Language as a Clue to Prehistory

[lpetrich]

More from the "Kin Nursery Terms" article in Mother Tongue 9:

We will also observe that childish words - words displaying deviant forms and/or meanings with regard to adult language - are progressively corrected by the child and, far from getting adopted into the adult language, soon fall out of use and sink into oblivion. In contrast, kin nursery words are kept in continuous use by speakers through their entire life, and their meaning as well as their phonetic shape are transmitted from generation to generation. Consequently, the kin terms endowed with a nursery phonetic form, contrary to childish words, must be considered members of the general lexicon of the languages they belong to.

The authors speculate on how these "nursery words" for relatives have survived for so long.

Some books with what IMO are total crackpottery:

Mario Alinei - Origini delle Lingue d’Europa [Origins of the Languages of Europe]; Volume 1 - Teoria della Continuità [The Continuity Theory], Volume 2 - Continuità dal Mesolitico all’età di ferro nelle principali aree etnolinguistiche [Continuities from the Mesolithic to the Iron Age in the Principal Ethnolinguistic Areas] (H Mulino - Bologna, 1996 and 2000).

Mario Alinei - Etrusco: Uma Forma Arcaica di Ungherese [Etruscan; An Archaic Form of Hungarian] (H Mulino, Bologna - 2003)

Mario Alinei proposes that the Indo-European langs were spread by the Paleolithic colonizers of Europe, a theory that goes even farther than Colin Renfrew's theory of dispersal by Neolithic farmers.

 

[lpetrich]

Mother Tongue 10 has an obituary for Sergei Starostin and Merritt Ruhlen's reminisciences of Joseph Greenberg.

According to MR, "They realized that Joe's idea that anybody could do this, if you simply used common sense, was in fact correct, and the idea that only geniuses could do this was in fact not correct." - "common sense" being intuition developed from experience in doing historical linguistics, it seems.

After describing JG's work on word-order typology, "So once again Joe's genius was to ask incredibly simple questions."

There is also some mention of Alfredo Trombetti (1866 - 1929), a linguist who proposed some long-range relationships, and even some global etymologies -- and who was run out of the linguistic community as a result.

He proposed monogenesis, that all of humanity's natural languages are descended from a single one. Also that it was possible to discover some features of that long-lost language. It must be pointed out that the first proposition can be true without the second proposition being true.

The issue has a review of the book "The Linguistics Wars" about the controversy about Noam Chomsky's generative grammar. I completely failed to follow it.

 

[lpetrich]

Allan Bomhard reviewed "Pre-Indo-European" by Winfred P. Lehmann - describing the theory that early PIE was an active-stative language, or active lang for short.

The inflections of active/animate nouns and verbs differ characteristically from those of the stative/animate counterparts in active languages. Active nouns have more inflected forms than do statives. Moreover, there are fewer inflected forms in the plural than in the singular...

Similarly, stative verbs have fewer inflections than do the active...

As another characteristic verbal inflections express aspect, not tense, in active languages...

Stative verbs are often comparable in meaning to adjectives...

Active languages are also characteristic in distinguishing between inalienable and alienable reference in personal pronouns...

Moreover, possessive and reflexive pronouns are often absent in active languages...

I think that he means active/animate vs. stative/inanimate in the first sentence.

A notable feature is case marking of subjects of intransitive verbs, like the agent of a transitive verb for something voluntary, what one does, and like the target of a transitive verb for something involuntary, what one experiences.

This also explains an oddity in PIE vocabulary. "Fire" has two forms, *h1ngwnis (masculine) and *peh2wr (neuter), the first from Latin ignis, Sanskrit agni, Russian ogon', etc. the second from Greek pûr, Hittite pahhur. The first one is fire as active, the second one is fire as pssive.

 

[Copernicus]

I think that he means active/animate vs. stative/inanimate in the first sentence.

No, I think he meant to contrast the number of inflected forms for the two different kinds of animate nouns, but I would need to look at the source text to get a clear idea of why he was making that point within the context of generative theory. It's hard for me to tell where he was going with that idea without actually reading the text that Bomhard was reviewing, but he seems to have classified languages as either active or stative typologically. Active and stative verbs, of course, are two different semantic categories of verbs, but I don't recall the details of his distinction between active and stative languages per se. It's really hard to understand the points being made without diving into the technical controversies that Lehmann was addressing at the time. Was he using the term "stative language" to refer to what would be called an "ergative language" in more traditional terminology?

