From martinez at EM.UNI-FRANKFURT.DE Fri Mar 7 19:24:11 1997 From: martinez at EM.UNI-FRANKFURT.DE (Fco. Javier Mart nez Garc a) Date: Fri, 7 Mar 1997 20:24:11 +0100 Subject: TITUS: Indo-European Course Register (Sommer 1997). Message-ID: TITUS has the new Indo-European Course Register (Sommer Semester 1997) We have now incorporated it into the TITUS Project web pages under following URL: http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/idg-ss97.html Best Regards J. Martinez From emil.hersak at ZG.TEL.HR Sat Mar 8 19:29:30 1997 From: emil.hersak at ZG.TEL.HR (Emil HERSAK (by way of B. Reusch)) Date: Sat, 8 Mar 1997 11:29:30 -0800 Subject: Dravidian/Uralic Message-ID: (I'm sending this to the list as the original sender has been unable to subscribe yet. Please excuse x-posting.) Beatrice From: Emil HERSAK Sent: 1997. To: Members of the list Subject: Dravidian/Uralic Dear Indologists, The short short encyclopaedic questions, that I would very much appreciate if someone could answer: First, regardless of whether the term Indo-European can be attributed to Thomas Young, as is sometimes claimed, can anyone give me the birth and death dates of Young. Second, in his book "In Search of the Indo-Europeans" (1992), in a very useful critique of the various "racial" interpretations of Indo-European, J.P. Mallory wrote: "Cannon Isaac Taylor, for example, once proposed the notion that the Indo-Europeans were essentially 'an improved race of Finns'" (page 268). Can anyone provide information on the context for this quote. Namely Mallory, does not give any information on the source, or on Taylor himself. BTW, for the sake of bibliographic precision, I would be pleased to find out what Mallory's own initials stand for (J.P.). Third, it would be very interested in hearing anything on the present state of the theory of ancient language links between Dravidian and Uralic. I am aware that this has been rejected by many linguistis, but nevertheless the theory is still often encountered in the literature. In this context, bellow I give a quote from a text by Janos Harmatta presented at a conference in Dushanbe several years ago. Unfortunately, in Harmatta's work there seem to be inconsistencies, and despite my attempts, I have not found any information on either HARALI or the Sumerian he mentions in the following quote. Some persons I contacted on the matter assumed the references were pure fabrication. Nevertheless, before rejecting the idea, I would appreciate your comments. "Historical and linguistic research often presumed that the Dravidians came from Northern territories lying around Lake Aral, where they had intensive linguistic contacts with Finno-Ugrian tribes. It was even assumed that Dravidian and Finno-Ugrian were genetically related languages. Linguists tried to assure a linguistic basis for this theory, but even the latest effort to point out a great number of common elements in Finno-Ugrian and Dravidian vocabulary did not arrive at any conclusive result. In any case, however, if the golden land H(+hook sub)arali (later Arali, Arallu) of the Sumerian hymm on trade with Tilmun, situated beyond Tukris(+hachek) in the far North-East, can be sought in Iran, and perhaps, even in Ancient Khorazmia indeed, then this name may be of Dravidian origin (cf. Tamil ar[+dieresis sub]al "to burn, to shine", ar[+dieresis sub]ali "fire", ar(+dieresis sottoscritto)alo[+macron]n "Agni, sun") and its meaning could be the same as that of Khorazmia, reflecting Old Iranian *Xva(macron)ra+zmi- "land of the Sun". If the localisation of H(+hook sub)arali and this interpretation is correct, then this toponym may give a hint for the ancient home of the Proto-Dravidians" (p 81). Source: J. Harmatta, "Proto-Iranians and Proto-Indians in Central Asia in the 2nd Millenium B.C. /linguistic evidence/. Etnicheskie problemy istorii central'noj azii v drebnosti /II tysjacheletie do n.e. - Ethnic problems of the History of Central Asia in the Easly Period/ Second Millenium B.B. - Moscow, 1981, pp. 75-83. Sincerely, Emil Hersak Institut for Migration and Ethnic Studies, Zagreb, Croatia. e-mail: emil.hersak at zg.tel.hr From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Sun Mar 9 11:08:58 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 11:08:58 +0000 Subject: Thomas Young Message-ID: Young's dates are 1773-1829. