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Language as a Clue to Prehistory

I'm returning to the mama - nana - papa - tata - kaka - yaya

Speech Sounds Development Chart - Kid Sense Child Development

Added English consonant, semivowel phonemes at which years of age:
  • 1 - 3: p, b, m, n, t, d
  • 3 - 4: k, g, f, s, y, h
  • 4 - 5: sh, ch, j, z, l, v
  • Afterward(?): ng, zh, r, w, th, dh (voiceless, voiced th)
So this accounts for m, n, p, b, t, d being used for one's closest elders, and k, y for less-close elders.

The page also described common mistakes. Some of these are common sound changes that one finds over language histories, I must note.
  • 1-3
    • Voicing - unvoiced to voiced, like t > d, p > b
    • Stopping - continuants to stops, like s > t
    • Final consonant deletion
    • Velar fronting: k > t, g > d
    • Palatal fronting: sh > s
  • 1-4
    • Weak syllable deletion: elephant > ephant
    • Assimilation: dog > gog
    • Consonant cluster reduction: brick > bick, clown > cown
  • 1-5
    • De-affrication: like ch > sh
  • 1-6
    • Gliding: l, r > w, y
  • 1-7
    • th > f, dh > v
 
I'd assume historical linguists would want a chart of the most common sound changes, but I've never seen such a chart.

lpetrich said:
The page also described common mistakes. Some of these are common sound changes that one finds over language histories, I must note.
  • 1-3
    • Voicing - unvoiced to voiced, like t > d, p > b
    • Stopping - continuants to stops, like s > t
    • Final consonant deletion
    • Velar fronting: k > t, g > d
    • Palatal fronting: sh > s
  • 1-4
    • Weak syllable deletion: elephant > ephant
    • Assimilation: dog > gog
    • Consonant cluster reduction: brick > bick, clown > cown
  • 1-5
    • De-affrication: like ch > sh
  • 1-6
    • Gliding: l, r > w, y
  • 1-7
    • th > f, dh > v
Click to expand...

Thank you for this! Another common reason for sound change, I think, is during language shift when the old language is missing a phoneme in the target language.

Starting with lpetrich's chart, possible change chains emerge, e.g. CH > SH > S > T > D. Are there any such long change chains that have been observed? (That change chain can be made slightly longer since K > CH is well-known in Middle French.)

What about Celtic's K > P ? (As a naive layman it has always struck me as unlikely-looking.)
 
It's P <-> Kw -- labial - labiovelar

Examples:

"four" IE *kwetwores
Italic *kwettwôr > Latin quattuor /kwattwor/, Oscan pettur, Umbrian petur
Celtic *kwetwores > Old Irish cethair /kjethirj/. Welsh pedwar
Pre-Germanic *petwôr > Gmc. *fedwôr

(palatalized)
Proto-Hellenic *kwetwores > Greek *tessares
Balto-Slavic *ketûres > Lithuanian keturi, Slavic *chetyre
Indo-Iranian *chatwâras

"five" IE *penkwe
Italic *kwenkwe > Latin quînque /kwînkwe/, Oscan, Umbrian pumpe
Celtic *kwenkwe > Old Irish cuig /kôgj/, Welsh pump /pimp/
Germanic *fimf
 
A better link to Weera Ostapirat's paper - has the abstract, the figures and tables, and a link to a PDF of the full paper
[PDF] Macrophyletic Trees of East Asian Languages Re examined | Semantic Scholar

Here are his numbers for Proto-Tai vs. Proto-AN and Old Chinese:
  • 1st 100: 21, 6
  • 2nd 100: 8, 20
I then tried to calculate the table's chi-squared value. I found a value of 14, with no difference between the PT-AN and PT-OC distributions having a probability of 0.00022. So the difference is real.

A57. 2005. The Current Status of Austric.pdf - Reid - compares Austroasiatic and Austronesian, finding some matches in basic vocabulary and grammatical formants, like causative prefixes.

