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Language as a Clue to Prehistory

 
 
 
JB then asks "Is Ainu Eurasiatic?"

He proposes borrowings and possible inheritance of 4 words from an earlier ancestor: Borean. "The parallels between Ainu and Austric, on the other hand, are both more numerous and more phonologically straightforward and regular." Like the pronouns.

Austronesian influence and Transeurasian ancestry in Japanese in: Language Dynamics and Change Volume 7 Issue 2 (2017) by Martine Robbeets
I argue that the separation of the Japanic branch from the other Transeurasian languages and its spread to the Japanese Islands can be understood as occurring in connection with the dispersal of millet agriculture and its subsequent integration with rice agriculture. I further suggest that a prehistorical layer of borrowings related to rice agriculture entered Japanic from a sister language of proto-Austronesian, at a time when both language families were still situated in the Shandong-Liaodong interaction sphere.
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A sister language of proto-Austronesian? Seems like Austric. Since Ainu is at least part Austric, it seems like some rice-farming Austric speakers moved northward from Southeast Asia to Korea and Japan in the early to mid Holocene.
 
Ainu and Austric: Evidence of Genetic Relationship by John Bengtson and Vaclav Blazhek

The Ainu language is known from Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's four big islands, Sakhalin, a similar-sized but longer island to the north that the Japanese call Karafuto, and the Kuril Islands, small islands in between those two islands.

But there is evidence of Ainu placenames on Honshu, the biggest of the Japanese islands, and as far south as the Ryukyu Islands. That is consistent with Ainu speakers coming from the south and arriving before Japanese speakers.

Like the others on Austric, this article has some vocabulary comparisons. But to properly evaluate them will require getting a better picture of Core Austric: AN, KD, AA, HM/MY.

Austronesian seems well-reconstructed, as does  Proto-Hmong–Mien language with lists of reconstructed words, both in the article itself and linked to in Wiktionary.

 Proto-Kra–Dai language - "No full reconstruction of Proto-Kra–Dai has been published to date, although tentative reconstructions of many Proto-Kra–Dai roots have been attempted from time to time."

Do the articles on its subfamilies and their protolanguages contain lists of reconstructed words? Or else link to lists of such words?
So there may be enough to do a good reconstruction of Proto-Kra-Dai.

 Proto-Austroasiatic language is much like Proto-KD, it seems, without a good overall reconstruction

As with Proto-KD:
So one will have to work on some of AA's subfamilies as well as on AA itself.
 
John Bengtson also has some articles on Dene-Caucasian.

Materials for a Comparative Grammar of the Dene-Caucasian (Sino-Caucasian) Languages

As an example of fossilized noun classes in Basque, JB mentions a prefix be-/bi- which is common in words for body parts and body fluids and the like, words like hatz "finger" and behatz "toe". It is cognate with a North Caucasian noun-class marker *b- / *w- (III singular)

A second one is e-/i- associated with various materials, like liquids, and some lower-body parts, cognate with NC *y- (II singular, feminine)

A third one is o-/u- associated with some body parts and fluids, cognate with NC *w- (I singular, masculine)

Thus, Basque osaba "uncle" and izeba "aunt" would be a relic of that gendering.

A fourth one is a- associated with people, animals, plants, and body parts. It has no obvious NC cognate. After these prefixes is often -s-, also evident in Haida and some Sino-Tibetan langs. Those langs have plenty of other evidence of fossilized prefixes. Yeniseian also seems to have some fossilized prefixes: a-, ä-, i-, u- (ä = schwa)

NC Class IV singular r- / d- is cognate wtih some fossilized ST prefixed, but not with anything in Basque that is readily evident.
 
Basque sometimes has an extra -r which looks cognate with NC plural -rV, also some stem alternations which may be relics of NC oblique stems.

JB then gets into comparison of noun-case endings.

Basque, like North Caucasian and Burushaski, has a blank ending for the absolutive case, for a transitive-verb object and an intransitive-verb subject: "I boiled the water" and "The water boiled" - "the water" would be in this case. For a transitive-verb subject, one uses the ergative case. The Basque ending of that case is -k, much like the instrumental-case ending -k/-ak in Burushaski and -ka in some NC langs. Instrumental: with/using-case.

Basque dative -i, East Caucasian *-hi, the to-case, for receiving something.

Basque genitive -en, NC *-nV, the of-case. In some NC langs, this ending became shifted to different functions.