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH England larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From gonzalor at JHU.EDU Sun Mar 9 08:09:36 1997 From: gonzalor at JHU.EDU (Gonzalo Rubio) Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 03:09:36 -0500 Subject: Dravidian/Uralic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 8 Mar 1997, Emil HERSAK (by way of B. Reusch) wrote: > there seem to be inconsistencies, and despite my attempts, I have not found > any information on either HARALI or the Sumerian he mentions in the > following quote. Some persons I contacted on the matter assumed the > references were pure fabrication. Nevertheless, before rejecting the idea, I'm afraid I'm not an Indologist, but an Assyriologist with an "Indo-European past". However, I'll try to answer some of your questions. a-ra-li (also written a-ra-a-li, a-ra-al-li, arali [E2.KUR.BAD or just KUR.BAD, and perhaps arali2 [URUxGAL]) was the name of the steppe between Uruk and Badtibira (bad3-tibira-KI) from very early texts (Presargonic and so on), and later on it was the name of a place in which demons dwell, the netherworld, etc. You may want to look at the _Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary_ A/1: 136ff. This a-ra-li is different from ha-ra-li, the place where gold comes from in Sumerian texts. Some stuff you may find interesting is Jacobsen's note in _Journal of the American Oriental Society_ 103 (1984): 195; Stol _Studies in Old Babylonian History_ 41 f.; _Chicago Assyrian Dictionary_ A/2: 227 (under arallu^). I cannot think of any example in which a-ra-li and Dilmun occur in the same text or context. However, since Dilmun seems to have been a sort of mythical paradise for the Sumerians, it's sound pretty likely that ha-ra-li (but not a-ra-li), the source of gold, may have been mentioned together with Dilmun. Regarding your other questions. The term "Indo-European" seems to have been coined by Thomas Young in his review of Adelung's _Mithridates_ (Berlin 1806-1817), "Mithridates, oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde", in _The Quarterly Review_ 10 (1813): 250-292. Thomas Young was born in 1773 and died in 1829. Concerning Dravidian and its alleged relations to other language families, from Rask's "Scytian" to McAlpin's Elamite hypothesis (and also the different Uralic and Altaic theories proposed by Caldwell, Schoebel, Schrader, Burrow, Bouda, and Menges), you may want to read Kamil V. Zvelebil's highly informative review of McAlpin's _Proto-Elamo-Dravidian_ (Philadelphia 1981), in _Journal of the American Oriental Society_ 105 (1985): 364ff. I hope this may help you. ------------------------ Gonzalo Rubio Near Eastern Studies Johns Hopkins University gonzalor at jhu.edu ------------------------ From cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU Sun Mar 9 22:40:12 1997 From: cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU (Clyde A. Winters) Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 16:40:12 -0600 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe Message-ID: In recent posting to this list various authors have suggested that the Dravidians came from Europe or the North. This is highly unlikely, it would appear that the Dravidians originated in Middle Africa and migrated to the Indus Valley and India sometime after 3000 B.C. The Dravidians came from the Sahara before it became a desert. Affinities exist between Nubia ware and pottery from Ennedi and Tibesti. These Saharan people were round-headed ancient Mediterranean type. They were often referred to as Cafsa or Capsians; a group of people not devoid of negroid characteristics according to J Desanges.(11) Wyatt MacGaffey, claims that the term "Mediterranean" is an anthropological euphemism for "Negro". The boats of the Saharan people are similar to those found on ancient engravings of boats in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. Many of the boats found in the eastern desert of Egypt and among the Red Sea Hills show affinities to Mesopotamian models. S.N. Kramer in , claimed that Makan was Egypt, Mekluhha was Nubia-Punt, and the Indus Valley was Dilmun. Today Dilmun is believed to be found near Arabia. But the archaeological evidence suggest that the Indus Valley which was settled by Dravidian speakers was the source of the lapis lazuli , which made Dilmun famous .