Language as a Clue to Prehistory

[lpetrich]

 Macro-Arawakan languages - mostly Arawakan ones and a few others near its range in South America. Range is mainly N, W, and central South America, surrounding the Amazon Basin.

According to Jolkesky (op. cit., 611-616), the proto-Macro-Arawakan language would have been spoken in the Middle Ucayali River Basin during the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE, and its speakers would have produced Tutishcainyo pottery in the region.

Pronouns: 1s *n-, 2s *p-, but 1p, 2p are more variable: 1p *w-, *y-, 2p *s-, *d-, *h-

So that's almost N-M, with **m > *p or *b.

According to Jolkesky (op. cit., 611-616), the proto-Macro-Arawakan language would have been spoken in the Middle Ucayali River Basin during the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE, and its speakers would have produced Tutishcainyo pottery in the region.

That river is nearly at the west end of the Amazon River Basin.

 Macro-Chibchan languages - has an uncredited diagram showing when that family split apart.
Looking in  Guaymí language its pronouns are 1s ti, 2s mä, 1p nun, 2p mun.

Included is  Misumalpan languages and to look for its pronouns, I checked on  Miskito grammar
Possessive: 1 -i, 2 -m (also infix), verb subject: 1 -na, 2 -ma, verb object: 1 ai, 2 mai

So Macro-Chibchan / Chibchan-Paezan likely also had N-M pronouns.

 

[lpetrich]

 Quechumaran languages - Quechua and Aymara, both in the Andes Mountains in South America.

Pronouns: 1 Q *ya-qa, A *na-ya, 2 Q *qam, A *huma -- Y-Q ?

Looking at patterns of language families, it looks like there were a lot of dispersals in the Americas over the Holocene. Some of them were likely connected to agriculture, others don't seem to be.
 Vavilov center

• Central America: 10,000 - 7,000 BP (Before Present)
• Central North America: 4,500 - 4,000 BP
• S Central America - N South America: 9,000 - 8,000 BP
• N Andes: 10,000 - 8,000 BP
• C Andes: 10,000 - 5,000 BP
• S Amazon basin: 8,000 BP

That may account for the more widespread Central and South American families.

Out of Amazonia: Late-Holocene climate change and the Tupi–Guarani trans-continental expansion - José Iriarte, Richard J Smith, Jonas Gregorio de Souza, Francis Edward Mayle, Bronwen S Whitney, Macarena Lucia Cárdenas, Joy Singarayer, John F Carson, Shovonlal Roy, Paul Valdes, 2017

The late-Holocene expansion of the Tupi–Guarani languages from southern Amazonia to SE South America constitutes one of the largest expansions of any linguistic family in the world, spanning ~4000 km between latitudes 0°S and 35°S at about 2.5k cal. yr BP. However, the underlying reasons for this expansion are a matter of debate. Here, we compare continental-scale palaeoecological, palaeoclimate and archaeological datasets, to examine the role of climate change in facilitating the expansion of this forest-farming culture.

... Our data synthesis shows broad synchrony between late-Holocene increasing precipitation and southerly expansion of both tropical forest and Guarani archaeological sites – the southernmost branch of the Tupi–Guarani. We conclude that climate change likely facilitated the agricultural expansion of the Guarani forest-farming culture by increasing the area of forested landscape that they could exploit, showing a prime example of ecological opportunism.

Seems like a good fit.

 

[Swammerdami]

I am hurt. I thought several of us had respect for each other's intellects. But Politesse has no respect for mine.

I wrote

.... Greenberg achieved huge respect when he classified the African languages into four large groups with this method. He applied the same method to the American languages and stated that he found these languages MUCH easier to classify than the African languages. Yet his classification of the African languages, despite some controversy, is the standard almost without exception to this day. His classification of Amerindian, on the other hand, has met with astoundingly shrill and angry opposition.

Someone unfamiliar with the facts of this shrill and angry opposition will say that "Debate is appropriate in the sciences." I'm tempted to waste an hour Googling for excerpts of this "debate." One finds examples from the anti-Greenberg crowd that are BY FAR the shrillest, angriest, and least intelligent remarks I have ever seen on any subject by people who call themselves scientists.

I especially called attention to the fact that those unfamiliar with the "debate" would make the claim I bold-faced above. But Politesse ignores my opinion^*, assumes that my opinion is worthless.

* — No? Put up or shut up. You implied that the Greenberg crowd was as shrill or angry as the anti-Greenberg crowd. You find a quote and I'll find three each thrice as shrill as your example. Until you accept the challenge, and post the example(s) I must withhold respect.

One finds examples from the anti-Greenberg crowd that are BY FAR the shrillest, angriest, and least intelligent remarks I have ever seen on any subject by people who call themselves scientists

Because Greenbergians set the bar so high....

Is this some goose—gander claim? Can you give an example? I'll spend the hour and hunt for an anti-Greenberg rant. We can make direct comparison.

I suppose it might be a goose and gander argument, if I thought there were anything wrong with academic debate in the first place, which I don't. This is how we progress over time.

Will we see examples of Greenbergism as shrill as the anti-G? Can Politesse do it? Or will Politesse rejoinder haughtily without deigning to present examples of Goose as shrill as the gander?

