Language as a Clue to Prehistory

[lpetrich]

Abstract Profiles of Structural Stability Point to Universal Tendencies, Family-Specific Factors, and Ancient Connections between Languages | PLOS ONE

Uses the World Atlas of Language Structures - WALS Online - Home - to try to find out what language structures are the most and least stable by finding out how much they are conserved in language families.

WALS is very comprehensive, though limited to present-day languages, and it needs to be expanded to past ones and to reconstructed protolanguages.

A curious complication that they note: Languages Evolve in Punctuational Bursts | Science

Linguists speculate that human languages often evolve in rapid or punctuational bursts, sometimes associated with their emergence from other languages, but this phenomenon has never been demonstrated. We used vocabulary data from three of the world's major language groups—Bantu, Indo-European, and Austronesian—to show that 10 to 33% of the overall vocabulary differences among these languages arose from rapid bursts of change associated with language-splitting events. Our findings identify a general tendency for increased rates of linguistic evolution in fledgling languages, perhaps arising from a linguistic founder effect or a desire to establish a distinct social identity.

Back to the first-mentioned paper.

We found that across all language families and datasets, the correlation between path length and number of nodes is very high (range 0.65–0.80, mean = 0.75, sd = 0.046), suggesting that punctuational bursts might explain about 50% of structural change.

 

[lpetrich]

The most stable features (most stable first):

Absence of Common Consonants -- Front Rounded Vowels -- The Optative -- Vowel Nasalization -- Obligatory Possessive Inflection -- Order of Genitive and Noun -- N-M Pronouns -- Nominal and Locational Predication -- Uvular Consonants -- M-T Pronouns -- Order of Object and Verb -- Order of Numeral and Noun -- Numeral Classifiers -- Order of Subject and Verb -- Tone

The least stable features (least stable last):

Locus of Marking in the Clause -- Voicing in Plosives and Fricatives -- Symmetric and Asymmetric Standard Negation -- Applicative Constructions -- Relationship between the Order of Object and Verb and the Order of Adjective and Noun -- Order of Person Markers on the Verb -- Indefinite Articles -- Asymmetrical Case-Marking -- Definite Articles -- Third Person Pronouns and Demonstratives -- Position of Polar Question Particles -- Number of Cases -- Ordinal Numerals -- Consonant-Vowel Ratio -- Consonant Inventories

The most stable feature: Absence of Common Consonants - absence of bilabials and/or fricatives and/or nasals. For all three to be absent, there must be no /p/ or /b/ or /f/ or /v/ or /m/.

The least stable feature: Consonant Inventories - how many consonants treated as distinct and not variations of the same consonant

 

[lpetrich]

For each language family, the authors worked out its "stability profile", the relative stability of each feature in the family. I find it curious that the authors used variations instead of average values, because average values are also important information. Northern Eurasian families often have m-t personal pronouns and western North American ones often have n-m ones, but by doing so, both would rank high in stability.

Different families have different stability profiles, and they compared the profiles of different families and they found some odd patterns. These profiles vary by geography, with regional clusters of similar profiles.

They found that the Americas are one cluster, with well-defined subclusters in North America and South America, though not in Central America. Siberia clustered with North America; Siberia: Tungusic, Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan.

Core Eurasia is a well-defined cluster: Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic (Turkic, Mongolic), North Caucasian (NE, NW), as is Eurasia more generally: Core Eurasia + Siberia.

For Nostratic:
v1 (narrow) - IE, Uralic, Altaic - significant
v2 (broad) - IE, Uralic, Dravidian, Afroasiatic - not significant
So there is at least some support for Narrow Nostratic or Eurasiatic, even if not for Broad Nostratic.

Austro-Tai is somewhat significant, as are the Papua New Guinea families taken together, but neither is very close to Australian.

Likewise, African outside of Khoisan is somewhat significant, but adding Khoisan is not.

 

[lpetrich]

1st Americans came over in 4 different waves from Siberia, linguist argues | Live Science - "The languages of the earliest Americans evolved in 4 waves, according to one expert."
noting
Founder effects identify languages of the earliest Americans - Nichols - American Journal of Biological Anthropology - Wiley Online Library by Johanna Nichols

Nichols surveyed 16 features of these languages, including syllable structure, the gender of nouns and the way consonants are produced when speaking.

That latter one is the point of articulation, the place where the consonant sound is produced. She also included labialization (+w) and palatalization (+y). Point of articulation is fairly stable, while voicing is not as stable.

The languages split into two main groups: an early one where the first-person pronoun has an "n" sound while the second-person pronoun has an "m" sound, and a later group with languages that incorporate a sentence's worth of information in just one word.

That latter one is polysynthesis. By English standards, it is packing pronouns, auxiliary verbs, and common adverbs into a verb.

Further linguistic analysis indicated that people arrived in the Americas in four distinct waves. The first occurred around 24,000 years ago, when massive glaciers covered much of North America. Nichols found no unique language features, suggesting a diverse set of people and languages entered North America at that time. A second wave of people around 15,000 years ago brought languages with n-m pronouns, while a third wave 1,000 years later brought languages with simple consonants. A fourth wave around 12,000 years ago then brought complex consonants.