MSEA Languages - Hmong-Mien and Austroasiatic look-alikes (Hmong-Mien ~ Miao-Yao)
  1. Native Hmong-Mien layer: many basic words such as 'to eat'
  2. Austroasiatic (a "missing" branch that shows many lexical similarities with Khmuic): many basic words (various body parts, natural phenomena, numerals 'two' and 'three')
  3. Kra-Dai / Pre-Austronesian? (I believe that Kra-Dai may have borrowed many lexical items from Hmong-Mien rather than vice versa, since correspondences are usually irregular, suggesting borrowing rather than a close genetic relationship. Some of these words, such as 'monkey' and 'snake', are found only in some rather than all Kra-Dai branches. Many words are exclusively shared by Kra-Dai and Hmong-Mien that are not found in Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, or Austroasiatic, which are curiously often animal names such as 'monkey', 'turtle', 'snake', 'rat', and 'dog'.)
  4. Tibeto-Burman (a "missing" branch that Paul K. Benedict refers to as Donor Miao-Yao): numerals 4-9 and mostly cultural words, including some kinship terms and the words for 'sun' and 'moon'.
  5. Old Chinese: mostly technological words
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The second class of words suggests shared ancestry.

The next step ought to be to compare at least three of AN, KD, AA, and HM/MY together.
 
All 45 of Joseph  Greenberg's linguistic universals are listed in that article.

The first of them is "In declarative sentences with nominal subject and object, the dominant order is almost always one in which the subject precedes the object." and the last one is "If there are any gender distinctions in the plural of the pronoun, there are some gender distinctions in the singular also."

VSO always has prepositions and inflected auxiliary verb before the main verb. SOV almost always has postpositions and inflected auxiliary verb after the main verb. Not just postpositions, also noun cases.

For VSO, the most common or only alternate order is SVO, and the adjective almost always follows the noun.

"If a language has inflection, it always has derivation."

If a language has a dual number (plural for 2), it must also have a plural number. Likewise, if it has a trial number (plural for 3), it must also have a dual number. When a language has a plural number, it does not mark only the singular, but at least sometimes the plural. Dual and trial numbers are almost always marked.

"If a language has the category of gender, it always has the category of number." and "A language never has more gender categories in nonsingular numbers than in the singular."

When a language has noun cases, the only zero-marked ones are those for the subject of an intransitive verb.

With separate plural and case markers, the plural marker always comes between the noun root and the case marker.

"All languages have pronominal categories involving at least three persons and two numbers."
 
I came across this from 2021: Researchers reconstruct major branches in the tree of language | Santa Fe Institute
Starting out with a 110-word Swadesh-derived list.
Working from this list, the researchers then use classic methods of linguistic reconstruction to come up with a number of word shapes which they then match with specific meanings from the list. The approach, dubbed “onomasiological reconstruction,” notably differs from traditional approaches to comparative linguistics because it focuses on finding which words were used to express a given meaning in the proto-language, rather than on reconstructing phonetic shapes of those words and associating them with a vague cloud of meanings.
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noting
Using ancestral state reconstruction methods for onomasiological reconstruction in multilingual word lists in: Language Dynamics and Change Volume 8 Issue 1 (2018)
That's what one does with the Swadesh sort of list. Find the words closest in semantics to the list's entries and compare their phonetic shapes.

That article referred to Rapid radiation of the inner Indo-European languages: an advanced approach to Indo-European lexicostatistics and Permutation test applied to lexical reconstructions partially supports the Altaic linguistic macrofamily | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core -- I was hoping for more.

I'd mentioned the second one earlier. Narrow Altaic (Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic) is well-supported but Broad Altaic only weakly supported, with a Japanese-Turkic relation but no Korean-anything relation.
 
Rapid radiation of the inner Indo-European languages: an advanced approach to Indo-European lexicostatistics

The authors constructed family trees both with and without derivationally-different cognates, like English "wind (in air)" and Russian veter. Along with Latin ventus, they come from Reconstruction: Proto-Indo-European/h₂weh₁- - Wiktionary, the free dictionary -- *(a)wâ- "to blow (of wind)"

Examples where it is reasonable to treat loanwords or words with borrowed roots as singletons are Modern German Kopf ‘head’ < Old High German kopf ‘mug, bowl’ < Latin cupa, cuppa ‘cask, bowl’ or the Romance word for ‘liverʼ (Italian fegato, French foie, etc.) < Vulgar Latin *fecatum ‘fig-stuffed liver (a dish)’, derived from Latin fīcus ‘fig’ < substrate Mediterranean term for ‘fig’.
Click to expand...
The German one is like what happened to the word for "head" in some Romance languages. Italian testa and French tête are from Latin testa "baked clay, brick, pot", from "pot" > "skull" > "head".