"Basque, Caucasian, and Burushaski also share the typological similarity of having compound case endings, constructed by the agglutination of more than one simple ending." -- but this is not much different from compound prepositions, like English "into and "out of".

In pronouns, JB reconstructs 1sg *nV *dzV *KV, 2sg *KwV *wVn, 3sg *w-(*m-), 3pl *Su -- often with suppletion, like English "I/me". Possessive prefixes are common.
 
Turning to verbs, many Dene-Caucasian langs have agglutinative grammar, with lots of prefixes and/or suffixes. West Caucasian, Yeniseian, and Na-Dene are mostly prefixing, Sino-Tibetan has a bit of prefixing, Basque and Burushaski are roughly half-half, and East Caucasian is mostly suffixing. But which affixes are cognate?

Basque, Burushaski, and Yeniseian share 1sg *ngV, 2sg *KwV

There are several markers of negation across the DC langs, which suggests that some ancestral one(s) were displaced by some other ones. Also, different ones may be used in different contexts, like plain negation vs. prohibitive ("I'm not going" vs. "Don't go").

Also "preverbs", separated parts of a verb, much like in English  Phrasal verb and in other West Germanic  Separable verb -- a common one is *d-

There is a common past-tense/past-participle marker *-n- and a transitive/causative one *-s- and maybe also *-r-.
 
John Bengtson also discusses Edward Vajda's Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis, one that has gotten some interest from mainstream historical linguists, unlike Dene-Caucasian more generally.

“Dene-Yeniseian” and “Dene-Caucasian” - a slideshow document with plenty of big text and colors and pictures.
Sydney Lamb on Taxonomy
  • ER = “Established Relationship” = universally accepted (e.g., Indo-European, Austronesian, Bantu, Algic, etc.)
  • PR = “Probable Relationship” = widely accepted as working models, but not as fully documented or developed as ER (e.g., Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, etc.)
  • PT = “Probable Truth” = accepted by a minority of historical linguists, doubted or rejected by “mainstream” (e.g., Nostratic/Eurasiatic, Dene-Caucasian, Khoisan, etc.)
Click to expand...
Source: Some Proposals for Linguistic Taxonomy on JSTOR but the examples are from JB.

“Dene-Yeniseian” and the Rest of Dene-Caucasian:
Part 3: The Burusho-Yeniseian (Karasuk) Hypothesis
Part 4: Burusho-Dene
Back to journal-paper format. JB repeats his presentation contents in it.
It is best to reserve judgement on the position of Yeniseian among the world's language families until more work has been done on Dene-Yeniseian lexical parallels and until a broader assessment of S. Starostin's (1982) “Sino-Caucasian” proposal can be made in light of the full body of evidence accumulated so far ... (Vajda 2009)
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John Bengtson: Basque and the Other Mediterranean Languages reprinted from Mother Tongue
Some of the resistance (perhaps indeed, most of the resistance) to accepting demonstrable relationships between Basque and other languages is the assumption by many that the Basque language as we know it is a lineal descendant of the language spoken by the original Upper Paleolithic (Aurignacian, etc.) settlers of Iberia and Aquitania some thirty millennia ago.
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That would make it very difficult to recognize relationships between Basque and any other language. But if Basque was brought to N Iberia by Neolithic farmers, then it is much closer in time to other possibilities.

Then a slideshow file: The Euskaro-Caucasian Hypothesis Current model (2017) - "A proposed genetic relationship between Basque (Vasconic) and the North Caucasian language family."

ohn D. Bengtson: Iarl and Iǫrmun-; Arya- and Aryaman-: A Study in Indo-European Comparative Mythology
Proposing a connection between Germanic Irmin-. Ermin- and Indic Aryaman "Aryanness", also PGmc *erlaz "man, nobleman", PGmc *arjaz "distinguished, esteemed", Proto-Celtic *aryos "freeman, nobleman", Hittite âra- "proper" - Ârya is an early self-designation of Indo-Iranian speakers, roughly meaning "noble", but its cognates have a more general meaning of "appreciated" or "noble".

Finally, The Proto-Sapiens Prohibitive/Negative Particle *ma - a widespread word for "not". It's phonologically rather simple, giving a strong risk of coincidence.
 
This popped up in my YouTube feed, about Norse influence in modern English, mostly standard English but does mention dialectal forms and placenames in former Danelaw regions.
 