 

[lpetrich]

Bayesian phylogeography of the Arawak expansion in lowland South America | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Here we investigate the expansion of Arawak, one of the most widely dispersed language families in the Americas, scattered from the Antilles to Argentina. It has been suggested that Northwest Amazonia is the Arawak homeland based on the large number of diverse languages in the region. We generate language trees by coding cognates of basic vocabulary words for 60 Arawak languages and dialects to estimate the phylogenetic relationships among Arawak societies, while simultaneously implementing a relaxed random walk model to infer phylogeographic history. Estimates of the Arawak homeland exclude Northwest Amazonia and are bi-modal, with one potential homeland on the Atlantic seaboard and another more likely origin in Western Amazonia. Bayesian phylogeography better supports a Western Amazonian origin, and consequent dispersal to the Caribbean and across the lowlands. Importantly, the Arawak expansion carried with it not only language but also a number of cultural traits that contrast Arawak societies with other lowland cultures.

I'd mentioned earlier Linguistic Clues to Iroquoian Prehistory | Journal of Anthropological Research: Vol 73, No 3

Some of the origin sites are secondary, like the east-central-US one, and that was the origin of not one but two families: Iroquoian and Siouan.

Some mid-Holocene dispersals don't seem connected with agriculture, like the Algonquian, Na-Dene, and Eskimo-Aleut ones. These may be connected to learning how to live in hostile environments, something especially true of Eskimo-Aleut speakers, I'm sure.

 

[lpetrich]

Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions | Science by Jared Diamond and Peter Bellwood, 2003

The largest movements and replacements of human populations since the end of the Ice Ages resulted from the geographically uneven rise of food production around the world. The first farming societies thereby gained great advantages over hunter-gatherer societies. But most of those resulting shifts of populations and languages are complex, controversial, or both. We discuss the main complications and specific examples involving 15 language families. Further progress will depend on interdisciplinary research that combines archaeology, crop and livestock studies, physical anthropology, genetics, and linguistics.

Reprint on Jared Diamond's site: Diamond et al 2003.pdf

He lists farming-language correlations from the most well-established to the most controversial. He lists in passing

• Panama area ~ Chibchan
• East Central US ~ Iroquoian, Siouan

He starts with

1. Bantu (Niger-Congo family). Beginning around 2000 B.C., farmers from the tropical West African agricultural homeland in eastern Nigeria and western Cameroon speaking early Bantu languages expanded east and then south over most of subequatorial Africa, replacing or intermarrying with most of the original inhabitants related to modern Pygmies and Khoisan people.

That may also be true of much of the rest of Niger-Congo, even if their speakers were mostly stay-at-homes relative to Bantu speakers.

 

[lpetrich]

2. Arawak (Taino). Around 400 BC, farmers from the Orinoco River of South America colonized the West Indies and eventually replaced most of the islands’ earlier occupants, spreading up the Lesser Antillean chain to the Greater Antilles and Bahamas. They thereby became ancestral to the modern Taino people speaking Arawakan languages. The evidence from linguistics, pottery, and domesticates is detailed, but genetic evidence is slight because few Tainos survived European conquest. Linguistic relationships suggest that Arawakan languages had previously originated in and spread over much of the upper Amazon (43–45).

Though present-day Puerto Ricans, for instance, have some Taino ancestry, and genetically that ancestry is closest to northern South America. That's not to say that it is all from the Arawakan dispersal, however, because it may also have some earlier South American dispersals in it.

3. Austro-Asiatic, Tai (“Daic”), and Sino-Tibetan. Several independent sources of evidence suggest expansions of these three language families from agricultural homelands in China, at different times and over different geographic ranges. Austro-Asiatic spread west and south from southern China into the Indian subcontinent and Malay Peninsula (46), Sino-Tibetan spread from the Yellow River or Sichuan into Burma and the Himalayas (47, 48). Much of the southward expansion of the Tai languages, like that of the Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao) languages, has been within historic times. Austro-Asiatic languages are especially diverse, suggesting that they were the first of these three families to expand. They occur today almost entirely south of the political border of China, raising the possibility that they too originated in southern China, but were then largely replaced there by later expansions of Sino-Tibetan and Tai.

 

[lpetrich]

4. Uto-Aztecan. Maize, beans, and linguistic evidence suggest strongly that agriculture based on Mexican domesticates reached the southwestern United States from northern Mesoamerica with speakers of Uto-Aztecan languages (49–51).

However, "the northernmost groups of Uto-Aztecans (Numic, Tübatulabal, and Takic) are desert hunter-gatherers in the Great Basin and southern California."

That presents a quandary. Did the Uto-Aztecan speakers start out in the north or the south? If in the south, then they must have given up agriculture and reverted to hunting and gathering in environments too hostile for farming, the solution that Jared Diamond decided on.

However, I've found this very recent paper: SocArXiv Papers | A Recent Northern Origin for the Uto-aztecan Family

The Uto-Aztecan language family is one of the largest language families in the Americas. However, there has been considerable debate about its origin and how it spread. Here we use Bayesian phylogenetic methods to analyze lexical data from 34 Uto-Aztecan varieties and 2 Kiowa-Tanoan languages. We infer the age of Proto-Uto-Aztecan to be around 4,100 years ago (3,258 - 5,025 years), and identify the most likely homeland to be near what is now southern California. We reconstruct the most probable subsistence strategy in the ancestral Uto-Aztecan society and infer no casual or intensive cultivation, an absence of cereal crops, and a primary subsistence mode of gathering (rather than agriculture). Our results therefore support the timing, geography, and cultural practices of a northern origin, and are inconsistent with alternative scenarios.