The original Latin word for liver was iecur, but a common practice in the Roman Empire was feeding figs to geese so that their livers will be tasty: iecur ficâtum "figged liver". But the iecur part dropped out, leaving the figged part, thus Italian fegato, Spanish hígado, French foie, etc. Something similar is still done to make foie gras, French "fat liver".

As to Latin fîcus "fig" itself, that is likely a pre-Indo-European Mediterranean word, like Greek sukon / tukon and Armenian t'uz.


The authors state "We believe that the use of reconstructed wordlists for intermediate proto-languages instead of the more traditional approach that requires a great number of wordlists from modern languages is preferable for two reasons."

1. To get good results, the number of language taxa ought to be less than the number of word meanings compared, like 1/3 of them.

2. Doing so eliminates a lot of "comparison noise".
 
Please excuse me for skipping to the end of the thread.
Has anyone mentioned the BBC documentry series 'The Story of English' from the 80s.
About how English was spoken all around the world. It was very good. I recommend it.
 
I had earlier posted on Indo‐European and Computational Cladistics - Ringe - 2002 - Transactions of the Philological Society - Wiley Online Library with PDF Indo-European and Computational Cladistics - ringe02IE-Cladistics.pdf - from 20 years ago. It agrees with the 2021 paper on Italo-Celtic and Greek-Armenian and Balto-Slavic-Indo-Iranian, but it places Germanic outside of Italo-Celtic.

The authors find branching order Anatolian, Tocharian, Italo-Celtic, Germanic, Greek-Armenian, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian.

Frederik Kortlandt: Other electronic publications - he works a lot on arcane details of Balto-Slavic, Indo-European, and the like, but he takes seriously Indo-Uralic and Altaic as genetic groupings, including the two together -- Narrow Nostratic or Eurasiatic. He also proposes an alternative voicing for the Proto-Indo-European stop consonants, a modification of the glottalic theory: "preglottalized" consonants, with a pause before the consonant sound instead of after it. Proto-Indo-European glottalic stops: The evidence revisited

Traditional: T, D, Dh, Glottalic: T(h), T', *D(h), Kortlandt: T(h), 'T, D(h), Germano-European (Thai-like, my favorite): T(h), T, D(h)
 
Fredrik Kortlandt: The Indo-Uralic verb

Starting off with him noting Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck proposing that Proto-Indo-European consists of two parts, A and B: "The first component comprises pronouns, verbal roots, and derivational suffixes, and may be compared with Uralic, whereas the second component contains isolated words, such as numerals and most underived nouns, which have a different source."

A is what one would expect of an inherited part, and B of a borrowed part. This reminds me of an article in Mother Tongue XIV: "Indo-European - North Caucasian Isoglosses Sergei A. Starostin Translated by Ronald W. Thornton" -- SS concluded that they were borrowings from NC into IE.

"What we have to take into account is the typological similarity of Proto-Indo-European to the North-West Caucasian languages. If this similarity can be attributed to areal factors (cf. Kortlandt 1995: 94), we may think of Indo-European as a branch of Indo-Uralic which was transformed under the influence of a Caucasian substratum connected with the Maykop culture in the northern Caucasus." and "The Indo-European verbal system appears to combine Uralic flexional morphemes
with Caucasian syntactic patterns."

FK's reconstruction of the PIE personal verb endings (singular, plural)
  • Athematic present: -mi, -si, -ti; -mes, -tq1e, -(e)nti
  • Athematic past: -m, -s, -t; -me, -te, -(e)nt
  • Thematic present: -oq1, -eq1i, -e, -omom, -etq1e, -o
  • Thematic past: -om, -es, -omo, -ete, -ont
  • Stative: -q2, -tq2o, -o; -medhq2, -dhwe, -ro
  • Perfect: -q2e, -tq2e, -e; -me, -e, -(ê)r
  • Transitive middle: -me2, -stq2o, -to; -medhq2, -tdhwe, -ntro
The q's are FK's interpretation of PIE laryngeals: q1 = glottal stop, q2 = uvular stop (Arabic q), q3 = labialized uvular stop (qw).