 

[Copernicus]

The issue has a review of the book "The Linguistics Wars" about the controversy about Noam Chomsky's generative grammar. I completely failed to follow it.

This was over the controversy between Chomsky's so-called "interpretive semantics" and a rival movement called "generative semantics" back in the late 60s and the decade of the 70s. I was a generative semanticist back then. You would need to study something of the history of linguistic theory to understand what the issues were. Generative semantics was founded by people that I was very familiar with--George Lakoff, Haj Ross, and Jim McCawley. That school basically morphed into the Berkeley school of "cognitive linguistics", which I had deep ties to because of my association with some of the players. Again, I think that this all requires some formal background in linguistic theory to understand properly. Lehmann was from UT Austin, a hotbed of generative semantics back in the day. However, he was of an older generation than the young Turks who were battling with MIT-based linguistics.

 

[lpetrich]

Mother Tongue 11 has John Bengtson with "A Multilateral Look at Greater Austric" - "greater" meaning likely including Nihali of central India and Ainu of Hokkaido, Japan and nearby.

Vaclav Blashek discussed "Was There Australian Substratum in Dravidian?" - pointing out some similarities, like in pronouns. Some of them fit, like Common Australian *miring "eye" ~ Dravidian *mil- "eye", and some of them not so well, like Common Australian *gudjara "two" ~ Dravidian *kirta "one fourth"

The pronouns (Australian, Dixon 1980):

• Minimal: 1 *ngay 1/2 *ngali 2 *ngin
• Augmented: 1 *ngana 1/2 *ngaNH- (??) 2 *NHurra *NHu(m)balV

For Dravidian (Illich-Svitych):

• Sg: 1 *ñân 2 *ñîn
• Pl: 1 *ñâm/n 2 *ñîr / *ñîm / *num

Then Timothy Usher on "Great Andamanese reconstruction underway"

 

[lpetrich]

I think that he means active/animate vs. stative/inanimate in the first sentence.

No, I think he meant to contrast the number of inflected forms for the two different kinds of animate nouns, but I would need to look at the source text to get a clear idea of why he was making that point within the context of generative theory. It's hard for me to tell where he was going with that idea without actually reading the text that Bomhard was reviewing, but he seems to have classified languages as either active or stative typologically. Active and stative verbs, of course, are two different semantic categories of verbs, but I don't recall the details of his distinction between active and stative languages per se. It's really hard to understand the points being made without diving into the technical controversies that Lehmann was addressing at the time. Was he using the term "stative language" to refer to what would be called an "ergative language" in more traditional terminology?

This is what Winfred Lehmann and others are proposing for Pre-Proto-Indo-European:  Active–stative alignment

Here's a rather informal introduction to alignment that I've encountered: Ranto (JBR Appendix - R) A more detailed and technical one:  Morphosyntactic alignment

A transitive verb has an agent and a patient / target / undergoer: the dog (agent) is chasing the cat (patient). An intransitive verb has an experiencer: the dog (experiencer) is running.

• Nominative-accusative alignment: experiencer ~ agent
• Ergative-absolutive alignment: experiencer ~ patient
• Active-stative: is the intransitive verb's action voluntary or involuntary?
  • Voluntary ("I'm jumping"): experiencer ~ agent
  • Involuntary ("I'm falling"): experiencer ~ patient

 

[lpetrich]

Mother Tongue 12 has Allan Bomhard vs. George Starostin, a Muscovite, on Indo-European stop-consonant voicing and what it corresponds to. I'm half-thinking of trying to settle this issue by taking each side's correspondences and finding which ones are for Swadesh-List members or members of similar lists.

VaclavBlazhek & Sharka Krpcova have "On the Application of Glottochronology to Kartvelian Languages" - only 4 langs, all in the South Caucasus Mountains. They find

( ( Georgian, ( Megrel, Laz ) ), Svan)

with an estimated age of 4,500 years (2480 BCE). Other estimates are 2200 BCE and 3000 BCE. Georgian? That's of Eurasian Georgia, not US Georgia.  Names of Georgia


Vaclav Blazhek has an article on "Dravidian Numerals" noting that "Numerals belong to a relatively stable part of the lexicon of almost all language families, although they are not immune to borrowing." Especially relatively large ones, though "relatively large" can sometimes mean more than 2 or 3 or 4 or 5.