 

[lpetrich]

From Johanna Nichols's paper:

No features likely to be unique to the first opening have been found; it appears to be a well-mixed, diverse set of languages.

Or else that first arrival is long enough ago to allow for plenty of divergence in language features.

The second opening is marked by n-m pronouns and the Penutian languages (nearly all of which have n-m pronouns). n-m pronouns are found densely in different families (Penutian and other) of Oregon-California, but only once north of the Columbia in the small Tsimshianic family.

She then notes that personal pronouns and their paradigms are very resistant to borrowing. That is some of the main evidence for the Afroasiatic language family, for instance.

The third opening is distinguished by later-stratum features and simple consonant systems; the fourth opening is similar but is saliently marked by complex consonant systems and numeral classifiers.

... Languages of the fourth opening fit typologically with some of the Paleosiberian languages of eastern Siberia and the whole set defines a North Pacific Rim linguistic population.

... The AET languages from a later entry to some extent fit typologically with the descendants of the fourth opening, and both AET and Eskimo-Aleut have North Pacific Rim affinities.

AET = Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit (Na-Dene)

How stable are these features? Are any of the structural features at least as stable as personal pronouns?

 

[lpetrich]

At the boundaries of syntactic prehistory | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

The paper has a family tree of its results on comparisons of syntactic features. Its lengths are not proportional (bleah). It also does not use earlier languages like Old English, Old Church Slavonic, Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. These languages have large enough literatures to enable one to infer many of these syntactic features, I'm sure. That's a problem with other databases of grammatical and structural features, I must note.

It gets this family tree for Indo-European, which is rather screwy:
(Celtic, (Indo-Iranian, (Italic, (Greek, (Slavic, Germanic)))))
when one would expect (Italic, Celtic) -- Italo-Celtic usually emerges when one tries to do subgrouping of the IE families.

Beyond well-established families, it gets totally screwy results.

IE+: (Semitic, ((Dravidian, NE Caucasian), IE))
Alt+: (Austronesian, (Yukaghir, (Uralic, Altaic)))
((Wolof, Chinese), ((Basque, Japanese), (Alt+, IE+)))

Of these, only Altaic and Ural-Altaic have any match with any proposed macrofamilies.

 

[lpetrich]

Found another interesting Vasco-Caucasian/Euskaro-Caucasian paper.

Northern Basque: The Hittite of Sino-Caucasian | John D Bengtson - Academia.edu

That's because northern dialects have h sounds that other dialects lost, h sounds that correspond to similar sounds in North Caucasian languages.

Starting with Ferdinand de Saussure proposing in 1879 that Proto-Indo-European had some extra consonants that would make vowels long and change their quality: “coefficients sonantiques” ("sonorant coefficients"):
e + A -> â, e + O -> ô
This would explain short-vowel-long-vowel alternations that correspond to (absent)-e alternations (ablaut) with different consonants, and it also preserves the canonical PIE root shape: CVC where the V is an ablauting vowel and the C's are consonants.

A year later, Hermann Møller proposed an additional one: E: e + E -> ê, and he proposed that these consonants were “probably gutturals of the Semitic type,” E ~ aleph (glottal stop), A ~ cheth (strong h), O ~ ayin (voiced strong h). Exactly what their phonetic value was is still unclear, but it's nowadays often thought that A was the kh velar or uvular fricative (back or lower back of tongue almost but not quite making /k/), and O is a version of A with w. They are also more usually written
E = h1, A = h2, O = h3

These sounds were all hypothetical until Hittite was discovered, and discovered to have h sounds where some laryngeals would be.

For example, Hittite pahhur "fire" ~ Greek pûr, English fire, German Feuer, ... < *peh2wr
Though there was a second root with that meaning: Latin ignis, Russian ogon', Sanskrit agni, ... < *h1ngwnis

Also Hittite hant- "front" ~ Sanskrit anti, Greek anti, Latin ante, English end < *h2enti
I'm not going to try to trace the semantics for this one.

 

[lpetrich]

John Bengtson then goes on to show ehre h corresponds to North Caucasian laryngeals (voice-box sounds) and pharyngeals (throat sounds).

12. Conclusions
The authors of NCED, Nikolaev & Starostin, formulated their reconstructions of PNC and PEC without taking in account any data from Basque, or from any other languages external to North Caucasian.

NCED = North Caucasian Etymological Dictionary

This type of unexpected
corroboration of PNC/PEC reconstructions in Northern Basque is analogous to the unexpected corroboration of Saussure’s coefficients decades later in the Hittite inscriptions.

Disappointing that only John Bengtson seems to be working on this, and maybe also Corinna Leschber.

JB's big book: Basque and Its Closest Relatives: A New Paradigm (annotated December 2017) | John D Bengtson - Academia.edu

Much shorter from him: The Basque Language: History and Origin. | John D Bengtson - Academia.edu and Euskaro- Caucasian Hypothesis: Current model (2017): | John D Bengtson - Academia.edu

George Starostin has Basque / North Caucasian lexical matches on the 50-item wordlist using JB's work.