They found that while northern Uto-Aztecan speakers were ancestrally hunter-gatherers, the southern ones were ancestrally farmers, and heavily committed to farming.

They used the speakers of Kiowa-Tanoan languages as an outgroup. They are in the western US Great Plains, what's now New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, and they were ancestrally hunter-gatherers. That tipped the balance in favor of a northern Uto-Aztecan homeland and hunting-gathering as ancestral.

 

[lpetrich]

BTW, Hopi is a northern Uto-Aztecan language, and its speakers are traditionally farmers. So they must have acquired farming separately from the ancestors of southern Uto-Aztecan speakers.

I've found it difficult to find out much about that language, especially to check the claim that "rain" is primarily a verb in that language, making their word for that substance is literally "a raining". But I think that that might be reading too much into such features. There is a lot of variety in linguistic structures, like adjectives as nouns vs. adjectives as verbs.

Adjectives as verbs? Japanese does that, and the members of  Let's Active decided to use that  Engrish phrase that was on a T-shirt sold in Japan when they were thinking of names. "Let's Active" uses "active" as a verb, meaning "to be active" in canonical English, where adjectives are noun-like.

 

[Politesse]

Ekkehart Malotki's three works on the language contain as much information about Hopi syntax as anyone might want to know.

Aa far as the agriculture question goes, I would point out that the Numic speaking groups of the Great Basin and Rockies did know how to farm, and throughout recorded history would engage in small scale gardening opportunistically, when conditions were good. Likewise, the Hopi are and long have been skilled hunters and gatherers, and have stories of time periods when drought obliged them to rely on those skills for survival. While the peoples of the Southwest have their customary preferences, there is no strict divide between farming and non-farming peoples historically, so we should not assume one prehistorically.

 

[lpetrich]

Back to Jared Diamond.

5. Oto-Manguean, Mixe-Zoquean, Mayan. Oto-Manguean has the widest geographic range of any language family within the Mesoamerican agricultural homeland, spanning a distance of 1300 km from Mesoamerica’s northwest boundary to its southeast boundary, although that range is still small by Old World standards. The reconstructed Proto-Oto-Manguean language, as well as Proto-Mayan and Proto-Mixe-Zoquean, includes terms for the major Mesoamerican crops, especially maize, supporting the hypothesis of an agricultural expansion.

Using "glottochronology", estimating age from amount of language change, their protolanguages date back to 3000 - 1500 BCE, around the time of intensification of agriculture there: 2500 - 1500 BCE.

6. New Guinea Highlands. By far the greatest linguistic diversity in the modern world occurs on the island of New Guinea, with 1000 of the modern world’s 6000 languages, and with dozens of language isolates or families that have no demonstrable relationship to each other or to any language outside New Guinea. Recent linguistic studies suggest that at least half of those 1000 languages belong to a family (the Trans-New-Guinea family) whose spread may have been driven by agricultural origins in the New Guinea Highlands (55). The principal uncertainties concern the age of agricultural origins in the Highlands (as early as 7000 B.C. or as late as 4000 B.C., perhaps) (56–58), the identity of the first staple crops, and the linguistic limits of the Trans-New-Guinea family.

The highlands provide plenty of natural boundaries, making it possible for groups of people to live separate from each other even if they are very close to each other, allowing their languages to diverge. Something like that also happened in the Caucasus Mountains and in the Pacific Northwest mountains. Basque survived because its speakers live in a mountainous area.

7. Japanese. Around 400 B.C., intensive rice agriculture, new pottery styles, and new tools, all based on Korean models, appeared on the southwestmost Japanese island of Kyushu near Korea and spread northeast up the Japanese archipelago. Genes and skeletons of the modern Japanese suggest that they arose as a hybrid population between arriving Korean rice farmers and a prior Japanese population similar to the modern Ainu and responsible for Japan’s earlier Jomon pottery. Modern southwest-to-northeast gene clines in Japan and DNA extracted from ancient skeletons support this interpretation (59, 60). Japanese origins would thus rival Bantu origins as the most concordant and unequivocal example of an agricultural expansion, were it not for the flagrant discordance of the linguistic evidence.

Japanese is not very close to Korean, even though there is some evidence that they are genetically related.

But early in Korea's history, it was divided into three kingdoms. One of them, Silla, spoke a language that is the ancestor of present-day Korean, while another one, Koguryo, spoke a language much closer to Old Japanese. Thus making arrival from Korea much more feasible.

 

[lpetrich]

8. Austronesian. Detailed archaeological evidence demonstrates the colonization of Taiwan by Neolithic pottery-making and rice-growing farmers from South China before 3000 B.C., followed by the spread of farming, pottery, and Neolithic tools to the Philippines (2000 to 1500 B.C.), then southwest to the Southeast Asian mainland and to Madagascar, and then east through Indonesia out across the Pacific to the furthest islands of Polynesia, eventually reaching New Zealand by about 1200 A.D. (23, 24, 27). In terms of distance covered, this was the world’s largest prehistoric agricultural expansion, and it rivals the Bantu expansion in the degree of detail of its linguistic reconstruction (62, 63).