1 to 4 he considers more likely Australian than Nostratic, and the rest he considers from inside Dravidian itself. 5 = "hand" or "many", 6 = "abundance", 7 = "rising", 8 = "number", 9 = 1 from 10, 10 = 2 of something, 100 = "powder", 1000 = "greatness"

 

[lpetrich]

Then some reviews of "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World", by David W. Anthony -- Proto-Indo-European speakers

Reviewed by Daniel F. McCall and Harold C. Fleming. DFMC notes DWA's reluctance to use linguistic-reconstruction evidence: what the PIE speakers had words for. HCF notes DWA's reluctance to use human-genetics evidence. Both of them appreciate DWA's learning Russian so that he can read the Russian archeological literature.

HCF says that "HW&L is a tremendous book. It should fairly well settle the questions about IE origins which are still debated by some scholars." One book won't do it, but a better-and-better-supported paradigm will, and this book exemplifies that successful paradigm. It should mean the end of rival hypotheses like origin from India, spread in the Neolithic or the Paleolithic, as it has the hypothesis of origin from Central Europe. That latter hypothesis was much liked by German nationalists of a little more than a century ago, and coupled with the early notion that PIE speakers were very India-like, that is why the Nazis called themselves Aryans. They believed that Real Germans were descended from PIE stay-at-homes, and were thus the uncontaminanted descendants of a conquering race of culture bringers.

"But it is not the linguistic portion of HW«feL which is overwhelming; it is the rock solid mass of archeological evidence which wins the day."

HCF:

His advisers are almost all from the University of Pennsylvania (which has produced such famous linguists as Zelig Harris and Noam Chomsky) but David’s advisers are all very conservative Indo-Europeanists, including Johanna Nichols, whose global efforts (or “typology run amuck”) seek systematically to remove Greenbergian taxonomies from said globe.

I've seen some attempts to dismiss similarities in pronouns like m-t and n-m as something other than ancestry, attempts that I find very absurd.

 

[lpetrich]

Mother Tongue 13: John Bengtson's "News from Russia"

It was personally gratifying to see firsthand how the “Moscow School” operates. Obviously, not every linguist in Moscow is interested in Nostratic and other long-range comparison (LRC), but the number of those who are seems to be greater than in any other settled area on earth. In America, for example, the few “long rangers” are scattered all around the country and do not get to meet and discuss with each other very often.

... Another difference seems to be that in Moscow the necessity and importance of LRC is accepted (even if not actively pursued by everyone), while in America and England LRC comparison is generally looked upon as an embarrassing, “fringe” preoccupation that is studiously avoided by any scholar who wants to be taken seriously by the “mainstream.”

Harold C. Fleming: "Roots of a Fallacy" - the "fallacy" that one cannot recognize any language relationship older than about 6,000 to 8,000 years. I wouldn't call that one a fallacy, because a fallacy is logically-invalid reasoning. In fairness to long-range skeptics, it becomes very difficult. But though I agree that comparing two only is not a good way to go, I also think that this ought to be justified statistically, by doing lots of simulations, if nothing else.

 

[Copernicus]

I think that he means active/animate vs. stative/inanimate in the first sentence.

No, I think he meant to contrast the number of inflected forms for the two different kinds of animate nouns, but I would need to look at the source text to get a clear idea of why he was making that point within the context of generative theory. It's hard for me to tell where he was going with that idea without actually reading the text that Bomhard was reviewing, but he seems to have classified languages as either active or stative typologically. Active and stative verbs, of course, are two different semantic categories of verbs, but I don't recall the details of his distinction between active and stative languages per se. It's really hard to understand the points being made without diving into the technical controversies that Lehmann was addressing at the time. Was he using the term "stative language" to refer to what would be called an "ergative language" in more traditional terminology?

This is what Winfred Lehmann and others are proposing for Pre-Proto-Indo-European:  Active–stative alignment

Here's a rather informal introduction to alignment that I've encountered: Ranto (JBR Appendix - R) A more detailed and technical one:  Morphosyntactic alignment

A transitive verb has an agent and a patient / target / undergoer: the dog (agent) is chasing the cat (patient). An intransitive verb has an experiencer: the dog (experiencer) is running.