. Principles of comparison between NC and Basque:
(a) «relaxed» model of phonetic correspondences /in general accordance with Bengtson 2008/;
(b) assumption of fossilized prefixes in Basque nominal stems (b/e/=, i=, etc.);
(c) comparison only between reliably archaic forms (Common Basque + Proto-North or Proto-Northeast Caucasian).

3. Results:
— 8 direct semantic matches between Common Basque and Proto-NC
— 4 etymological (non-lexicostatistical) matches with allegedly trivial semantic shifts
— general correlation with J. Bengtson's model of phonetic correspondences
— NC: optimal match among all language families of Eurasia as Basque's closest relative
— should definitely be used as a point of reference for future research on Basque (and NC) prehistory

 

[lpetrich]

I find this result especially interesting because one can find a homeland for Vasco-Caucasian:  Neolithic Europe - early Neolithic farmers who lived some 10,000 years ago in Anatolia. Some of them went northeast to the Caucasus Mountains and others went west to the Pyrenees Mountains.

These people also have spread over most of Europe, all the way to S Scandinavia and Poland and W Ukraine.

That Wiki article has some stuff about what can be inferred of pre-Indo-European languages in much of Europe

The prefix *a- and the suffix *-it- are the most apparent linguistic markers by which a small group of "Agricultural" substrate words - i.e. *arwīt ("pea") or *gait ("goat") - can be isolated from the rest of the Proto-Germanic lexicon. ccording to Aljoša Šorgo, there are at least 36 Proto-Germanic lexical items very likely originating from the "agricultural" substrate language (or a group of closely related languages).

Non-Indo-European root nouns in Germanic: evidence in support of the Agricultural Substrate Hypothesis - sust266_kroonen.pdf

It is proposed by Šorgo that the Agricultural substrate was characterized by a four-vowel system of */æ/ */ɑ/ */i/ */u/, the presence of pre-nasalized stops, the absence of a semi-vowel */j/, a mobile stress accent, and reduction of unstressed vowels.

Šorgo (427-472) - Šorgo, Aljoša - 2020 - Characteristics of Lexemes of a Substratum Origin in Proto-Germanic.pdf

*-it- ~ Pre-Greek *-nth-
like
Proto-Germanic arwît- "pea" ~ Greek erebinthos "chickpea"

Also,  Paleo-European languages noting Basque as the only present-day survivor.

(PDF) Some lexical comparisons of Basque with Andian languages - John Bengtson again

BASQUE AND HURRIAN | iurii mosenkis - Academia.edu - with Hurrian likely related to North Caucasian, Vasco-Caucasian likely also includes Hurrian.

 

[lpetrich]

Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine - I searched for creator:"Allan R. Bomhard"

Search: creator:"Allan R. Bomhard" - with lots of macro-linguistic downloads that I've commented on in this thread.

Bomhard - A Critical Review of Illič Svityč's Nostratic Dictionary (2021) : Allan R. Bomhard : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - He finds only some of VIS's etymologies supportable.

Let me begin by stating unequivocally that I have the highest admiration for what Moscovite scholarship (especially the work of V. M. Illič-Svityč and A. B. Dolgopolsky — some of the work done by other Russian scholars is not on the same level) on Nostratic has achieved. Their research has opened up new and exciting possibilities and given Nostratic studies new respectability. However, this does not mean that I agree with everything they say. I regard their work as a pioneering effort and, as such, subject to modification in light of advances in linguistic theory, in light of new data from the Nostratic daughter languages, and in light of findings from typological studies that give us a better understanding of the kind of patterning that is found in natural languages as well as a better understanding of what is characteristic of language in general, including language change.

Like the voicings of the stop consonants. VIS reconstructed T, T' (glottalic, ejective), D, mainly on some Kartvelian and Afrasian (Afroasiatic) evidence, which he proposed to correspond to PIE T ~ T', D ~ T, Dh ~ D. But then came Tamaz Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav Ivanov with their glottalic theory of PIE: T ~ T(h), D ~ T', Dh ~ D(h), and AB thinks that that is a better fit for Nostratic.

Illič-Svityč and Dolgopolsky posit glottalics for Proto-Nostratic based upon a small number of seemingly solid examples in which glottalics in Proto-Afrasian and/or Proto-Kartvelian appear to correspond to traditional plain voiceless stops in Proto- Indo-European. Based upon these examples, they assume that, whenever there is a voiceless stop in the Proto-Indo-European examples they cite, a glottalic is to be reconstructed for Proto-Nostratic, even when there are no glottalics in the corresponding Kartvelian and Afrasian forms!

Then the question of Afrasian and Kartvelian T" ~ trad PIE T

Do these criticisms completely invalidate the cognate sets proposed by Illič-Svityč and Dolgopolsky in which glottalics in Kartvelian and Afrasian appear to correspond to plain voiceless stops in Indo-European? Well, no, not exactly — it is not quite that simple. In some cases, the etymologies are correct, but the Proto-Nostratic reconstructions are wrong.