As they went, they absorbed or replaced the local populations of "Negritos", people who look much like (pre-European) New Guineans and Australians.

There are problems, like the lack of mainland-China Austronesian speakers. Seems like Chinese speakers overran them, as Austronesian speakers themselves did for the people they settled among.

Possible language family homelands and the spread of rice into Southeast Asia (ca. 5,500–2,500 BP). The approximate coastlines during the early Holocene are shown in lighter blue. - shows some homeland hypotheses:

• Sino-Tibetan: Yellow River (NE China)
• Austronesian: E China
• Hmong-Mien / Miao-Yao: Yangtze River a little inland (E China)
• Kra-Dai: Pearl River (SE China)
• Austroasiatic: S China / E Myanmar / N Laos / N Vietnam / N Thailand

Pronouns:

• Sino-Tibetan: Old Chinese: 1 *la, 2 *ne, Proto-Tibeto-Burman 1 *nga-y, *ka, 2 *na-ng
• Austronesian: 1s *i-aku, 2s *i-(ka)Su, 1p incl *i-(k)ita, excl *i-(k)ami, 2p *i-kamu
• Hmong-Mien: Hmong: 1s kuv, 2s koj, 1p peb, 2p nej
• Kra-Dai: 1s *aku, 2s *isu, *amu
• Austroasiatic: 1s *an, 2s *mi:, 1p *i:, 2p *ye:

 Austro-Tai languages = Austronesian + Kra-Dai
Pronouns: Austronesian 1 *aku, 2 *kamu, Tai 1 *kuu, 2 *mung, Kam-Sui 1 (*ju), 2 *maa, Hlai 1 *hou, 2 *meu, Gelao 1 kuu, 2 maa
This indicates a K-M pattern.

 Vavilov center - these homelands are located at a center of agriculture origin: E China.

 

[lpetrich]

9. Dravidian. Food production reached South India at about 3000 BC, partly through the spread of Fertile Crescent and Sahel domesticates via the Indus Valley and the northwestern Deccan, and partly through a simultaneous spread of rice cultivation from Southeast Asia with speakers of Austro-Asiatic (Mundaic) languages. In addition to these undoubted spreads of crops into India from elsewhere, Fuller (68) has recently argued for primary (independent) origins of rice, millet, and gram domestication in the Ganges Valley and South India.

Pronouns: 1s *yam-, 2s *nin-, 1p excl *yam-, incl *nam-, 2p *nim-
A Y-N pattern.

Dravidian is not very close to any Middle Eastern language, with the possible exception of Elamite. If it was spread by farming from the Middle East, then some farmers in SW Iran would have learned how to farm from other Middle Easterners, and then spread outward, going into India. When they arrived, they domesticated some additional crops, like rice.

10. Afro-Asiatic. This language family consists of six branches, five (including Ancient Egyptian) confined to North Africa, one (Semitic) also extending in ancient times to Southwest Asia. That distribution suggests an African origin for the family, whose Semitic branch might then have spread into Southwest Asia. But the overwhelming archaeologically attested flow of domesticated crops and animals from Neolithic times onward, into Egypt and through the Arabian Peninsula into Ethiopia, is out of Southwest Asia rather than out of Africa. That would make it surprising for Semitic languages to have spread against that stream

I've discussed this conundrum earlier in this thread. The solution I like is for Proto-Semitic speakers to have gone to the Middle East from NE Africa when they domesticated donkeys.

 

[lpetrich]

Finally, Jared Diamond gets to

1. Indo-European. We have saved for last the most intensively studied, yet still the most recalcitrant, problem of historical linguistics: the origin of the Indo-European language family, distributed before 1492 A.D. from Ireland east to the Indian subcontinent and (as represented by the extinct Tocharian languages) western China. Unlike the NigerCongo and Austronesian language families, each consisting of about a thousand languages that sometimes intergrade geographically, the Indo-European language family contains only 144 languages divided among 11 markedly distinct branches. These and other facts suggest that the task of reconstructing IndoEuropean origins is complicated by massive extinctions of Indo-European languages in the past, resulting from the expansions of a few highly successful subgroups (Germanic, Romance, Slavic, and Indo-Iranian).

Their spread was with the help of horses and wheeled vehicles and possibly also milk drinking.


Two isolates in North America:

 Zuni language - W New Mexico, E Arizona
Pronouns: 1 h-, 2 d-

 Washo language - NE California, NW Nevada
Possessive-pronoun prefixes: (before vowel) 1 l-, 2 m- (before consonant) 1 di-, 2 ?um-
In effect, D/L-M, which looks like a modification of N-M.

 

[lpetrich]

However, Joseph Greenberg used a method,  Mass comparison that seems very subjective and impressionistic, and his classification is not generally accepted.

Greenberg's disciples stress that mass comparison is just a FIRST step. Once a list of possible cognates is available, a linguist can explore for sound change laws, etc.

I agree. One should also look for shared grammatical irregularities, like "is" and "be" in most Indo-European languages, derived from imperfective *h1es- and perfective *bheuH-.