• Nominative-accusative alignment: experiencer ~ agent
• Ergative-absolutive alignment: experiencer ~ patient
• Active-stative: is the intransitive verb's action voluntary or involuntary?
  • Voluntary ("I'm jumping"): experiencer ~ agent
  • Involuntary ("I'm falling"): experiencer ~ patient

Right. That's a type of split-ergative language (like modern Hindi). That kind of agreement pattern is not all that uncommon, because languages sometimes undergo a change where passive sentences morph into active. For example, a sentence like "A window was broken by John" becomes "By John (agent) broken (active verb) the window", where "broken" and "window" agree with each other in properties such as plurality and gender. That is, the subject in a so-called "accusative language" falls into an oblique case and there is object-verb agreement rather than subject-verb agreement. What he is calling active-stative represents roughly an intermediate stage in the changeover process, but I don't like the terminology "active-stative". I would prefer to use terms like "agentive" and "thematic" because of the phrase structure affects the syntax of nominal phrases.

I find these typological arguments to be a bit dicey, because the linguists who propose them aren't actually familiar with all of those languages that they are fitting into typological buckets. Typologists are forced to rely on the descriptions of other linguists, who, not being native speakers of the languages they are studying, often translate them poorly into English. Translation is more of an art than people realize. So one often gets rather bizarre claims about how exotic languages work, only to find out that their features were somewhat misrepresented or poorly analyzed in the scant literature devoted to them.

That said, Lehmann was one of the most respected historical linguists in the latter half of the 20th century. I don't recall meeting him in person more than a couple of times. He predated generative linguistic theory, but he became a strong proponent of it in the 1960s. He ran the linguistics department at UT Austin for several years, and it turned out to be one of the best in the country.

 

[lpetrich]

Jonathan Morris: "The myth of rapid linguistic change (debunked by the Romance languages)" - "If we analyze the change between the Classical Latin Swadesh list and the modern Romance Swadesh lists, we find that 70% of the change to Romanian, 75% of the change to French and 90% of the change to Spanish, is likely to have occurred by the end of the Roman empire."

It's hard to work out what he was getting at. Was there a lot of proto-Romance dialectal variation in the Roman Empire? Even if so, then that variation has a maximum age that is set by the expansion of the Roman state.

 File:Roman conquest of Italy.PNG
 File:Extent of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire between 218 BC and 117 AD.png

Rome started out as a city-state around 500 BCE. By 330 BCE, it had conquered its nearby neighbors, and by 250 BCE, most of the "boot". Over the next three centuries, Rome conquered southern and western Europe, northern Africa, and the western Middle East. Looking at the  Fall of the Western Roman Empire - the Western Empire's loss of territory started roughly around 400 CE and became complete a century later.

So the rate of language changed was more in the Empire than afterward, likely from a lot of social upheaval. That likely made the difference between Icelandic and the Continental Scandinavian langs -- much more social upheaval in Denmark and Norway and Sweden than in Iceland.

Then, "APPENDIX: Implications For Dating Proto-Indo-European"

He dismisses outright the Kurgan hypothesis of the Indo-European homeland, as it might be called.

If we use the same ratio, we are asked to believe that at most 50,000 Bronze nomads and their descendants succeeded in imposing language change on most of Eurasia in 500-1,000 years, including 3 million people in Europe alone, so completely as to obliterate ail traces of substrate languages, even in marginal areas like Norway, when 300,000 Germanic tribefolk concentrated in an area about a twentieth of the size had had no lasting impact beyond a few borrowings and sound changes. Indeed, where did all their surplus largesse of wagons/cows/horses etc. that they needed to impress the natives actually come from?

Except that there are oodles of counterevidence, like in the Roman Empire, which he himself had looked at. Let's look at central Anatolia, a place where such replacement from elite dominance has happened several times.

• ~ 1500 BCE: first written records: Hittite (IE; split off first), Hurrian, Hattic (both possibly North Caucasian)
• ~ 1200 BCE: Bronze Age collapse - Hittite Empire destroyed
• ~ 500 BCE: Phrygian (IE: closest to Greek)
• ~ 300 BCE: Greek (from Alexander the Great's conquests)
• ~1400 CE: Turkish, from Central Asian nomads who settled down in Anatolia

But sometimes conquering elites end up losing, becoming assimilated, like the Germanic tribes that overran much of the Roman Empire.