Rather complicated, it must be noted.

Joseph Greenberg identified some 60 grammatical elements in Eurasiatic, and FK proposes these ones as being in Indo-Uralic: 1st person m, 2nd person t, demonstratives i/e, t, s, dual ki, plurals t, i, accusative m, genitive n, dative ka, locatives ru, u, i, ablative t, diminutive k, nominalizers i, m, participles n, t, nt, i, verbal noun s, conative sk, reflexive u/w, negative n, interrogative k

(conative = trying to do something / actually doing something as opposed to imagining it or feeling something)

He proposes these cognates, all verbs: PU *meqi- "give, sell", PIE *mey- "exchange"; PU *moski- "wash", PIE *mesg "to sink, wash", PU *(q)aja-, PIE *q2eg'- "drive"; PU *teki- "do", PIE *dheq1- "put", PU *toqi- "bring", PIE *dheq1- "put", PU *toqi- "bring", PIE *deq3- "give", PU *weta- "pull", PIE *wedh- "lead", PU *wiqi- "take', PIE *weg'h- "carry"

The velars' following vowels' qualities became merged into them, back ones (o,u) making labiovelars, Kw, and front ones (e,i) making palatovelars, K' or Ky. So FK rediscovered a nontrivial correspondence that Nostraticists had discovered half a century ago.

FK then tries to reconstruct very early forms of those personal-ending sets. Unfortunately, he didn't give any Uralic comparisons for those.

Proto-Uralic has an unsourced conjugation, though it agrees with On the structure of Proto-Uralic | Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen - with the dual forms:

-m, -n/t, -; -majn, -tajn, -ki; -mat, -tat, -t

It looks a lot like some of the Indo-European ones.

Proto-Uralic dual: *-ki, plural: *-t, *-j-
 
Are Mongolian and Tungus genetically related? - rebutting someone who claimed otherwise from the geographical distribution of certain putative borrowings. FK argued that one has to be careful about dialectal groupings. He also noted that many of these putative borrowings are verbs. These don't get borrowed as much as nouns, though they can and do get borrowed.

C. C. Uhlenbeck on Indo-European, Uralic, and Caucasian

FK on CCU: "He recognized that it is necessary to distinguish between two components of Indo-European language and culture, an older common inheritance which reflects a pastoral society and a later European complex with a common agricultural vocabulary, both of them dating from before the introduction of metallurgy."

"Here A contains pronouns, verbal roots and derivational suffixes whereas B contains isolated words which are not related to verbal roots, such as numerals, some kinship terms, and many names of body parts, animals and trees. Uhlenbeck compares A with Uralic and Altaic and attributes irregular features such as heteroclitic inflection and grammatical gender to B, for which one might think of Caucasian languages."

Heteroclitic - nouns with r/n alternations, like wódr, udnés "water" and yékwr, ikwnés "liver".
 
Indo-Uralic Consonant Gradation - about how Indo-European phonology emerged from Indo-Uralic; rather complicated

Indo-Uralic and Altaic

FK concedes that "It is easy to criticize Greenberg’s methodology", saying "One should regard his list of grammatical elements, like Pokorny’s Indo-European dictionary (1959) and Starostin’s Altaic dictionary (2003), as a collection of possible rather than actual cognates which must be subjected to further analysis."

He cautiously endorses comparisons in pronouns:

Indo-Uralic: 1sg *mi, 1pl *me, 2sg *ti, 2pl *te, "self" -u, genitive -n (Uralic, some IE oblique stems?)
Altaic: 1sg *bi, 1pl *ba, 1 obl. *min-, *man-, *mun, 2sg *si, 2pl *su, 2 obl. *sin-, *sun-
Mongolian 2sg tSi < *thi, 2pl ta < *tha (h: aspirated)

Indo-Uralic demostr. *i/e-, *t-, *s-
Altaic "this" *sV, *ko, *la, *o, "that" *tSha, *e, *i, *tha, *the (h: aspirated)

Interrogative (animate): Indo-Uralic *k-, Altaic *kha

Then some comparisons of plurals and noun cases. Like Uralic, Turkic and Mongolian have genitives with *-n, but some of the other ones don't match very well.