Greenberg achieved huge respect when he classified the African languages into four large groups with this method. He applied the same method to the American languages and stated that he found these languages MUCH easier to classify than the African languages. Yet his classification of the African languages, despite some controversy, is the standard almost without exception to this day. His classification of Amerindian, on the other hand, has met with astoundingly shrill and angry opposition.

Someone unfamiliar with the facts of this shrill and angry opposition will say that "Debate is appropriate in the sciences." I'm tempted to waste an hour Googling for excerpts of this "debate." One finds examples from the anti-Greenberg crowd that are BY FAR the shrillest, angriest, and least intelligent remarks I have ever seen on any subject by people who call themselves scientists.

 Joseph Greenberg has a lot of respect for  Greenberg's linguistic universals The article restates his 45 universals, like his first one: "In declarative sentences with nominal subject and object, the dominant order is almost always one in which the subject precedes the object."

He has a lot of respect for his classification of African languages into Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan. Looking at the Wikipedia articles on them, I find:

Afro-Asiatic (Afroasiatic, Afrasian) is accepted, with only the membership of Omotic being controversial.

Niger–Congo is called "hypothetical", though its largest subgroupings are accepted: Atlantic-Congo, Dogon, Mande, etc.

Nilo-Saharan is called "disputed".

Khoisan is called "obsolete" - united by having clicks - "They are now held to comprise three distinct language families and two language isolates."

Pronouns:

Atlantic-Congo:
Bantu:
Swahili: independent 1s mimi, 2s wewe, 1p sisi, 2p ninyi; combining suffix 1s -mi, 2s -we, 1p -si, 2p -nyi; possessive 1s -angu, 2s -ako, 1p -etu, 2p -enu; verb subject prefix 1s ni-, 2s u-, 1p tu-, 2p m-; verb object prefix 1s -ni-, 2s -ku-, 1p -tu-, 2p -wa-
Zulu: independent 1s miná, 2s wená, 1p thiná, 2p niná; combining suffix 1s -me, 2s -we, 1p -thi, 2p -ni; posseessive 1s -mi, 2s -kho, 1p -íthú, 2p -ínú; verb subject prefix 1s ngì-, 2s ù-, 1p sì-, 2p nì-; verb object prefix 1s -ngí-, 2s -kú-, 1p -sí-, 2p -ní-
Volta-Niger:
Yoruba: emphatic 1s èmi, 2s ìwo, 1p âwa, 2p eyin; subject 1s mo, 2s o, 1p a, 2p e; object 1s mi, 2s o, 1p wa, 2p yin
Igbo: independent 1s mu, 2s gi, 1p anyi, 2p unu; attached to verb 1s m, 2s i

A selection of several grammar descriptions at their home site:
A grammar of Jalkunan (Mande, Burkina Faso)
Mande: 1s ma, 2s wo, 1p a, 2p e
A grammar of Najamba (Dogon, Mali)
A grammar of Toro Tegu (Dogon), Tabi Mountain dialect
Dogon: 1s mi, 2s o, u 1p i, 2p e, a

Seems like Niger-Congo has M-W.

Appendix:Nilo-Saharan word lists - Wiktionary - a lot of variation in pronouns

 Proto-Afroasiatic language - Ehret's reconstruction:
1s ind (?)ân-, (?)în- bd i, yi
2s ind (?)ânt-, (?)înt-, bd-m ku, ka, bd-f ki
1p (?)ânn-, (?)înn-
2p kuuna
ind = independent, bd = bound (2s: masculine, feminine ones)

So AA has a pronoun pattern of I-K

 

[lpetrich]

Greenberg achieved huge respect when he classified the African languages into four large groups with this method. He applied the same method to the American languages and stated that he found these languages MUCH easier to classify than the African languages. Yet his classification of the African languages, despite some controversy, is the standard almost without exception to this day. His classification of Amerindian, on the other hand, has met with astoundingly shrill and angry opposition.

Someone unfamiliar with the facts of this shrill and angry opposition will say that "Debate is appropriate in the sciences." I'm tempted to waste an hour Googling for excerpts of this "debate." One finds examples from the anti-Greenberg crowd that are BY FAR the shrillest, angriest, and least intelligent remarks I have ever seen on any subject by people who call themselves scientists.

 Amerind languages has a summary of such criticisms.

Reception

The consensus among historical linguists specializing in Native American languages is that the Amerind hypothesis is unsupported by valid evidence,[5][14][24] particularly because the basis for the proposal is mass comparison, but also because of many other methodological flaws made by Greenberg in the elaboration of the hypothesis.[10][16][25][26][27][28] Critics regard this technique as fundamentally flawed, unable to distinguish chance resemblances from those due to a historical relationship among the languages and providing no means of distinguishing resemblances due to common descent from those due to language contact.[citation needed] In addition, critics have pointed out errors in the citation of data, including erroneous forms, erroneous glosses, unjustified morphological segmentation, attribution to the wrong language, and citation of entirely spurious forms.[7][8][9][10][13][15][16][25]

A further criticism is that, contrary to normal scholarly practice, no source references are given for the data, which in most cases come from languages for which there is no standard, authoritative source. In addition, Greenberg does not normalize the spelling of the data, so it is impossible without knowing the source of each form to know what the notation represents.[15][25]

While sympathetic to the idea of an Amerind language family, Morris Swadesh was critical of many of Greenberg's subdivisions and believed it was due to an insufficient number of comparisons by Greenberg.[29]

I don't have a copy of his book "Language in the Americas" with me, so I can't assess how good he was at listing his sources. But I agree that not doing so is a bad practice in a work of research.