Swammerdami said:
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!
Click to expand...
:o

In fairness, the splitters may be annoyed at all the long-range crackpottery that they have very likely encountered, like Joseph Yahuda's book "Hebrew is Greek", online at Hebrew is Greek : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive. It has lots of farfetched phonetic and semantic comparisons, and no effort to find systematic sound correspondences. I looked for references to the Swadesh list of highly-stable meanings, without any success, and also for comparisons of numerals, also without any success. I also note that he hardly ever addresses the Indo-European affiliation of Greek and the Semitic affiliation of Hebrew.

By comparison, the works of Nostraticists are much better, even if those works should be regarded as cutting-edge research rather than well-established results. There are three reconstructions of Nostratic/Eurasiatic: Muscovite (Illich-Svitych-Dolgopolsky), Bomhardian, and Greenbergian, with some significant discrepancies between them. That's not much worse than for Afrasian (Afro-Asiatic), which has two very different ones: Muscovite (Orel-Stolbova) and Ehretian. Furthermore, Nostraticists use Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Semitic a lot in their work.

Nostraticists have also revised their opinions about relationships over time. The earlier works have Afrasian alongside Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, etc., but more recent works have AA alongside Eurasiatic or Narrow Nostratic: IE, U, A, etc.
 
I've collected a lot of lists of conserved words, and I've counted up what they tend to share. I've automated this operation, though I've had to normalize the word forms before doing so, something I've had to do by hand.

Each word in these lists is present in at least one of them, and I counted up how many lists each word is in. For each count, I then counted up how many words are for that count:

1:35, 2:54, 3:42, 4:36, 5:15, 6:14, 7:9, 8:17, 9:27, 10:17, 11:10, 12:10, 13:6, 14:2

This has a bimodal distribution, with a peak at 2, a trough at 7, and another peak at 9. The 2 words present in 14 lists are "name" and "water", the 6 words in 13 lists are "two", "blood", "eye", "louse", "tongue", "tooth", the 10 words in 12 lists are "one", "I", "you (sg.)", "bone", "ear", "fire", "hand", "horn", "Sun", "to die", and the 10 words in 11 lists are "dog", "fish", "full", "new", "nose", "not", "salt", "stone", "to give", "who?"

Many of the lists are derived from the Swadesh list, something put together rather subjectively. But it overlaps with two lists derived by more objective means, the Dolgopolsky list and the Leipzig-Jakarta list. Looking at counts of members of those two lists, they have a bimodal distribution, one mode of words shared by most other lists, and the other mode of words shared with not nearly as many lists.

I included these related lists because I wanted to estimate stability by counting up how many lists a word is present in, because the compilers of short lists are likely to want to include only highly stable word forms.

For word counts and the Dolgopolsky lists I found flatness, because of two few words. However, the Swadesh list and the Leipzig-Jakarta list both had declines with increasing ranking, as expected.
 
Looking at semantics, some categories have words that show up on many lists, some only a few.

In function words, pronouns are very common, and prepositions and conjunctions are rare.

Here are the numbers: 1sg 12, 2sg 12, who? 11, this 10, what? 10, that 7, 1pl 6, 3sg 4, 2pl 3, how? 3, where? 3, 3pl 2, when? 2, which?
  • Who? animate noun
  • What? inanimate noun
  • How? manner
  • Where? place
  • When? time
  • Which? selection

English has two demonstratives: this (near), that (far)
Some languages have more, like Spanish: este (near speaker), ese (near listener), aquel (far from both)

Pre/postpositions are rare in these lists, but I'm not sure if noun-case endings were counted among them.

Conjunctions are in only one list, and are "and", "if", "because".

"And" is a coordinating conjunction, and in English, one can use it for *anything*.
  • Nouns: bread and butter
  • Adjectives: black and white TV (strictly speaking, a grayscale one, but that's what they called it)
  • Adverbs: I stepped slowly and carefully.
  • Verbs: I opened and closed the door.
  • Prepositions: I went into and out of the house.
  • Clauses: The dog is barking and the cat is meowing. I went into the house and I found the cat.
Some languages use different words for different uses.

The word can be a separate one, a prefix (Arabic wa-, Hebrew we-), or a suffix (Latin -que).

"If" and "because" are subordinating conjunctions, with one clause having a dependent relation on the other.
If the cat sees you, it will run away.
The cat ran away because it saw you.
 