...
Once the questionable examples are removed, there is an extremely small number (no more than a handful) left over that appear to support their position. However, compared to the massive counter-evidence in which glottalized stops in Kartvelian and Afrasian correspond to similar sounds (the traditional plain voiced stops) in Proto-Indo-European, even these residual examples become suspect (they may be borrowings or simply false cognates). Finally, there are even some examples where Dolgopolsky’s and Illič-Svityč’s comparison of glottalized stops in Proto-Kartvelian and Proto-Afrasian with plain voiceless stops in Proto-Indo-European is correct. This occurs in the cases where two glottalics originally appeared in a Proto- Nostratic root: *C’VC’-. Such roots are preserved without change in Proto-Kartvelian and Proto-Afrasian, while in Proto-Indo-European, they have been subject to a rule of regressive deglottalization: *C’VC’- > *CVC’-.

So he is confident that that discrepancy is not a real problem.

VIS, AD: PIE T ~ Nostr T', PIE D ~ Nostr T, PIE Dh ~ Nostr D
AB: PIE T ~ T(h) ~ Nostr T, PIE D ~ T' ~ Nostr T', PIE Dh ~ D(h) ~ Nostr D

 

[lpetrich]

AB notes that Alexis Manaster Ramer arrived at similar conclusions on typological grounds, by counting how times various consonants appear.

AD also points out that VIS reconstructed Nostratic vowels as the same as in Modern Finnish, a very improbable sort of survival.

Then this issue.

Now, there is another rather troublesome problem that must be addressed. To this day, more than half a century after it first appeared, the work on Nostratic by Illič- Svityč and, to a lesser extent, Dolgopolsky are seen as a source of national pride in Russia, so much so that some non-Russian scholars have compared the adulation that their work has received to a “cult”. Any attempt to criticize or even modify/correct the work of Illič-Svityč is, more often than not, met with ill- tempered, gratuitous, and irrational outbursts by some Russian scholars — “defend at any cost”. Needless to say, this attitude tends to stifle progress in the study of distant-linguistic relationships among the languages/language families involved. At the same time, the defects in the work of Illič-Svityč (and Dolgopolsky) have been recognized by non-Russian (and even some Russian) scholars from the very beginning and have been repeated over and over again in the relevant literature almost ad nauseum. Russian scholars have every right to be proud of the unquestionably impressive accomplishments of Illič-Svityč, but, surely, the time is long past for a level of objectivity, civility, and honesty that will lead to genuine advancements in the field.

 

[lpetrich]

Hegedüs & Sidwell (eds.) - Nostratic Centennial Conference - The Pécs Papers (2004) : Allan R. Bomhard : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive That's Pécs, Hungary ("pehtch").

1903 was the year of the first appearance of the term Nostratic in the oft-quoted article by Holger Pedersen. It was not the first time that the distant genetic relations of Old-World language families had been discussed, but the coining of a name along with Pedersen’s forceful arguments for, at least, a solid connection between Indo-European and Uralic, clearly marked the birth of Nostratic in a programmatic sense.

Starts off with Václav Blazhek proposing some correspondences between some Indo-European and Afroasiatic prepositions, mostly Semitic ones. Then Allan Bomhard on Nostratic morphology, like noun-case suffixes.

Then Paul S. Cohen on "Relationships between Initial Velar Stops and Laryngeals in PIE"

The laryngeals are sounds inferred from ablaut alternations (short vowel) ~ (long vowel) in parallel with (no vowel) ~ e,o, sounds that make root CVC and not just CV or VC. They were found in Hittite, making their inference a success in historical linguistics. A similar success is the inference of labiovelars (kw,) in Mycenaean Greek, in the form of Linear B characters that correspond to them and not to what they later became (k, p, t).

In Hittite, they were velar fricatives, h-like and almost k, like German ch, Spanish j, ...

*kh2e- ~ *h2e- (*h2e > *a)
*kh2e/o- ~ *h2o- (*h2o >*o)
*kw- ~ *(h)w- ~ w(h2)-
*ku- ~ *(h)u-
*gw- ~ *h3(w)-

This alternation would originate from *K being softened to *H -- any possible cognates outside of IE?

Latin costa "rib" ~ Greek osteon, Laitn os, Hittite hastai "bone" < *(k)ost-
Sanskrit krmi- "worm" ~ English "worm", Latin vermis "worm" < *(k)wrmis
Russian gora "mountain' ~ Greek oros "mountain" <*(g)or-

Wiktionary has Proto-Slavic *gora < PIE *gwerH- "to elevate" and Greek oros < PIE *h3er- "to rise" -- related roots?

The author mentioned French canard "(male) duck" < French cane "female duck" as related to Latin anas "duck", but short of other cognates, I'd leave that aside.