 

[lpetrich]

Vitaly Shevoroshkin: "Introduction To Milyan" - what he has been working on. - "Milyan and Lycian are closely related Late Anatolian languages of the Luwian subgroup, spoken in Western Asia Minor." in the first millennium BCE.

V. M. Illich-Svitych - "Stop Correspondences in Nostratic" - 1966

Irén Hegedüs - "A Note on the Pre-Protolinguistic Background of Proto-Uralic Homonyms" - words with unrelated meanings that sound alike, unlike polysemy, having different but related meanings, like "true" and "good". - "The distribution of apparent homonymous forms shows that homonymy occurs less frequently in words with an initial nasal stop than elsewhere (i.e. in words with a stop other than nasals). This seems to support the explanation that the increased frequency of non-nasal stops is rooted in pre-Proto-Uralic merger processes that did not affect nasal stops."

Consistent with Nostratic / Eurasiatic, reconstructed as having three voicings of stop consonants. All three voicings merged into voicelessness in Proto-Uralic and Proto-Dravidian. More than one voicing may also be true of substrate langs. Nasal consonants: n, m, ng.

 

[lpetrich]

Vaclav Blazhek - "Numerals in Arctic Languages" - Yukaghir, Chikchi-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut

4 = 3+1 = 2*2, 5 = hand, 6 = 5+1 = 3*3, 7 = 5+2 = 8-1, 8 = 5+3 = 2*4, 9 = 5+4 = 10-1, 10 = 5+5 = top

A lot of variation. Is this variation a result of not doing very much counting with those numbers?

I don't have Vaclav Blazhek's book with me, sad to say, but I've found this: Uralic numerals: is the evolution of numeral system reconstructable? (reading new Václav Blažek’s book on numerals in Eurasia)

"As it can be seen, most of these Blažek’s Proto-Uralic recontructions are too optimistic if not to say simply bad."

Author Vladimir Napolskikh has his own reconstruction. UYu = Uralic-Yukaghir, U = Uralic, FU = Finno-Ugric (Finnish, Hungarian, etc.), FP = Finno-Permic (Finnish), Ugr = Ugric (Hungarian), Sam = Samoyedic

UYu 1, U 1: (?), FU 1 *üke, Sam *o-
UYu 2: *ket > U *kekta > FU 2 *kektâ, Sam 2 *kitâ
FU 3 *kolme, Sam 3 *näkar
FU 4 *neljä (<? Drav •nâl), Sam 4 *tetta (< Turkic (Bulg. 3) *tüät)
U 5 *witte > FU 5 *witte, Sam 10 *wüt ... ? Sam *sampa- "hand" > Sam 5 *sampalanka
U *kutte "back" > FU 6 *kutte ... Sam *maka "back" > Sam 6 *maktat
Balt 7 *setem > FP 7 *seccem ... II 7 *sapta > Ugr 7 *Säpt, Sam 7 *sejtwa
8 "without 2"
9 "without 1"
UYu *kümen- "number, many" > FU 10 *kümene (Sam 10 ~ FU 5)
U *kojese "human" > FU 20 *kuse ... Sam "two-ten"
II 100 *sata > FU 100 *sata ... Turkic (Bulg.) 100 *jür > Sam 100 *jür

Then basic numerals and counting:
UYu: (1), 2, many ... 1, 2, 2+1, 2+2, ...
U: (1), 2, 5, 20 ... 1, 2, 2+1, 2+2, 5, 5+1,... 2*5,... 2*5+5, ... 20, ...
FU, Sam: 1, 10, 100 ... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10-2, 10-1, 10, ...100, ...