(2) Archaeological research has confirmed that cultural interaction existed between the contemporary civilizations of the 4th and 3rd millenia B.C. Extensive trade routes connected the Proto-Dravidians of the Indus Valley, with African people in Egypto-Nubia, and the Elamites and Sumerians. P. Kohl discovered that vessels from IVBI worshop at Tepe Yahya, have a uniform shape and design. Vessels sharing this style are distributed from Soviet Uzbekistan to the Indus Valley, and Sumerian, Elamite and Egyptian sites. (2) In addition, we find common arrowheads at Harappan sites, and sites in Iran, Egypt, Minoan Crete and Heladic Greece. It appears that the locus for this distribution of cultural traditions and technology was the Saharan-Nubian zone or Kush. This would explain why the Sumerians and Elamites often referred to themselves as "ksh". For example the ancient Sumerians called their dynasty "Kish". The words "kish", "kesh" and "kush" were also names for ancient Nubia-Sudan. The Elamites also came from Kush. According to the classical writer Strabo, Susa the centre of the Elamite civilization was founded by Tithonus, king of Kush. B.B. Lal has shown conclusively that the Dravidians came from Nubia and were related to the C-Group people who founded the Kerma dynasty.(3) They both used a common black-and-red ware (BRW) which Lal found was analogous to ceramics used by the megalithic people in India who also used analogous pottery signs identical to those found in the corpus of Indus Valley writing. (4) Singh believes that this pottery spread from Nubia, through Mesopotamia and Iran southward into India.(5) The earliest examples of this BRW date to the Amratian period (c4000-3500 B.C.). T This same BRW was found at the lowest levels of Harappan sites at Lothal and Rangpur. After 1700 B.C. This ceramic tradition spread southward into megalithic India.(6) Dilmun was an important source of lapis lazuli. If the Indus Valley civilization was Dilmun as hypothesized by Kramer, it would explain the control of the Harappans/ or Dilmunites of this important metal. The Indus Valley people spoke a Dravidian language.(7) The Harappans controlled the lazurite region of Badakhshan, and the routes to the tin and copper fields of central Asia.(8) The major city of the Harappans/Dilmunites in the lapis lazuli region was Shortughai. Francefort believes that many lapis lazuli works were transported to Iran and Mesopotamia from Shortughai.(9) The BRW at Shortughai is typically Harappan. When we put all of this evidence together we must agree that there were connections between the Dravidian and African people. The evident linguistic connections between Uralic and Dravidian are probably the result of the Dravidian migrations into Central Asia and contact with Uralic speakers during this proposed period. Footnotes (1)C.B. Rawlinson, "Notes on the early history of Babylon", (First Series) 15, p.230. (2). Philip L. Kohl, "The balance of trade in the mid-Third millenium BC", , 19 (1978), pp.463-492. (3)B.B. Lal, "From megalithic to the Harappan: Tracing back the graffiti on pottery", , 16 (1960). (4)B.B. Lal, "The only Asian mission in threatened Nubia", , 20 April 1963. (5) H.N. Singh, , Delhi, 1982. (6) C.A. Winters, "The Dravido-Harappan Colonization of Central Asia", , 34 (1-2), pp.120-144. (7) C.A. Winters, "The Dravidian language of the Harappan script", , (1990). (8) B. Brenjes, "On Proto-Elamite Iran", , 24 (2) (1984), pp. 240-. (9) Henri-Paul Franceport, "La civilisation de l'Indus aux rives de l'Oxus", , (Decembre) p.50. (10) Ibid., p.49. (11) J. Desnages, "The Proto-Berbers". In vol.2, (Ed.) by G. Mokhtar (Heinemann Educational Books, London) p.25. C.A.Winters From fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG Sun Mar 9 23:09:17 1997 From: fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG (Steven Schaufele) Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 17:09:17 -0600 Subject: Dravidian/Uralic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Concerning the possible glossogenetic connection between Dravidian and Uralic (what i like to call the `Dravido-Uralic Hypothesis'), i have a paper, copies of which i would be happy to make available to anyone interested; this paper is basically an attempt at a critical survey of what has been said in the published literature on the subject, from Caldwell up to the present. Any requests for copies of this paper will be honoured, provided they are accompanied by snail-mail addresses, assuming i can find it in my `archives' (probably down in the basement). Here i will say that i, personally, am favourably disposed towards the Dravido-Uralic