FK concludes that 20 Indo-Uralic grammatical elements are also present in Altaic, thus cautiously supporting Eurasiatic.
 
IIndo-Uralic and Altaic Revisited

Starting out by noting Anna Dybo & George Starostin's pro-Altaic rebuttal to Alexander Vovin's anti-Altaic arguments. "Dybo & Starostin’s civil tone and admirable restraint contrast starkly with Vovin’s vicious rhetoric and personal insults."
Dybo & Starostin claim (2008: 135) that “if genetic relationship between two or more languages can be demonstrated on morphological evidence, it will inevitably show up in the basic lexicon as well” whereas “if genetic relationship can be demonstrated on lexical evidence, it will not necessarily be detected within the compared languages’ morphology as well”. The problem is that critics of the Altaic hypothesis find most etymologies unattractive or suspicious and feel that the corpus of Altaic comparisons comprises not only possible cognates but also obvious loanwords, accidental lookalikes and even totally irrelevant non-lookalikes (as one colleague put it in an e-mail message to me).
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Then on what is likely to be borrowed.
When we look at language interference in bilingual communities, it appears that there is a marked difference in the ease of linguistic borrowing between grammar and lexicon, between bound and free morphemes, and between verbs and nouns. As a result, the older strata of a language are better preserved in the grammatical system than in the lexical stock, better in morphology than in phonology or syntax, better in verb stems and pronouns than in nouns and numerals.
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Also better in some meanings than in some other ones.

"The wide attestation of the Indo-European numerals must be attributed to the development of trade which
accompanied the increased mobility of the Indo-Europeans at the time of their expansions." An alternate hypothesis is that with technology advanced enough, the lower numerals become rock-steady. That's evident not only in Indo-European, but also in some other long-lived ones like Semitic.

"Numerals do not belong to the basic vocabulary of a neolithic culture, as is clear from their absence in Proto-Uralic and from the spread of Chinese numerals throughout East Asia." The picture is more complicated than that. The smallest ones, 1, 2, maybe 3, maybe 4 tend to be universal, with larger ones being added later when one has more that one has to count.
 
I'd mentioned this earlier:
Borrowability and the notion of basic vocabulary with PDF at (PDF) Borrowability and the Notion of Basic Vocabulary

In a study of the earliest contacts between the Indo-European and Uralic language families (1986), Rédei lists 64 words which were supposedly borrowed from Indo-European into Uralic at an early date. The material is divided into three groups: 7 Indo-European words which are attested in both Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic, 18 Indo-European or Indo-Iranian words which are attested in Finno-Ugric but not in Samoyedic, and 39 Indo-Iranian words which are found neither in Ugric nor in Samoyedic. Now it turns out that the number of verbs in the oldest material is too large to support the hypothesis that they were borrowed: verbs constitute 43% of the first group, 28% of the second group, and 5% of the third group.
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A lot of the words are basic verbs like ‘to give’, ‘to wash’, ‘to bring’, ‘to drive’, ‘to do’, ‘to lead’, ‘to take’, though he does not list what he considers cognates. I checked on Wiktionary and on StarlingDB:

Indo-European *ghabh- "to take, give", *deh3-, *dô- "to give"
Uralic *ëmta-, *amta- "to give", *toxe- *toghe-, "to bring, give"

For that last one, StarlingDB also gives us Altaic *t'uja- (Mongolic *taghu- "to give, distribute", Tungusic *tuju- "to give, give a feast"), Eskimo-Aleut *tun(i)- "to give", Dravidian *te- "to bring, give to 1st, 2nd ." Eurasiatic *dwV[H]V "to give" and also Borean *TVHV "to give" citing possible Sino-Caucasian and Amerind comparisons.