Then some similar systems:

Aghu (Trans-New-Guinean): 1 = fasike, 2 = okuomu, 3 = okuomasike, 4 = "little finger", 5 = "palm", 6 = 5+1, 7 = 5+2, 10 = 2*5
Jawony (Pama-Nyungan): 1 = antirin, 2 = tatkurang, 3 = 2+1, 4 = 2+2, 5 = 2+2+1
San (Khoisan): 1 = /wi, 2 = /am, 3 = ng/ona, 4 = 2 of 2, 5 = hand
Eskimo: 1 - 4 = (various), 5 = "hand", 7 = +2, 8 = +3, 10 = "upper side", 11 = 10+1, 15 = "in front of", 16 = 15+1, 19 = 20 not, 20 = "human"
Haida (Na-Dene): 1 = sgoâ'nsin, 2 = stiñ, 3 = lgu'nul, 4 = 2*2, 5 = lê'il, 6 = 3*2, ..., 10 = 5*2
Yukaghir (Kolyma): 1 = irkiei, 2 = ataxloi, 3 = yaloi, 4 = 3+1, 5 = "hand", 6 = 2*3, 7 = 2 above, 8 = 2*4, 9 = 10 without 1, 10 = kunel
Sumerian (counting of days): 1 = be, 2 = 1+1, 3 = PESH <? "next", 4 = 3+1, 5 = 3+1+1, 6 = 3+3, 7 = 3+3+1, ...
Sumerian (usual): 1 = ash, 2 = dish, 3 = min, 4 = esh, 5 = i, 6 = 5+1, 7 = 5+2, 8 = 5+3, 9 = 5+4, 10 u = < "many", 20 = 2*10

Notice a lot of base-5 counting and double smaller numbers, like Japanese 2 ~ 1, 6 ~ 3, 8 ~ 4, Indo-European 5 ?= "hand", 8 ?= 2*4, 10 ?= "2 hands", 100 ?= big 10, 1000 = big 100 or big hand, Proto-Berber 6 = 5+1, 7 = 5+2, 8 = 5+3, 9 = 10-1

We start out counting from 1 to 2, then adding 3, then adding 4, then adding "hand" or "palm": 5. We next do arithmetic to go up to the base for larger numbers: 10 or 20 or 60. We may then coin special words for powers of the bases, but other than that, it's all arithmetic.

Nearly every such number base is 10; the exceptions are Mayan (20) and Sumerian (60):
 Maya numerals and  Sumerian language

Here are the families with native words for 100 as far as I can determine: Indo-European, Turkic, Mongolian, North Caucasian (several), Sino-Tibetan, Tai family, Mon-Khmer, Austronesian, Dravidian, Semitic, Egyptian

With native words for 1000: Indo-European, (Turkic, Mongolian: one borrowed from the other), some North Caucasian?, Sino-Tibetan, Tai family, Malayo-Polynesian, Semitic, Egyptian

I say "native", because borrowing of words for numbers is common for relatively high numbers, and "relatively high" can be as low as 6 in some cases (Indo-European, Swahili).

There are even some langs with special words for 10,000: Greek murioi (> "myriad"), Chinese wàn, Egyptian djeba, Sanskrit ayúta

 

[lpetrich]

More from MT 13: Vaclav Blazek: "Chukcho-Kamchatkan and Uralic: Lexical Evidence of Their Genetic Relationship" - the conclusion:

The present list of lexical parallels between Chukcho-Kamchatkan and Uralic, containing 136 lexical units, is too low to formulate all phonetic correspondences in detail, but sufficient for acceptance of genetic relationship. The occasional citations of parallels from Yukaghir and Nivx should indicate the future direction of research: a common Uralo-Yukaghir-Nivx-Chukcho-Kamchatkan stock within Nostratic.

At least if such a subdivision is justified, and it may not be.

Then mentions estimated split times. Chukcho-Kamchatkan split around 890 BCE, with its two main branches each splitting around 520 CE.

Uralic split between Samoyed and Finno-Ugric around 3430 BCE, with Samoyed then splitting over 720 BCE and 130 CE, and with Finno-Ugric splitting into its major branches over 2180 BCE to 1340 BCE. These branches have more recent splits over 130 - 670 CE.

What made that splitting happen over the last few millennia? Some ancestors acquiring or inventing some new technology or social arrangement and then spreading? Most of these langs are spoken by people who live in the far north of Eurasia, and that can be challenging to survive in. Eskimo-Aleut speakers also split in that time, and they live in a similar climate.

For early Finno-Ugric speakers we have a clue: contacts with Indo-Iranian speakers that led to borrowing of words like for pig *porsas (Finnish porsas, IE *porkos) and 100 *sata (Finnish sata, Hungarian száz, IE *kmtom). Note the satem sound shift of k > s in them.