Hypothesis, and this comes across in the above-mentioned paper. However, the necessary time-depth is such, and (consequently?) the proposed cognate morphemes so short (though, it seems to me, in such tantalizingly large numbers), that it is extremely difficult to demon- strate cognacy beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt. I'm hoping VERY MUCH for an opportunity to pursue this matter further, if i ever get a chance to do any original research, but it's going to have to be done a LOT MORE critically than it has been in the past. Too much of what has been written and published on the matter has been coloured too heavily by the authors' attitude, whether pro or con, on long-distance reconstruc- tion in general and the Dravido-Uralic Hypothesis in particular. And that, at the moment, is my very brief perspective on the current state of scholarship on this question. Best, Steven --------------------- Dr. Steven Schaufele 712 West Washington Urbana, IL 61801 217-344-8240 fcosws at prairienet.org http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html **** O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum! *** *** Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis! *** From mcv at PI.NET Mon Mar 10 12:45:51 1997 From: mcv at PI.NET (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 12:45:51 +0000 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Clyde A. Winters wrote: > In recent posting to this list various authors have suggested > that the Dravidians came from Europe or the North. This is highly > unlikely, it would appear that the Dravidians originated in Middle > Africa and migrated to the Indus Valley and India sometime after > 3000 B.C. This highly unlikely. We now have a 6000 BC date for Neolithic Mehrgarh in Baluchistan, and the roots of the Elamite civilization can be traced at least back to Susa A, c. 4000 BC, and the earlier Susiana a-e phase (c. 5000-4000 BC). McAlpine's Proto-Elamo- Dravidian can be put with some confidence in the Southern Zagros by the start of the Neolithic, c. 8000 BC, spreading from there to the Indus (and the Amu-Darya?) by a Neolithic "wave of advance" not unlike the model proposed by Colin Renfrew for the spread of agricultural peoples across continental Europe. Since this is a linguistic list after all, what linguistic evidence might there be for an origin of Elamo-Dravidian in Nilo-Saharan territory as recently as 3,000 BC? ---------------------------- Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at pi.net ---------------------------- From fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG Mon Mar 10 05:21:53 1997 From: fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG (Steven Schaufele) Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 23:21:53 -0600 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In response to Clyde Winters' remarks about the ethnic affinities of South Indians, i don't think anybody contests that, in terms of physical anthropology, they are closely affiliated with certain African groups. What's this got to do with language? We all know that linguistic affiliation has no necessary connection with biological affiliation. Nowadays, the English language counts members of all ethnic groups among its speakers; that doesn't change the fact that it's historically (and glossagenetically) a Northwestern European language, a Low-German dialect of the Indo-European family. Suppose some near-universal cataclysm wipes out all English-speaking communities outside of Australia & New Zealand. Will our descendants conclude therefrom that, since these regions were settled from Southeast Asia and, possibly, indirectly Africa, that English must be either a Southeast Asian or an African language in its origin? It should also be borne in mind that there is a Dravidian island along the Afghan/Pakistani border. I've usually understood that this datum could be used to support a hypothesis that the Dravidian family was originally indigenous to the Indus Valley area, that in late prehistoric times expanded into the Indian subcontinent, overwhelming whatever languages were used by the local population (which in whole or in part had come from Africa) before being in turn overwhelmed in much of the northern half of the subcontinent by invading Indo-European speakers. Not that i'm necessarily promoting such a hypothesis, but i don't know of a great deal of evidence on the subject one way or another. My