed Pre-Basque in one posted by Miguel Carrasquer
> Vidal to the Nostratic list which suggested that Basque could be Nostratic
> [since pre-Basque lost most initial consonants, the problem is actually that
> finding potential cognates for Basque words is too easy].
I liked mcv's reconstruction, though I've forgotten the details now.

The strange thing is that Kartvelian is often included in Nostratic(*),
so bringing Basque into the latter would prove a connection. But of
course the Basque-Kartvelian connectionists want to compare the modern
forms, not the reconstructed ones.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)
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(*) Or was that in the bad old days, when people just assumed that all
the Caucasian languages were a unit?