 

[lpetrich]

George van Driem: "The Shompen of Great Nicobar Island: New linguistic and genetic data, and the Austroasiatic homeland revisited"

Has a rough family tree of Austroasiatic with divergence times. The family as a whole goes back to 5000 BCE, Munda of India goes back 1500 BCE, and Mon-Khmer goes back 4000 BCE. The latter has Khmero-Vietic, going back to 2500 BCE, with that group being named after Khmer of Cambodia and Vietnamese.

"Andamanese Mythical Signatures Linking Gondwana Mythology With The Laurasian Cluster" - using Michael Witzel's Gondwana vs. Laurasia mythology scheme. "Myths of the origin of the world are not found in Australia, Melanesia, Sub- Saharan Africa and Andaman." Though these people have various stories about how humanity was created, including some creator forming the first people from clay, and emergence from another species, like for some Andamanese, monitor lizards.

Monitor lizards? One has to go back to the Permian to find ancestors of humanity that were lizardlike, but one finds them.

Then noting some Australian creation stories of the first people being created without sense organs and their creator then correcting this oversight. Also of some female ancestors giving birth to the first populations.

Gondwana mythology (found in Australia, New Guinea and sub- Saharan Africa) altogether lacks motifs such as creation myths that tell the origin of the world or female witches but is characterized by an emphasis on the emergence of humankind in an already existing world. On the contrary, Laurasian mythology (found in Eurasia, North Africa and the Americas) emphasizes the creation of the world.

Then "Andamanese mythology is comparatively weak in cosmogony myths." With very little mention of the creation of the Sun and the Moon and the Earth by the creator of human beings.

 

[lpetrich]

MT 13: Harold C. Fleming: "Avoiding Dogma: Our Differences Regarding Chronology and Other Matters"

On a more analytical note one can point out the obvious but politely concealed truth about ASLIP. We have been a coalition of disparate groups, barely escaping open conflict with each other, varying greatly in our allegiance to the common goals, with a substantial amount of individual career pursuit, not to mention the occasional empire builder. Alors! We have been like the Democratic Party in the United States. Our Obama has come and gone - he was called Joseph Greenberg - and we cannot wait much longer for another.

The article later mentions pro-taxonomy and pro-reconstruction factions: subjective resemblance vs. regular sound correspondences. I myself like correspondences, but one has to do resemblance before one can look for correspondences. Also, one might find almost as many kinds of correspondence as individual correspondences, depriving correspondences of their explanatory value.

 Neogrammarian - back in the mid 19th cy., as the existence of the Indo-European family became more broadly accepted among researchers interested in historical linguistics, some of those researchers wanted to be more rigorous about sound correspondences. They became known as the Neogrammarians, German Junggrammatiker "Young Grammarians".

 

[lpetrich]

Then Jonathan Morris again, with "The myth of rapid linguistic change: Part II The evidence from Roman military history, Italian dialects, Catalan verbs and palaeodemography"

Proposing that Romance-language changes started off as dialects of Latin from the early Empire and possibly the late Republic. That would depend on how military colonists were recruited for each region. Were colonists of Iberia recruited from one region and colonists of Gaul from another and colonists of Dacia from another? That's from where Romance langs survive.

Mentions a hypothesis about what makes French so different: "The extensive invasion and settlement of Northern Gaul by the Franks in the late 5"’ century CE is thus responsible for the fact that French has undergone much more phonological change than say Italian or Spanish." -- the social-upheaval hypothesis.

Makes an analogy with English colonists of North America: different colonies were founded by colonists from different parts of England.

Some Latin dialects may have had carryovers from previous langs, like Oscan and Umbrian, and if military colonists of some places were recruited from some regions, then these dialects and carryovers may have survived there.

JM then pooh-poohs the notion of conquering elites imposing their languages, noting cases of them failing to do so. But they sometimes succeed, as in the Roman Empire and Anatolia.

Some examples of Phrygian from JP Mallory's "In Search of the Indo-Europeans":

Old Phrygian
Ates arkia evais akenan o-lavos Midai lavaltaei vanaktei edaes.

Ates? dedicated and carved this stone for Midas, the protector of the people, the king.

Late Phrygian
ios ni semoun knoumanei kakoun addaket,
gegreimenan egedou tios outan,
akke oi bekos akkalos tidregroun eitou.

Who does evil to this grave,
he bears the inescapable curse of god,
and to him shall bread and water be unpalatable.