point is that it is not usually a very good idea to build an argument for the linguistic affiliation of a certain ethnic group on the basis of its undeniable *physical* affinities. Best, Steven --------------------- Dr. Steven Schaufele 712 West Washington Urbana, IL 61801 217-344-8240 fcosws at prairienet.org http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html **** O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum! *** *** Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis! *** From Bomhard at AOL.COM Mon Mar 10 02:28:08 1997 From: Bomhard at AOL.COM (Allan Bomhard) Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 21:28:08 -0500 Subject: Dravidian/Uralic Message-ID: Genetic relationship between (Elamo-)Dravidian and Uralic(-Yukaghir) has been proposed within the conext of the Nostratic hypothesis, first by V. M. Illich-Svitych and A. B. Dolgopolsky and then by A. R. Bomhard. There is no special relationship between Uralic and Dravidian. Dravidian appears to be related to Elamite (if the views of D. McAlpin are accepted). According to J. H. Greenberg, Uralic is part of the Eurasiatic family of languages, along with Indo-European, Altaic, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Gilyak, and Eskimo-Aleut. A. R. Bomhard considers Eurasiatic to be one of the branches of Nostratic. These and other issues are discussed in detail in: A. R. Bomhard and J. C. Kerns. _The Nostratic Macrofamily._ 1994. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. A. R. Bomhard. _Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis._ 1996. Charleston, SC: Signum. From cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU Wed Mar 12 22:36:48 1997 From: cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU (Clyde A. Winters) Date: Wed, 12 Mar 1997 16:36:48 -0600 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 9 Mar 1997, Steven Schaufele wrote: > > In response to Clyde Winters' remarks about the ethnic affinities of > South Indians, i don't think anybody contests that, in terms of physical > anthropology, they are closely affiliated with certain African groups. > What's this got to do with language? We all know that linguistic > affiliation has no necessary connection with biological affiliation. > Nowadays, the English language counts members of all ethnic groups among > its speakers; that doesn't change the fact that it's historically (and > glossagenetically) a Northwestern European language, a Low-German dialect > of the Indo-European family. Suppose some near-universal cataclysm wipes > out all English-speaking communities outside of Australia & New Zealand. > Will our descendants conclude therefrom that, since these regions were > settled from Southeast Asia and, possibly, indirectly Africa, that > English must be either a Southeast Asian or an African language in its > origin? This would be highly unlikely because we would probably use oral tradition and comparative linguistic methods to show that English could not have originated in these areas. If such an event did occurn the English speakers would more than likely adopt the languages of the "native" people since much of their culture would probably change as a result of being separated from the major centers of Western culture. It seems that in this event English woulf be recognize as a substratum language. > > It should also be borne in mind that there is a Dravidian island along > the Afghan/Pakistani border. I've usually understood that this datum > could be used to support a hypothesis that the Dravidian family was > originally indigenous to the Indus Valley area, that in late prehistoric > times expanded into the Indian subcontinent, overwhelming whatever > languages were used by the local population (which in whole or in part > had come from Africa) before being in turn overwhelmed in much of the > northern half of the subcontinent by invading Indo-European speakers. The archaeological data fails to support this view. The work of B.B. Lal, makes it clear that the red-and-black ware common to the Indus Valley dwellers and the South Indians appear to have originated in Africa. This along with the evidence for a genetic relationship between Dravidian languages and African languages indicate that the Dravidians did not originate in the Indus Valley or Iran. It would appear that while Dravidian elements remained in the Indus Valley after the decline of the Harappan ciivlization, other elements migrated