IMO A better one is
English goose, Latin ânser, Greek khên < PIE *ghh2ens (> *ghans) "goose"
Latin anas, English (dialectal) annet, Russian utka < *h2enh2ts (> *anëts) "duck"
where I use ë for schwa.

 

[lpetrich]

"Nostratic, Quo Vadis?"

Quo Vadis? - Latin "where are you going?" - John 13:36 in the Bible

Notes various levels of criticism of Nostratic.

• Category A is refinement of the classic works of Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky, mainly in the Moscow school.
• Category B is the likes of Allan Bomhard's alternative-Nostratic work
• Category C is mainly of specialists in descendant families. They tend to be agnostic about long-range hypotheses.
• Category D is from users of statistics to assess relationship hypotheses. Their results are often negative.
• Category E is outright rejection.

About Category A, a good selection from the Moscow School is in "Typology, Relationship and Time" (1986), edited by Shevoroshkin and Markey.

Author Ronald Coleman then complains about poor presentation, like not giving thumbnail introductions to languages and language families, and not adequately explaining phonetic symbols. Also jumbled layout. For Category B, he mentions Allan Bomhard's book, which he calls very well laid-out.

About Category C,

Their reviews, at best, are generally lukewarm and when they agree, it can be a case of “damning with faint praise”. Unfortunately, this category is probably the majority position.

About Category D, the author is rather skeptical about the use of statistical methods. "It would appear that by the time intelligent lists of cognates have been drawn up by competent linguists for the software to process, 99% of the work has already been done." But such cases provide excellent tests of software for discovering cognates, software that can then be used on languages much less studied than (say) Germanic or Slavic ones.

He also quotes someone who responded to a paper on Austronesian genes, languages, and migrations that found high congruence. “As far as I can see, nothing new results from their analyses. ... So it seems possible to publish an article in Nature just by using the right computer program and forget that many years of research have been performed in linguistics to be able to perform these analyses.”

That seems to me a very dumb criticism, because that finding of family trees is built on all that work in finding cognates. If one has a big database of cognates, it will be VERY hard to find relationships by eyeballing, and one will have to use computerized techniques.

 

[lpetrich]

After discussing some Category E criticisms, the author quotes one linguist as saying “The real question, in my view, is not why isolates exist, but why families exist - and above all large families. Why should there be large families like Indo-European and Austronesian? .... Why should Nostratic exist? How could it exist ? And furthermore, even if it somehow does exist, how can it have the properties ascribed to it?”
???

Then mentioning genetics and recent work on the Australian Aboriginal languages using the techniques of historical linguistics: work on Proto-Pama-Nyungan and Proto-Australian.

Australian languages usually have up to six stops and corresponding nasals, but no sibilants (s, z, sh, zh) or fricatives (f, v), and only three vowels (a, i, u).

Some 50 common roots have been identified, including bu- = to hit., ka- = to carry, mala/mara =hand, jina = foot, nya- = to see. Na- as in nata, naya or nayu = I.

A semantic homogeneity relating to a hunter/gatherer lifestyle.

Wide semantic fields and the use of metaphor are distinguishing features of many languages. For example, the same word often refers to an item and its source, the material from which it comes as in fire/firewood, milk/breast or activity/result such as sink/drown, hear/listen and hit/kill. Metaphors include the use of body parts to extend meanings to geographical or abstract ideas such as back/ridge and chest/frontness.

Not as common in English, but there are some, like animals and the meat of them. It is true that English has several words for meats of Old French origin, but most of them also come from words from their source animals.

 

[Swammerdami]

There were at least THREE major Neolithic cultures in Western Europe which predate the arrival of Indo-Europeans. There was little relationship among these three cultures genetically or culturally. Conflating their languages into a single "Africultural substrate" seems ill-advised to me. These three cultures are Impressed Ware/Cardial Ware which arrived in Western Europe by sea and includes Basque ancestors and is marked by a G2 Y-chromosome; Linear Ware which followed Danube and Rhine Rivers and was driven by "cultural diffusion" since these people largely retain the I2 Paleolithic Y-chromosome; and Funnel Beaker (TRB) which seems to have arisen from a Megalithic culture of Scandinavia. (In its final phase, Funnel Beaker may have incorporated an I1 Y-chromosome.)

The prefix *a- and the suffix *-it- are the most apparent linguistic markers by which a small group of "Agricultural" substrate words - i.e. *arwīt ("pea") or *gait ("goat") - can be isolated from the rest of the Proto-Germanic lexicon. ccording to Aljoša Šorgo, there are at least 36 Proto-Germanic lexical items very likely originating from the "agricultural" substrate language (or a group of closely related languages).

Non-Indo-European root nouns in Germanic: evidence in support of the Agricultural Substrate Hypothesis - sust266_kroonen.pdf

The paper cited above may have much interest for linguists, but as a layman, I'd be more interested in a paper which deals with the MANY distinct substrates present in Germanic. Instead that paper speculates about a very small number of ancient words, probably irrelevant to developments in the Bronze Age or later.