Food and drink tasting awful? I'm scared.

It isn't Hittite, it isn't Greek, and it isn't Turkish.

I then used Google Translate on:
Whoever does evil to this grave,
let him bear the inescapable curse of god,
and let bread and water be unpalatable to him.

Modern Greek:
Όποιος κάνει κακό σε αυτόν τον τάφο,
ας υποστεί την αναπόφευκτη κατάρα του θεού,
και ας του είναι δυσάρεστο ψωμί και νερό.
Ópoios kánei kakó se aftón ton táfo,
as yposteí tin anapófefkti katára tou theoú,
kai as tou eínai dysáresto psomí kai neró.

Turkish:
Kim bu mezara kötülük yaparsa,
bırakın tanrının kaçınılmaz lanetini taşısın,
ve ekmek ve su ona tatsız gelsin.

 

[lpetrich]

Jonathan Morris has a section: "The “1:5” rule of thumb for explaining language replacement"

Instead, there appears to be a rule that wholesale language replacement only occurs when there is a critical ratio of immigrants to natives. It is evidently impossible to specify this ratio precisely since we are dealing with estimates and probably many contingent factors, but it is likely to be somewhere between 1:3 and 1:6 (I have called it the “1:5” rule). Whatever the figure may be, it certainly isn’t 1:20 or 1:30.

In order to be valid, this model must nevertheless explain the apparent counter-examples of Germanic invaders successfully shifting the language of Britain from British/Latin to Anglo-Saxon, of Turkish invaders imposing Turkish on Turkey and Hungarian invaders imposing Hungarian on the plains of Pannonia.

He then tries to argue against those counterexamples.

Allan R. Bomhard - "Proto-Indo-European ‘Horse’ From a Nostratic Perspective"

Traditionally reconstructed as ek'wos - in the thematic -os declension. Hittite has ekus in the athematic declension (the older kind). "Horse" is often proposed to be "the quick, swift one" from other IE words, but AB proposes a Nostratic origin from some word meaning "to move quickly; to rage; to be furious, raging, violent, spirited, fiery, wild" reconstructed from Turkic, Mongolian, and Japanese. Seems like similar semantics to me.

 

[lpetrich]

Sergei Starostin: "Indo-European-North Caucasian Isoglosses" - similar words across langs

Hurro-Urartian is likely Northeast Caucasian, and Hattic Northwest Caucasian or close to that branch of N Caucasian.

The absence of a genetic relationship between the North Caucasian and Indo-European languages is obvious: in the basic lexicons of these languages no correspondences of whatever sort exist, and the phonological and morphological systems differ fundamentally as well. Consequently, if we encounter resemblances of vocabulary between the North Caucasian and Indo-European languages (whether in their present stage of development or in their reconstructed states) the discussion clearly must be about borrowings.

He then considers Indo-Europeanisms in the NC langs. The most recent ones are lots of borrowings from contemporary Russian.

Then from medieval and modern Persian, and also from Armenian. There are some early Indo-Iranian borrowings in the NEC langs but seemingly none in the NWC ones.

After going into a lot of detail, SS concludes "Although between the PNC and PIE systems sufficiently regular phonetic correspondences can be established, the character of the shared vocabulary does not eliminate doubts that the common character of these lexemes is not the result of an original kinship but rather the result of borrowings."

Like words for domestic animals and plants, raising of animals and cultivation of plants, including animal body parts, everyday-use iterms, items for feeding, and trade and exchange. "At that time the presence among the PNC-PIE isoglosses of a sufficiently large number of names of wild plants and vegetation as well as of terms for fauna such as 'frog', 'fish', and 'weasel' leads to the notion that we have before us evidence not simply of cultural contacts but of substrate relations."

"A careful analysis of the phonetic correspondences enables us to come to the conclusion that the borrowing was done by the Proto-Indo-European side." - PIE had many fewer phonemes than PNC, and it would show for borrowing from PIE. That is evident in borrowings from Russian, and also Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese in borrowing from Chinese.

These borrowings took place early in PIE history, before Anatolian speakers split off, and the NC contributor was already different from PNC.

The disintegration times - for PIE, the period of about the fifth to fourth millennia BCE; for PNC, the boundary between the the sixth and fifth millennia BCE - implying roughly 5,000 BCE for the contact date.