Some of the difference is likely due to different methods of construction. Aharon Dolgopolsky worked from well-documented families like Indo-European, and his initial list included the words for numbers 1 to 10, 20, and 100, though he kept only the word for 2 in his final list.

Omission is harder to discover than commission, so it's rather surprising to me that kinship terms are in only one of the lists that I collected: Wiktionary's Swadesh-207 list, with "father", "mother", "husband", and "wife", though without "brother", "sister", "son", or "daughter". Why are they so seldom used? Words for elders are often baby-talk sorts of words, though even those are often fairly stable over the better-established families.

Wiktionary:About Proto-Indo-European - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
 Indo-European vocabulary
Linguistics 051: Proto-Indo-European Language and Society: Kinship Terminology

Father is *ph2tér- with informal variants *atta *tata

Well-conserved ones from elsewhere:
Proto-Uralic *ićä, Proto-Yukaghir *eče
Proto-Turkic *ata
Proto-Tungusic *amin
Proto-Dravidian *appa *tantay
Proto-Kartvelian *mam-
Proto-Nakh *data
Proto-Abkhaz-Abaza *abá
Proto-Semitic *ʔabw-
Proto-Austronesian *amax

Mother is *máh2ter- with informal variants *nan(n)a *am(m)a *ma(m)ma

Proto-Uralic *emä
Proto-Turkic *ana
Proto-Tungusic *eńe
Proto-Dravidian *taḷḷay *mama
Proto-Kartvelian *ded-
Proto-Nakh *naana
Proto-Abkhaza-Abaza *anǝ́
Proto-Semitic *ʔimm-
Proto-Austronesian *ina

Parent is *genh1-tor- *genh2-trih2- literally "begetter" and it survived in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, and from Latin genitor in some Romance langs. It is much more variable, with replacements also meaning "begetter" (Latin parens, Russian roditel') or else "elder" (Dutch ouder, German Elternteil).
 
Brother *bhréh2ter- (became "fellow community member" in Greek, original meaning: adelphos more-or-less "womb mate")

Proto-Tungusic *akin
Proto-Dravidian *aṇṇa (elder) (couldn't find younger one)
Proto-Kartvelian *ʒ₁am-
Proto-Nakh *wašo
Proto-Semitic *ʔaḫw-

Sister *swésor- (replaced in Greek by adelphê)

Proto-Tungusic *eKe
Proto-Dravidian *akka (elder), *tamkay (younger)
Proto-Kartvelian *da-
Proto-Nakh *yašo
Proto-Semitic *ʔaḫwat-

General terms for sibling are very variable, and Latin germânus germâna "sibling" gave rise to the usual Spanish and Portuguese words for brother and sister. A sibling of each sex is also evident in Proto-Nakh (m w-, f y-) and Proto-Semitic (f -at)

Son *suHnús *suHyús (replaced in Latin by filius)

Proto-Dravidian *makanṯu
Proto-Semitic *bin-

Daughter *dhugh2ter- (replaced in Latin by filia)

Proto-Dravidian *makaḷ
Proto-Semitic *bint-

Sometimes one can reconstruct a generic word for child (descendant) but not one of each gender. Like for instance Proto-Austronesian *aNak, Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *anak Thus, "son" is "male child" and "daughter" is "female child", a common pattern (Dravidian, Semitic, etc.).

So Indo-European is rather unusual.
 
After all this, I'll stick with Indo-European.

Turning to the second degree of separation, immediate relatives of immediate relatives, I first consider descendants.

Grendson, nephew: *nepot-
Granddaughter, niece: *neptih2

Possibly from *ne- "not and *pótis "master, lord, husband"

Some langs have separate words for fraternal and sororal nephews and nieces, children of one's brother or sister.

North Germanic langs have a lot of compounds for more distant relatives, like Swedish systerdotter "sister daughter" for sororal niece.

Polish has (nephew) (fraternal) bratanek, (sororal) siostrzeniec, (niece) (fraternal) bratanica, (sororal) siostrzenica - it has derivational suffixes and masculine and feminine forms.

Turning to grandchildren, French has petit-fils and petite-fille, "little son" and "little daughter".

A lot less stable than the immediate relatives.
 
There are lots of reconstructible terms for father's and husband's relatives, but not so much for mother's or wife's ones.