I found a paper with a promising title, but one of its topics was a 140 year-old theory about a Celtic superstrate in Germanic:

In 1885 [de Jubainville] first set out his theory of a Celtic superstratum to Germanic, one that comprised three components: (i) a number of suggestive references in classical accounts to a former Celtic military superiority over their Germanic neighbors; (ii) the results of a search through Friedrich Kluge’s etymological dictionary (first edition, 1883) for German words with Celtic etymological roots; and (iii) a patriotic Gallomania. In the judgement of later scholars, de Jubainville’s best evidence was the terms represented by NHG Reich “realm” and Amt “office”; see, e.g., recently, Schmidt (1984:141–152, 1986:238). Both are clearly Celtic loans and seem to refer to hegemonic relationships. He elaborated his theory over the next few years (1891, 1892, 1903), clearly with the military terminologies (represented in English, for example, by marshal and seneschal) that the Frankish superstratum contributed to French in mind. He discovered a series of other terms that arguably represented similar relationships and interpreted them as loanwords from Celtic that all reflected borrowings due to a similar social state and presumably represented a similar time depth. De Jubainville suggested these loans showed that the ancient Germans had served as infantry to chariot-riding Celtic warlords (cf. OHG rÈ ∆tan “ride”, Gaulish reµda “chariot”) and that Germanic military culture was dependent on that of their putative overlords (cf. OHG wÈ ∆gan, OIr. fichim “fight”; OHG ge∆r, Gaulish gaiso- “spear”; OHG marah, Galatian marca “warhorse”; and ON hoD, OIr. cath “battle”). Moreover, comparable evidence from the legal sphere appeared to indicate that much of Germanic legal practice also derived from that of the Celts (cf. Go. aiπs, OIr. oeth “oath”; Go. dulgs “debt”, OIr. dligid “duty, law”; Go. arbi, OIr. arbe “inheritance”; OHG ban “ban, banned”, OIr. bann “law”; and OHG gÈ ∆sal, OIr. gÈåall “hostage”). He also proposed that the ancient Germans were indebted to the Celts for their battle chant, the barditus mentioned by Tacitus, which, he claimed, mimicked those of the Celtic bards. He even went so far as to insist that the language of the ancient Germans had been so affected by Celtic that the fixing of stress on the initial syllable in Germanic had been caused by the accent of theirCeltic overlords.

I've previously commented in this thread that Non-IE Germanic words like the sea-faring terms Ship, Sail, Sea, Seal, Keel, Eel, Ice; basic vocabulary finger, toe, neck, bone, wife, oak, berry, horse; and especially words like king, knight imply a strong adstratum influence from the Pitted Ware culture.

It would be nice to see an expert provide perspective on the several distinct substrates present in Germanic.

 

[lpetrich]

Response to comments "On the quantification of Euskaro-Caucasian lexical matches ..." (09/27/2022 | John D Bengtson - Academia.edu

I am not able to respond to every comment individually, many of which indicate that the readers did not carefully read the paper itself, or that they have not read my book BCR (Bengtson 2022) in which all or most of the comments are addressed in great detail. BCR contains about 600 etymologies (understanding that not all of them will prove valid after more rigorous testing), more than 250 pages devoted to comparative phonology and sound correspondences, and some 65 pages concerned with comparative morphology (nouns, pronouns, verbs). The hardbound book (500 pages +) is available from Gorgias Press (if you can afford it), or you can access a GRATIS PDF on academia.edu. I am not going to discuss the details of Indo-Uralic comparison, which are better addressed by Kassian, Zhivlov and Starostin themselves.

In his replies, JB stated that he does not believe in an 8,000-year limit to the comparative method of historical linguistics.

Then noting that Afrasian beats that limit by a factor of 2, quoting estimates:

• Christopher Ehret in 2015: 22,000 - 15,000 BCE (24 - 17 ky BP) for the first two divergences, soon followed by "Erythraic": Semitic, Egyptian, Berber
• George Starostin: -14.76 ~ 16,782 BP
• Harold Fleming: >= 20 ky BP

The last glacial maximum was roughly 26 - 20 ky BP, and the Holocene Epoch began at 12 ky BP -- the time in between I like to call the terminal Pleistocene.

Virtually all specialists in African languages, and historical linguists in general, accept Afro-Asiatic as a valid language family. (J. Nichols hedges this by calling it “quasi-genetic” because it is beyond her supposed 8,000 year limit.) This is based more on grammar and lexicon than on phonology (where Ehret’s model differs from Orel -Stolbova’s – but so what? Even Indo-Europeanists disagree, after some 200 years, on details of IE reconstruction and phonology, like 4 laryngeals or none). It is the presence of common pronouns, noun case markers, /a/ plural forms (“broken plurals”, in Semitic, Berber, Cushitic, Chadic), the prefix conjugation of verbs with prefixes that distinguish the subject’s person and gender (in at least Semitic, Berber, Cushitic), etc., that have convinced linguists, along with some basic lexical isoglosses (like s m y ~ asam ~ *si/um ~ *sumi ~ *sum ~ *šum ‘name’, in all 6 AA families).