Also bad are not normalizing spellings and the numerous errors that his critics have found, but if a relationship is strong enough, it may stand out from all the noise that these errors make. So I think that his classification is a starting point for future investigation, even if not some strong result.

 

[lpetrich]

 Dolgopolsky list again.

Wiktionary has Appendix:Swadesh lists - Wiktionary and they are 208 words each for each language listed. But the Dolgopolsky list is only 15 words, and I've mapped it onto that long Swadesh list.

I/me - 1 -- two/pair - 23 -- you (singular, informal) - 2 -- who/what - 11, 12 -- tongue (body part) - 78 -- name - 207 -- eye - 74 -- heart - 90 -- tooth - 77 -- no/not - 16 -- nail (fingernail) - 79 -- louse/nit - 48 -- tear/teardrop -- water - 150 -- dead - 109

Negation being highly conserved reminds me of Document21 - Russell, Bertrand - The Metaphysician's Nightmare.pdf

What was known was that he consistently avoided the word 'not' and all its synonyms. He would not say 'this egg is not fresh', but 'chemical changes have occurred in this egg since it was laid'. He would not say 'I cannot find that book', but 'the books I have found are other than that book'. He would not say 'thou shalt not kill', but 'thou shalt cherish life'.

Thus avoiding expression of negation.

I've sorted them in order for quick search through a Wiktionary Swadesh list:

1 - I/me -- 2 - you (singular, informal) -- 11 - who -- 12 - what -- 16 - no/not -- 23 - two/pair -- 48 - louse/nit -- 74 - eye -- 77 - tooth -- 78 - tongue (body part) -- 79 - nail (fingernail) -- 90 - heart -- 109 - dead -- 150 - water -- 207 - name

English, Middle E, Old E:
I, you, who // what, not, two // louse, eye, tooth // tongue, fingernail, heart // to die, water, name
I, thou, who // what, ne, two // lous, eie, tothe // tonge, nayl, herte // sterven, water, name
ic, thû, hwâ // hwaet, ne, twêgen // lûs, êage, tôth // tunge, fingernaegl, heorte // sweltan, waeter, nama

Dutch:
ik, jij, wie // wat, niet, twee // luis, oog, tand // tong, vingernagel, hart // sterven, water, naam

German, Old High G:
ich, du, wer // was, nicht, zwei // Laus, Auge, Zahn // Zunge, Fingernagel, Herz // sterben, Wasser, Name
ih, dû, wêr // waz, niowiht, zwêne // lûs, ouga, zand // zunga, nagal, herza // sterban, wazzar, namo

Swedish, Nynorsk, Bokmål, Danish, Icelandic, Old Norse:
jag, du, vem // vad, inte, två // lus, öga, tand // tunga, nagel, hjärta // dö, vatten, namn
eg, du, kven // kva, ikkje, to // lus, auga, tann // tunge, nagl, hjarta // døy, vatn, namn
jeg, du, hvem // hva, ikke, to // lus, øye, tann // tunge, negl, hjerte // dø, vann, navn
jeg, du, hvem // hvad, ikke, to // lus, øje, tand // tunge, (finger)negl, hjerte // dø, vand, navn
eg, thú, hver // hvadh, ekki, tveir // lús, auga, tönn // tnga, nögl, hjarta // deyja, vatn, nafn
ek, thú, hvar // hvat, eigi, tveir // lús, auga, tonn // tunga, nagl, hjarta // deyja, vatn, nafn

Gothic, Proto-Germanic:
ik, thu, hwas // hwa, ni, twai // --, augô, tunthus // tuggô, --, hairtô // gadauthnan, watô, namô
ek, tû, hwaz // hwat, ne, twai // lûs, augô, tanths // tungô, naglaz, hertô // dawjana, watôr, namô

th = þ, dh = ð

It's easy to see that Germanic languages are closely related.

 

[lpetrich]

1 - I/me -- 2 - you (singular, informal) -- 11 - who -- 12 - what -- 16 - no/not -- 23 - two/pair -- 48 - louse/nit -- 74 - eye -- 77 - tooth -- 78 - tongue (body part) -- 79 - nail (fingernail) -- 90 - heart -- 109 - dead -- 150 - water -- 207 - name

Latin and Romance languages:
French, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese
je, tu, qui // quoi, ne pas, deux // pou, oeil, dent // langue, ongle, coeur // mourir, eau, nom
jo, tu, qui // què, no, dos // poll, ull, dent // llengua, ungla, cor // morir, aigua, nom
yo, tú, quién // qué, no, dos // piojo, ojo, diente // lengua, uña, corazón // morir, agua, nombre
eu, tu, quem // que, não, dois // piolho, olho, dente // lingua, unha, coração // morrer, água, nome