Indo-European *dheh1-, *dhê- "to do, put, place"
Finno-Ugric *teke- "to do, put, place"

StarlingDB also has Altaic *dê- "to lie down", Kartvelian *dw- "to lie down", Eurasiatic *dV\W, Borean *TVHV (Afroasiatic, Sino-Caucasian, Amerind)

For "to lead", IE *wedh-, Uralic *wetä-

StarlingDB also has Altaic *judu "to lead, direct (Turkic *id- "to send", Mongolic *udu- "to lead, direct"), Kartvelian *wed- "to go", Eurasiatic *wetV "to lead", Borean *WVTV (AA, SC, Austric, Amerind)

However, "to wash" is not quite as clear, despite my searching.
 
lpetrich said:
Starting out by noting Anna Dybo & George Starostin's pro-Altaic rebuttal to Alexander Vovin's anti-Altaic arguments. "Dybo & Starostin’s civil tone and admirable restraint contrast starkly with Vovin’s vicious rhetoric and personal insults."
Click to expand...

As a layman I may not be qualified to express an opinion on Lumper vs Splitter debates. BUT I have noticed, almost universally, a HUGE difference in tone between the two camps. Very often the Splitters write as though they need their mouths washed out with soap!

One sees the same phenomenon -- or even worse -- in Shakespeare authorship debates.
 
Fredrik Kortlandt then mentions "There is additional evidence for Indo-Uralic in the relation between Proto-
Indo-European root structure and accentuation discoverd by Lubotsky (1988:169-170)." This is explained as originating from a more Uralic-like state.

FK then gets into pronouns again, and he has a hypothesis for the origin of Middle Korean 1sg na, 2sg ne -- origin from oblique *mVn- > *mn- > *n- and *tVn- > *tn- > *n-

Referring to Martine Robbeets,
In her magnum opus (2005), Robbeets eliminates the large majority of etymologies which have been proposed for Japanese words because they may be suspect for a variety of reasons, reducing a corpus of 2055 lexical entries to 359 core etymologies representing 4 pronouns, 170 verbs, 46 adjectives or quality nouns, 83 basic nouns and 56 non-basic nouns.
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This seems a bit large for the time depth of Altaic, but the number of verbs suggests ancestry rather than borrowing.

BTW, Japanese has numerous borrowings from Chinese -  Sino-Japanese vocabulary - and nearly all these words are borrowed as nouns, with verbs being formed as <noun> suru "to do <noun>" and adjectives as <noun>-na.
 
Along the way, I've found some grammatical curiosities, like  Symmetrical voice also called Austronesian alignment, the Philippine-type voice system or the Austronesian focus system. In Austronesian, it's found in the Formosan langs (Taiwan), and in the Malayo-Polynesian subfamily, in the Philippines, Borneo, Madagascar, and N Sulawesi, but it is absent in the others. It's reconstructed for Proto-Austronesian and Proto-Malayo-Polynesian. Outside of Austronesian, it is present in at least some Nilotic langs, in East Africa.

To introduce, let us consider grammatical voice. A transitive verb has in its clause an agent noun phrase, a patient or target noun phrase, and sometimes other kinds of noun phrases. They are marked out with word order and/or adpositions and/or noun cases. Adpositions (prepositions, postpositions) and noun cases are functionally equivalent, I must note.

In active voice, the verb's subject is the agent, while in passive voice, the verb's subject is the patient. Austronesian alignment expands on that, though the langs vary in which ones they have. For instance, Tagalog, in the Philippines, has agent or actor voice (active-voice subject), patient voice (direct object, passive-voice subject), benefactive voice (indirect object, like the receiver of a gift), instrumental voice (what one uses to do something), locative voice (where the action is taking place), and reason voice (why something happens)

These are implemented as prefixes, infixes, and an infix that comes after the first consonant in the root. Proto-Austronesian examples:

Actor Voice
K-um-aen Semay Cau
Eat rice (obj) man (subj)
The man is eating the rice

Patient Voice
Kaen-en nu Cau Semay
Eat man (erg) rice (subj)
The rice is being eaten by the man

Locative Voice
Kaen-an nu Cau Semay Rumaq
Eat man (erg) rice (obj) house (subj)
In the house, the rice is being eaten by the man

Instrument Voice
Si-kaen nu Cau Semay lima-ni-á
Eat man (erg) rice (obj) hand (gen) (3sg)
With his hand, the rice is being eaten by the man

Note, *lima means both "hand" and "five" (a hand has five fingers)


Another grammatical voice:  Causative - this increases the valency of the verb, to include the causer.