southward into India, while Tamilian speakers moved into North Asia and Southeast Asia. The Dravidian traditons, and linguistic evidence indicate that the Tamilian speakers migrated from Southeast Asia down into South India. > Not that i'm necessarily promoting such a hypothesis, but i don't know of > a great deal of evidence on the subject one way or another.. My point is > that it is not usually a very good idea to build an argument for the > linguistic affiliation of a certain ethnic group on the basis of its > undeniable *physical* affinities. This theory is not based on physical affinities, it is based on the archaeological and linguistic evidence that point to Africa as the original home of the Dravidian speakers. C.A. Winters From cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU Wed Mar 12 22:42:17 1997 From: cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU (Clyde A. Winters) Date: Wed, 12 Mar 1997 16:42:17 -0600 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe In-Reply-To: <199703101143.MAA22700@mailhost.pi.net> Message-ID: On Mon, 10 Mar 1997, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Clyde A. Winters wrote: > > > In recent posting to this list various authors have suggested > > that the Dravidians came from Europe or the North. This is highly > > unlikely, it would appear that the Dravidians originated in Middle > > Africa and migrated to the Indus Valley and India sometime after > > 3000 B.C. > > This highly unlikely. We now have a 6000 BC date for Neolithic > Mehrgarh in Baluchistan, and the roots of the Elamite civilization can > be traced at least back to Susa A, c. 4000 BC, and the earlier > Susiana a-e phase (c. 5000-4000 BC). McAlpine's Proto-Elamo- > Dravidian can be put with some confidence in the Southern Zagros by > the start of the Neolithic, c. 8000 BC, spreading from there to the > Indus (and the Amu-Darya?) by a Neolithic "wave of advance" not > unlike the model proposed by Colin Renfrew for the spread of > agricultural peoples across continental Europe. You are right about the early dates for the Mehrgarh culture. This culture has nothing to do with the historic south Indian cultures which we use as the Proto-type culture for the Dravidians. The evidence makes it clear that the pottery used by the South Indian Dravidians and the Harappans are similar. The cultural evidence, markings on pottery and etc. for the Mehrgarh and the South Indian and Harappan cultures are dissimilar. > > Since this is a linguistic list after all, what linguistic > evidence might there be for an origin of Elamo-Dravidian in > Nilo-Saharan territory as recently as 3,000 BC? > There is plenty of evidence for this relationship which I will post at a later date. C.A. Winters From alderson at NETCOM.COM Thu Mar 13 19:19:09 1997 From: alderson at NETCOM.COM (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Thu, 13 Mar 1997 11:19:09 -0800 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe In-Reply-To: (cwinter@ORION.IT.LUC.EDU) Message-ID: Clyde A. Winters writes: >This theory is not based on physical affinities, it is based on the >archaeological and linguistic evidence that point to Africa as the original ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >home of the Dravidian speakers. As has already been pointed out, this is a linguistics mailing list. Please post citations of the linguistic evidence adduced for such a relationship, with bibliography if possible. Rich Alderson From bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Fri Mar 14 08:20:47 1997 From: bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU (benji wald) Date: Fri, 14 Mar 1997 00:20:47 -0800 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe Message-ID: Clyde Winters wrote: >This along with the evidence for a genetic relationship between Dravidian >languages and African languages indicate that the Dravidians did not >originate in the Indus Valley or Iran. and later > The Dravidian traditons, and linguistic evidence indicate that the >Tamilian speakers >migrated from Southeast Asia down into South India. I am not aware that Clyde provided any linguistic information to support these claims. The characterisation "African" languages is too vague to be of linguistic value, and does not indicate impressive knowledge of that field. There are at least four language families indigenous to Africa, which have not been demonstrated to be related to each other, much less to any other