FaFa *h2euh2os
FaBr, Fa(male) *ph2trôus, *ph2trwyos (< *ph2ter- "father")
FaSi ?
BrWi *snusós
HuFa *swékuros
HuMo *swekrúh2s (fem. of HuFa)
HuBr *daih2wér-
HuBrWi *h1ienh2ter-
HuSi *glh3wos
MoFa ? FaFa
MoMo ? h2euh2ih2 (fem. of FaFa)
MoBr ? FaFa
MoSi *mah2truh2s (< *mah2ter- "mother")
WiFa = HuFa
WiBr *swekurós (like HuFa, but with accent moved)
SiHu *gemHros "marrier"
DaHu *gomHter- "marrier"
 
To marry (a woman) *h2wed(h2)-, *gemH-
Marrier > son-ln-law *gemHoter-, *gemHrós

The basic words for husband and wife were those for man (male) and woman: *h2ner-, *gwenh2-

Household *dôm
Master of the house *potis, *démspotis
Mistress of the house *potnih2

Clan *woik-
Clan leader *wikpotis "lord of the clan"

Widow *widheweh2
Orphan *h3orbhos
Concubine ? *parikeh2
Twin *yemos -- important in PIE mythology

Note: PIE feminines were usually formed using these suffixes
-eh2 > -â
-ih2 > -î
-uh2 > -û
 
Linguistics 051: Proto-Indo-European Language and Society: Kinship Terminology
‘Omaha’ system of kinship terminology equates certain roles which are held distinct in English — often equated with patrilineal/patrilocal society:

father = paternal uncle [indicated for PIE] (older male relative)
mother = maternal aunt
brother/sister = children of paternal uncle or maternal aunt
maternal grandfather = maternal uncle [probably not PIE]
children of maternal grandfather = children of maternal uncle
Click to expand...
Author Rolf Noyer is not sure whether PIE society had Omaha kinship or whether its Italic, Celtic, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic descendants separately developed it.

It's impressive that one can get a look at a long-ago society in this way, by looking at what kinship terms have survived.

In looking across langs, I've come across some families where the words for son and daughter are <gender> child, and brother and sister are <gender> sibling. Here is an example where father and mother are <gender> parent:
  • Maori matua tâne, Hawaiian makua kâne "father" lit. "man parent"
  • Maori matua wahine, Hawaiian makuahine "mother" lit. "woman parent"
and
  • PPN *matuqa "parent" < PCP *matuqa < POC *matuqa "old (person)" < PMP *(ma-)tuqah (ACD **ma-tuqah) < PAN *(ma-)tuqaS (ACD **ma-tuqaS)
  • PPN *fafine "woman" < PCP *vavine < POC *papine "woman, female" < PMP *babinahi (ACD *ba-b<in>ahi) < PAN *bahi "female, woman"
  • PPN *taqane "male" < PCP *tangwaqane < POC *qatamwaqane < *qatamaRuqane < PMP *qaRta "outsider" + *maRuqanay "male" (ACD: POC *maRuqane "male" < PMP *ma-Ruqanay < PAN *RuqaNay)
Proto-: Polynesian, Central Pacific, Oceanic, Malayo-Polynesian, Austronesian

Wiktionary
ACD - Austronesian Comparative Dictionary - Introduction
Pollex Online - Polynesian Lexicon Project Online
 
Omaha kinship? It is one of George Peter Murdock's six main types of kinship terminology.

 Hawaiian kinship - the simplest kind, distinguishing only gender and generation:
  • Parent brother = father, parent sister = mother
  • Male cousin = brother, female cousin = sister
The Hawaiian system is named for the pre-contact kinship system of Native Hawaiian people in the Hawaiian Islands. Today, the Hawaiian system is most common among Malayo-Polynesian-speaking cultures; the Hawaiian language itself is Malayo-Polynesian.

This system is usually associated with ambilineal descent groups, where economic production and child-rearing are shared between the genders. The Hawaiian system is found in approximately one-third of the world's societies, although usually small societies.
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 Eskimo kinship - the familiar kind: parent brother = uncle, parent sister = aunt, their children = cousins
The Eskimo system is relatively common among the world's kinship systems, at about 10% of the world's societies. It is now common in most Western societies (such as those of Europe or the Americas). In addition, it is found among a small number of food-foraging peoples such as the !Kung tribe of Africa and the Eskimos (Inuit-Yupik) for whom it is named.