The usual English causative is (causer) make (causee) (bare verb) (object(s))

I'm reading this
You made me read this

But "cause" itself is sometimes used instead of "make", and English has a causative suffix -ify. It is from from Old French -ifier, in turn from Latin -ificâre from facere "to make, do". It is often used with adjectives, however, like "acidify X" - "make X acid".

Languages have a variety of ways of making causatives, and they change the causee from a subject to an object in a variety of ways.

Some causatives are suppletive, using different word roots. For instance, "to kill" is the causative of "to die", though in some langs, "to kill" is derived from "to die" using a causative formation.
 
I'll now turn to John Bengtson's collected papers at his site: John D Bengtson

Global Etymologies - Proto-World - I'd mentioned it earlier.

The "Greater Austric" Hypothesis

Starting around 1996, JB proposes "Greater Austric" -- Austric with isolates Nihali in central India and Ainu in Hokkaido, Japan. I think that it's difficult to resolve the positions of isolates without a better understanding of the macrofamilies that they are putative members of. I've seen both Nostratic and Dene-Caucasian for Sumerian, for instance.

Grammatical evidence? JB cites the first person singular pronoun, and I checked it with Wiktionary and  Proto-Hmong–Mien language which has some comparisons.

JB did only 1sg, so I filled out with 2sg, 1pl(in,ex), 2pl
Proto-Austronesian: 1sg *(i-)aku, 2s *(i-)(ka)Su, 1plin *(i-)(k)ita, 1plex *(i-)(k)ami, 2pl *(i-)kamu
Proto-Kra-Dai: 1sg *ku, 2sg *mu, 1plin *rau, 1plex *tu, 2pl*su
Proto-Austroasiatic: 1sg *kV *Vn *Vj, 2sg *mV, 1plin, 1plex, 2pl
Proto-Hmong-Mien/Miao-Yao: 1sg *ko *wang *ja, 2sg *kong *kam *mwei, 1pl *pV, 2pl *mu *nV
Nihali: 1sg jo, 2sg ne, 1pl ingi, 2pl la
Ainu 1sg ku, 2sg e, 1pl ci, 2pl eci

So one infers Austric 1sg *ku, 2sg *mu -- K-M Compare Eurasiatic M-T and Amerind N-M

JB then continued with a causative affix in AA and AN: *pa- *-ap-

AN: Bontok (Philippines) kán ‘to eat’ : pa-kán ‘to cause to eat = to feed’, téy ‘die’ : pa-téy ‘to cause to die = to kill’

Also an agent-noun affix AA *ma- *-am- and AN *mu- *-um-
 
Some Austric langs have mainly single-syllable words, making comparison difficult, but JB proposes that they have traces of now-gone second syllables:

Proto-HM/MY: *day "to die", *tay "to kill" < Proto-Austric stative *ma-t(r)ay "to die", causative *pa-t(r)ay "to kill".

Stative? That would more properly be "to be dead", because English "to die" is eventive, referring to an act of dying rather than the state of being dead.

JB then listed words for man, blood, head, root, fire, sky, to die/kill

Edward Sapir and the "Sino-Dene" Hypothesis - published back in 1925

A Multilateral Look at Greater Austric - originally in the journal Mother Tongue - has some more putative Greater Austric etymologies

JB proposes that Proto-Austric had, for its 1sg pronoun, nominative *aku, oblique *eN-. For 1pl, it's rather confusing: *tV, *bVn-, *l/rV. 2sg is *mi and 2pl is *pi -- rather difficult, and JB himself concedes "It is of course impossible, at this stage, to know what the precise Proto-Austric pronominal paradigms were, and whether the inclusive/exclusive dimension or nominative/objective opposition is original here."
 
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