"Name"? Proto-AA *sim -- Proto-Semitic *shim- -- Egyptian rin -- Proto-Berber *isem -- Proto-Chadic *s3m > Hausa suna -- Cushitic: Somali magac -- doesn't quite fit, but are some of these putative cognates semantically shifted?

Then noting some Basque - N Caucasian matches in grammar and vocabulary. Pronouns 1s ni, 2s hi, a verb conjugation: -n-, and lexical matches like for "fire" *su ~ *cayi and "smoke" *eke ~ *kwinhV.

 

[lpetrich]

Juho Pystinen: The IE–B comparisons definitely are bad for various reasons.

JDB REPLY: I agree.

Much better fit with North Caucasian.

Then on how reliable the North Caucasian reconstructions are.

Robert Lindsay: IE or Uralic borrowed "nomen" from where?! You can't just call any word a loan that you don't like, especially at the level of proto-languages! You better make a damn good case for a loan in the case of a proto-language. Further, IE and Uralic were never adjacent for even one second anywhere, so all of these IE-Uralic fake loans can go straight in the trashbin. Lyell Campbell's reasoning for why numerous Uralic and IE words were loans was because they were lookalikes.

JDB REPLY: I agree.

That's correct for a common Uralic homeland hypothesis: NW Siberia near the Ural Mountains.

Although looking very similar is typical of relatively recent borrowings, it can also be true of distant cognates, and that's been a big problem for Altaic: how much is inherited and how much is borrowed? A common opinion is that *every* similar-looking word is borrowed, even the pronouns. I think that that's in excess, and that the Altaic families have a core of common ancestry, though how far it extends beyond the pronouns I'm unwilling to speculate about.

 

[lpetrich]

Robert Lindsay: Bomhard proposes that the Caucasian in IE is substratum, not genetic. I think his theory
does allow that the Yamana people may have spoken Caucasian but switched to IE, perhaps with the
advent of agriculture which came out of Anatolia.

JDB REPLY: I agree. This fits with my scenario (BCR pp. 453; Bengtson 2017).

Robert Lindsay: I am sorry, but Colarusso's IE and North Caucasian work is terrible. It is very poorly
regarded IMHO. And it does look like substratum. The best theory is that speakers of NW Caucasian
(What is that? Abhkaz? Circassian?) quit speaking Caucasian and started speaking IE. That would leave
the sort of residue effect better than anything else.

REPLY (JDB): Colarusso is a respected authority on NW (or West) Caucasian, and a friend. I disagree
with his early idea of a genetic link between WC (NWC) and IE. Has he now modified it toward a
substratum explanation?

Sergei Starostin's big list of IE-NC borrowings was once published in Mother Tongue. I remember his argument that the borrowings went from NC to IE because IE has a simpler phonology than NC and that the NC forms covered the full range. He cited Russian borrowings into NC langs which use a limited subset of the langs' phonology.

That causes a problem for identifying European substrate words. If they are NC cognates, did they come into PIE or did they come in later?

 

[Swammerdami]

Response to comments "On the quantification of Euskaro-Caucasian lexical matches ..." (09/27/2022 | John D Bengtson - Academia.edu

I am not able to respond to every comment individually, many of which indicate that the readers did not carefully read the paper itself, or that they have not read my book BCR (Bengtson 2022) in which all or most of the comments are addressed in great detail. BCR contains about 600 etymologies (understanding that not all of them will prove valid after more rigorous testing), more than 250 pages devoted to comparative phonology and sound correspondences, and some 65 pages concerned with comparative morphology (nouns, pronouns, verbs). The hardbound book (500 pages +) is available from Gorgias Press (if you can afford it), or you can access a GRATIS PDF on academia.edu. I am not going to discuss the details of Indo-Uralic comparison, which are better addressed by Kassian, Zhivlov and Starostin themselves.

In his replies, JB stated that he does not believe in an 8,000-year limit to the comparative method of historical linguistics.

Glottochronology provides a consistent -- albeit it unreliable for dating -- way for guesstimating kinship and separation time. Since there are SOME semantic items (who, me, hand, vagina) that are VERY resistant to change one would expect half a dozen or so ancient word matches, depending on separation time. (Icelandic and Sanskrit mutated only slowly over the centuries -- how well can ancient mutation rates be guesstimated?)

Et cetera. Expanding on this, it turns out that it is the vehement anti-lumpers whose positions are invalid, and who should be denounced at every opportunity.

Then noting that Afrasian beats that limit by a factor of 2, quoting estimates:

• Christopher Ehret in 2015: 22,000 - 15,000 BCE (24 - 17 ky BP) for the first two divergences, soon followed by "Erythraic": Semitic, Egyptian, Berber
• George Starostin: -14.76 ~ 16,782 BP
• Harold Fleming: >= 20 ky BP

The last glacial maximum was roughly 26 - 20 ky BP, and the Holocene Epoch began at 12 ky BP -- the time in between I like to call the terminal Pleistocene.