The system is widely used in non-unilineal societies, where the dominant relatives are the immediate family. In most Western societies, the nuclear family represents an independent social and economic group, which has caused the emphasis on the immediate kinship. The tendency of families in Western societies to live apart also reinforces this.
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 Iroquois kinship
  • Father brother = father, children = siblings
  • Mother sister = mother, children = siblings
  • Father sister = aunt, children = cousins
  • Mother brother = uncle, children = cousins
"It is commonly found in unilineal descent groups." (one-parent-line descent)

Cousins by same-sex relative of a parent are sometimes called parallel cousins and by opposite-sex relative cross-cousins. The Iroquois system makes parallel cousins into extra siblings, and distinguishes only cross-cousins as cousins.

 Omaha kinship - like Iroquois, but with uncle's children promoted to uncle and mother, and aunt's children demoted to one's children.
Associated with patrilineal descent, male-line descent.

 Crow kinship - like Iroquois, but with aunt's children promoted to father and aunt, and uncle's children demoted to one's children.
Associated with matrilineal descent, female-line descent.

The Omaha and Crow systems are mirror images of each other.

 Sudanese kinship - the monster raving loony system: all one's parents' siblings and their children distinguished from one's parents and one's siblings.
 
Austronesian sibling terms and culture history - PL-C127.31.pdf by Robert Blust

Some Austronesian langs have a remarkable oddity in their sibling terminology. We are all familiar with a gender distinction, and some langs distinguish between older and younger ones. But those langs also distinguish between a man's siblings and a woman's siblings.

Noting Patterns of Sibling Terminology on JSTOR with these possibilities:
  • A Kordofanian: sibling (no distinctions)
  • B Yoruba: older, younger sibling
  • C Algonquian: older brother, older sister, younger sibling
  • D Dravidian: older brother, older sister, younger brother, younger sister
  • E European: brother, sister
  • F Melanesian:
    • same-sex, opposite-sex sibling
    • same-sex sibling, man's sister, woman's brother
    • opposite-sex sibling, man's brother, woman's sister
    • man's brother, man's sister, woman's brother, woman's sister
  • G Siouan: monster raving loony: all three distinctions, without clear patterns
Murdock's conclusions:
(1) ambilineal descent appears especially conducive to the emergence of sibling terms of Type F; (2) bilateral descent appears relatively conducive to Types B, D and G, and reveals a negative association with Types A and F; (3) matrilineal and double descent appear especially conducive to Type F; (4) patrilineal descent appears particularly conducive to Type E; and (5) except for differences in Types E and F, matrilineal and patrilineal societies show an almost identical profile, contrasting at almost every point with the profile of bilateral societies. For the second determinant he examines the correlation of type of sibling terminology with type of cousin terminology, and concludes (p. 14) that "the types of the two subsets vary almost completely independently".
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RB noted these reconstructions of words for siblings in Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *betaw "man's sister", *ñaRa "woman's brother", *kaka "elder same-sex sibling", *huaji "younger same-sex sibling"

Of these, the two that go back to Proto-Austronesian are *kaka "elder sibling", *Suaji "younger sibling".

The successes of the comparative method of linguistics have so often been celebrated that its shortcomings are sometimes overlooked by those who rely on secondhand knowledge. One point that should be emphasised is that the reconstruction of a 5,000 or 6,000 year-old protolanguage is not a high resolution affair. Some social anthropologists rather naively expect the comparative linguist who is involved in reconstruction to be able to distinguish between theoretical models of social organisation that are of interest to kinship specialists working with attested societies. This type of expectation can be compared to a demand that astronomers using earth-based telescopes distinguish features a few metres in size on the surface of Mars. No protolanguage of any great time-depth, not even Proto Indo-European, has been reconstructed in such fine detail that we can, for example, translate a passage of more than a few words from a modern language into it (despite some overly-ambitious nineteenth-century attempts to do so).
Click to expand...
A big difficulty is that the vocabulary that survives the best is often the most basic and least culturally distinctive. That can make it hard to find culturally-interesting features. But one does sometimes get some, especially if one gets a lot of other vocabulary.

"It is a remarkable fact that the comparative method allows us to penetrate confidently to a time-depth of perhaps six millenia, and any general feature of social organisation that can be inferred from such reconstructed language material is a gift that we are not likely to receive in any other way."

Like Proto-Indo-European speakers worshipping deities named Father Sky and Dawn.
 
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