Italian, Romanian, Latin, Proto-Italic
io, tu, chi // che, non, due // pidocchio, occhio, dente // lingua, unghia, cuore // morire, acqua, nome
eu, tu, cine // ce, nu, doi // șarpe, ochi, dinte // limbă, unghie, inimă // muri, apă, nume
egô, tû, quis // quid, nôn, duo // pêdis, oculus, dens // lingua, unguis, cor // morî, aqua, nômen
egô, tû, kwis // kwid, ne, duô // pezdis, okwelos, dents // denghwâ, ungus, kord // morjôr, akwâ, nomen

Celtic:
Irish, Old Irish, Welsh, Proto-Celtic
mé, tú, cé // cad, ni, dó // míol cnis, súil, fiacail // teanga, ionga, croi // faigh bás, uisce, ainm
mé, tú, cía // cid, ní, dá // míl, rosc, dét . fiacail // tengae, ingen, cride // at-baill, dobur . uisce, ainmm
mi, ti, pwy // beth, ddim, dau // llau, llygad, dant // tafod, ewin, calon // marw, dŵr, enw
mî, tû, kwês // kwid, ne, dwau // luwâ, lukato-, dant // tangwâss, angwînâ, kalonâ . kridyom // bayeti, dubros . undeskyos, anman

Slavic:
Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian
ja, ty, kto // čto, ne, dva // voš', glaz, zub // jazyk, nogot', serdce // umirat', voda, imja
ja, ty, kto // co, nie, dwa // wesz, oko, zab // jezyk, paznokieć, serce // mrzeć, woda, imie
já, ty, kdo // co, ne, dva // veš, oko, zub // jazyk, nehet, srdce // umirat, voda, jméno
ja, ti, ko // što, ne, dva // uš, oko, zub // jezik, nokat, srce // umreti, voda, ime
az, ti, koj // kakav, ne, dve // vaška, oko, zab // ezik, nokat, sarce // umiram, voda, ime

Old Church Slavonic, Proto-Slavic
azu, ty, kuto // chito, ne, duva // vuši, oko, zobu // jezyku, noguti, sridice // umreti, voda, ime
jazu, ty, kuto // ču, ne, duva // vuši, oko, zobu // jezyku, noguti, sirdice // merti, voda, jume
ez-, tû, kas // ki, ne, duwô // ušis, ak-, dantis . zambas // inzû, nagutis, sirdis // mertei, wandô, inmen

Baltic: Lithuanian
aš, tu, kas // kuris, ne, du // utėlė, akis, dantis // liežuvis, nagas, širdis // mirti, vanduo, vardas

Greek, Ancient G
egho, esi, pios // ti, dhe, dhio // psira, mati, dhondi // ghlosa, nikhi, kardhia // petheno, nero, onoma
egô, sy, tis // ti, ou, dyo // phtheir, ophthalmos, odus // glôssa, onyks, kardia // apothnêskô, ydôr, onoma

Armenian
es, du, ov // inč, očʿ, erku // oǰil, ačʿkʿ, atam // lezu, ełung, sirt // meṙnel, ǰur, anun

Albanian
unë, ti, kush // çfarë, nuk, dy // thëri, sy, dhëmb // gjuhë, thua, zemër // vdes, ujë, emër

 

[lpetrich]

Proto-Balto-Slavic:
ez, tû, kas // ki, ne, duwô // ušis, ak-, dantis . zambas // inzû, nagutis, sirdis // mertei, wandô, inmen

Tocharian B:
ñäs, tuwe, kuse // kuse, mâ, wi // pärseriñ, ek, keme // kantwo, --, arañce // sruketär, war, ñem

Indo-Iranian:

Northern Kurdish, Persian, Old Persian (very little material to work with)
ez . min, tu, kê // çî, na, du // qêç . espî, çav, dan // zar, nînok, dil // mird, av, nav
man, to, ki // če, ne, do // šepeš, češm, dandân // zabân, nâxon, del // mordan, âb, esm . nâm
adam, tuvam, -- // --, --, -- // --, --, -- // --, --, -- // --, --, nâma

Hindi, Bengali, Sanskrit, Proto-Indo-Iranian
mai, tû, kaun // kyâ, nahî, do // jû, âkh, dât // jîbh, nâxun, dil // marnâ, pânî, nâm
ami, tumi, ke // ki, na, dui // ukun, côkh, dât // jibh, nokh, hridoy // mora, pani, nam
aham, tvam, ka // kim, na, dvi // yûkâ, akshi, danta // jihvâ, nakha, hrdaya // mriyate, jala . ap . pânîya . vâri . udan . toja, nâman
ajam, tuH, kas // kim, na, dwaH // ćwišas, čakšuš, Hdants // jijwaH, Hnâks, jrdayam // mriyatay, Hâps, Hnâma

(Multiple words with some meaning have a . in between them, like the several Sanskrit words for water)

Hittite
ûk, zîk, kuis // kuit, natta, dân // --, sakaui-is, gagas // lalas, kaddu, kir // aki, wâtar, lâman

Proto-Indo-European
egh2(om), tuh2, kwis // kwid, ne, dwoh1 // lewH-, h3okws, h2donts . gombhos // dngweh2s, h3negh-, kêr // mer- . dhew-, h2ekweh2 . h2ep- . wodr, h1nomn

Most of Wiktionary's PIE Dolgopolsky-Swadesh list is well-represented in the dialects. For the 1s and 2s pronouns, the resemblance looks even better when one uses oblique forms, and one reconstructs *me- and *te-. Negation is *n- though many dialects have forms that are forms of "nothing", and some of them have the "thing" part (Jespersen's cycle). "Two" is also very well-preserved. In fact, the names of 1 to 10 are very well-preserved, though "1" is somewhat variable, and though Armenian has some odd sound changes. The Numbers List

"Louse" is not very well-preserved: PGmc lûs, PCelt luwâ, PIt pezdis, Gk phtheir, PII ćwišas.