Virtually all specialists in African languages, and historical linguists in general, accept Afro-Asiatic as a valid language family. (J. Nichols hedges this by calling it “quasi-genetic” because it is beyond her supposed 8,000 year limit.) This is based more on grammar and lexicon than on phonology (where Ehret’s model differs from Orel -Stolbova’s – but so what? Even Indo-Europeanists disagree, after some 200 years, on details of IE reconstruction and phonology, like 4 laryngeals or none). It is the presence of common pronouns, noun case markers, /a/ plural forms (“broken plurals”, in Semitic, Berber, Cushitic, Chadic), the prefix conjugation of verbs with prefixes that distinguish the subject’s person and gender (in at least Semitic, Berber, Cushitic), etc., that have convinced linguists, along with some basic lexical isoglosses (like s m y ~ asam ~ *si/um ~ *sumi ~ *sum ~ *šum ‘name’, in all 6 AA families).

"Name"? Proto-AA *sim -- Proto-Semitic *shim- -- Egyptian rin -- Proto-Berber *isem -- Proto-Chadic *s3m > Hausa suna -- Cushitic: Somali magac -- doesn't quite fit, but are some of these putative cognates semantically shifted?

Then noting some Basque - N Caucasian matches in grammar and vocabulary. Pronouns 1s ni, 2s hi, a verb conjugation: -n-, and lexical matches like for "fire" *su ~ *cayi and "smoke" *eke ~ *kwinhV.

Yes, Basque and N. Caucasian (Dagestan?, "macro-Hurrian"?) are related. BUT we want to know WHEN the separation occurred relative to inventions, especially agriculture. Cognates for Certain vocabulary items -- e.g. barley, grain, irrigate -- would be of greatest interest, no?

BRIEFLY Skimming one Bengtson summary yielded only TWO possible "Neolithic" words: ‘threshing board/floor’ and 'vessel for keeping corn.'
Surely there must(???) be several other cognates relevant to Neolithic advances. Are there?

East Caucasian has numerous derivatives, only some of which are cited here. Archi ƛorom = tɬorom ‘threshing board’ (which resembles Basque *laṙain‘threshing floor’) is said to be a derivative by metathesis < *ƛ:ɨroma < Proto-Lezgian *mɨƛ-ra (see NCED 1031–33). The PEC structure *=rŁV is the result of a common transposition < Proto-Euskaro-Caucasian *rVŁV ~ *ŁVrV. From a Sino-Caucasian per-spective cf. Burushaski *daltá-n- ‘to thresh’ < *rVŁV-n- (SCG 182).

...
νέκταρ ‘nectar, drink of the gods’; νεκτάριον a plant name [attested in Basque and Caucasian]
...
ὄγχνη ~ ὄχνη‘pear tree, Pirus communis; pear’
...
σῑρός ~ σειρός ‘pit or vessel for keeping corn, silo’. “Technical word without etymology. The variation between σῐρ-, σῑρ-, σειρ- is hard to explain from an IE point of view” (Beekes 1335). / σῦριγξ, σῦριγγος ‘quill, flute, syrinx [shepherd’s pipe]’ (Il[iad]); also of pipe-like objects, e.g. ‘windpipe, blood-vessel, fistula’ (medic., etc.), ‘spear case’ ... ‘hole in the nave of a wheel’

Notes on some Pre-Greek words in relation to Euskaro-Caucasian (North Caucasian + Basque)

A “Pre-Greek” substratum underlying the Indo-European Greek language has been suspected for a long time. There is no reason to suppose that there was only one “Pre-Greek” language; the region where Greek was and is spoken may have been multilingual, with languages of diverse origins. In the...

www.degruyter.com

Notes on some Pre-Greek words in relation to Euskaro-Caucasian​

How about it? Can we guess the level of agriculture when/where Dagestan and Basque split?

 

[lpetrich]

JB to another responder:

GENERAL REPLY: Most of your “comments” are fallacious assertions with no evidence (like “PIE *H1neH3-mn and PU *nimi **cannot** be cognates.” - why?), or simply invective, unjustified slurs, trolling, and outright insults. THIS IS NOT DISCUSSION.

Or in non-laryngeal terms: *(ë)no-mn -- I've decided to write schwa as ë -- Wiktionary has h1nómn.

That's a problem with IE *nomn ~ U *nimi -- the m in the IE form is part of a noun-forming suffix *-mn -- Latin -men (-min-), Greek -ma (-mat-), Sanskrit -ma (-man-), Proto-Germanic *-mô, Proto-Celtic *-man, *-sman, Proto-Slavic *-me(n), ...

Often segmented as *h1no-mn with putative root *h1no-, but it could also be *h1nom-mn with putative root *h1nom-. That latter one would fit the Uralic form very well.

From Wiktionary, this suffix forms nouns from verbs. The Latin form: "... generally with senses along the lines of 'a means of doing something'", the Greek Form: "... the effect or result of an action, a particular instance of an action, or the object of an action", the Germanic form "... a quality, state, or instrument", the Celtic form: action nouns, ...