"Eye" is fairly well-preserved, but "tooth" has two roots that seem to coexist, with one or the other dropping out or getting some alternate meaning. *gombhos has English cognate "comb", for instance, and Wiktionary lists additional meanings "row of teeth" and "peg".

"Tongue" is fairly well-preserved, but sometimes with sound changes like in Latin lingua. "Nail" is also well-preserved, though some of the lists have forms that are obviously compounds of "finger" and "nail", like the English word. That's a problem with using lists like these, a problem with Joseph Greenberg's mass comparisons. Such comparisons are good as a starting point, even if not for much else.

"Heart" is well-preserved, and "to die" is fairly well-preserved, but with some of the dialects having a lot of variation.

As with "tooth", there are two or three coexisting roots for "water", with possibly different meanings like "water as a substance" and "flowing water" and "body of water". The form *wodr has stem alternation r/n, like genitive *wedns "of water", and if it gets frozen, it can be one or the other, like West Germanic -r and North Germanic -n.

"Name" is very well-preserved, and is more apparent when one looks at oblique forms, like in the Slavic languages. Russian imja, imjen-, for instance.


Something that has helped the recognition of the Indo-European family is the numerous irregularities in its inflections, irregularities that are often inherited and hardly ever borrowed. Like those r/n nouns and for "to be", imperfective *h1es- and perfective *bheuH-.

I recall from somewhere that Rasmus Rask around 1800 established the Germanic family using inflection features.

 

[lpetrich]

1 - I/me -- 2 - you (singular, informal) -- 11 - who -- 12 - what -- 16 - no/not -- 23 - two/pair -- 48 - louse/nit -- 74 - eye -- 77 - tooth -- 78 - tongue (body part) -- 79 - nail (fingernail) -- 90 - heart -- 109 - dead -- 150 - water -- 207 - name

Uralic: Finnish, Hungarian, Proto-Uralic
minä, sinä, kuka // mikä, ei, kaksi // täi, silmä, hammas // kieli, kynsi, sydän // kuolla, vesi, nimi
én, te, ki // mi, nem, kettő // tetű, szem, fog // nyelv, köröm, sziv // meghal, víz, név
minä, tinä, ki // mi, e-, kakta // täje, śilmä, piŋi // käli, künči, śüdäme // kali-, weti, nime

"Louse" is well-preserved in Uralic, unlike in IE. "Water" and "name" are in this list.

Turkic: Turkish, Proto-Turkic (couldn't find Chuvash)
ben, sen, kim // ne, değil, iki // bit, göz, diş // dil, tırnak, yürek // ölmek, su, ad
ben, sem, kem // --, ermeŕ, ẹk(k)i // bït, köŕ, tīĺ // til, dïrŋak, yürek // öl-, sub, āt

Mongolian
bi, či, xen (khen) // juu (yuu), -güj, xojor // böös, nüd, šüd // xel, xums, zürx // üxex, us, ner

There's a little bit of similarity between Turkic and Mongolian, like 1s, 2s, "louse", "water".

Korean, Middle K
na, ne, nugu // mues, an, tûl // i, nun, i // hye, sonthop, yemthong // cwuk-ta, mul, ilum
na, ne, nwu // enu, ani, twulh // ni, nwun, ni // hye, thwop, mozom // cwukta, mul, ilhwom

Japanese, Old J
watashi, anata, dare // nani, -nai, futa // shirami, me, ha // shita, tsume, kokoro // shinu, mizu, na
are, nare, tare // nani, zu, puta // sirami, me, pa // sita, tume, kokoro // sinu, midu, na

Between Japanese and Korean, only "water" and maybe "louse".

 

[lpetrich]

Japanese has the complication of multiple personal pronouns as a function of social status, like many European languages having plural you as the formal form, but to a much greater degree.  T–V distinction and  T–V distinction in the world's languages

1s: watakushi, atakushi, watashi, atashi, washi, boku, ore, jibun, ...
2s: nata, anta, kimi, omae, kisama, anatasama, omaesan, ...
Microsoft Word - Japanese pronouns-corrected - Ponamareva.pdf --  Japanese pronouns

Korean:
1s: jeo, na
2s: neo, jane, geudam, dangsin
Korean Pronouns - An easy grammar lesson that you'll love --  Korean pronouns

Some other examples:

Vietnamese:
1s: toi, ta, tao, minh (literary) min, qua, thiep, (archaic) tram
2s: may, mi (literary) mi, bau, chang
 Vietnamese pronouns

Khmer:
1s: anh, khnhum, yeung khnhum, khnhum bat, khnhum preah karuna, atma, khnhum, preah bat amchas
2s: eng, nak, louk, preah tech, preah kun, nhoum srei, nhoum bros, preah karuna
 Khmer language

Thai:
1s: phom, dichan, chan, ku, nuu
2s: khun, than, kae, thoe
 Thai language