language family. If Clyde claims that Dravidian is related to only one of those families, as is least implausible given the time frame, it also remains for him to specify the nature of the relationship, e.g., an independent descendent of Niger-Congo or of some more specific group. In any case, archaeological artifacts alone allow only the possibility not the certainty that language was imported along with certain other aspects of culture. Clyde's statement about the origin of Tamil speakers has nothing to do with his proposed African origin of the Dravidian language, and simply indicates that aspects of Tamil culture (including loan-words, I suppose) were subject to influence from Southeast Asia at some time in the past, perhaps even by assimilation of some Southeast Asians into the Dravidian society of the Tamil area. The linguistic evidence for this should be distinguishable from linguistic evidence for a genetic relation between Dravidian and the un-named African family. Southeast Asia also sounds more like a cultural area than a specific linguistic family. From cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU Fri Mar 14 02:59:58 1997 From: cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU (Clyde A. Winters) Date: Thu, 13 Mar 1997 20:59:58 -0600 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe In-Reply-To: <199703131919.LAA02071@netcom16.netcom.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 13 Mar 1997, Richard M. Alderson III wrote: > Clyde A. Winters writes: > > >This theory is not based on physical affinities, it is based on the > >archaeological and linguistic evidence that point to Africa as the original > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > >home of the Dravidian speakers. > > As has already been pointed out, this is a linguistics mailing list. Please > post citations of the linguistic evidence adduced for such a relationship, with > bibliography if possible. > > Rich Alderson > The citations are as follows: K.P. Aravanan, Physical and cultural similarities between dravidian and African, , No.10, (1976) pp.23-27. U.P. Upadhyaya & S.P. Upadhyaya, les entre Kerala et l'Afrique noire tels qu ils..culturelles et linguistiques', Bulletin de l' Institute fondamental Afrique Noire, 41, no.1, 1979, pp.108-132. U.P. Upadhyaya, Dravidian and negro african, , 3 (1), (1985) pp.1-9. C.A. Winters, "The genetic unity between the Dravidian, Elamite, manding and sumerian languages, (pp.1413-1425). Hong Kong: Asian research service 1985. Vol. 5 C.A. Winters, Tamil, Sumerian, manding and the Genetic Model, , 18 (1), (1989) pp.67-91. C.A. Winters, The Dravidian and african Languages, , 23 (1), (1994) pp.34-52. The first linguist to recognize the genetic relationship between Dravidian and African languages was the french linguist L. Homburger. Homburger explained the close relationship between Dravidian languages and the Bantu and west atlantic group of African languages back in the 1940's and early 1950's. Her research was confirmed by Upadhyaya, and the Senegalese linguist C.T. N'Diaye who proved conclusively the genetic relationship between Dravidian languages and the West atlantic group of African languages. C.A. Winters, has discussed the proto-Indo-African terms for African and Dravidian languages. he has also illustrated the close relationship of the Dravidian group to Manding, Somali and Nubian. Common Indo African Terms English Dravidian Senegalese Manding Mother amma ama ma pregnancy basaru bir bara skin uri guri guru King mannan mansa mansa Grand biru bur ba Saliva tuppal tuudde tu boat kulam gaal kulu cultivate bey mbey be stream kolli kal koli Pronominal Agreement Language 1P SG 2nd P 3rd P Dravidian an, naa,ne i a Somali ani adigu isagu Nubian anni ir tar Bantu ni u a Manding na, n i a Hausa na kin ya Wolof ma ya na This is some of the evidence which supports the African origin of the Dravidians from a linguistic perspective. Please refer to the articles listed above for more information of this most interesting topic. For information on the Dravidian settlement of East Asia and migration into South India from South East Asia please refer to the following article: C.A. Winters, "The Far eastern Origin of the Tamils", , no. 27, (1985) pp.65-92. I hope this information can help you in understanding the African origin of the Dravidian speaking people from a linguistic standpoint. C.A. Winters From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Sat Mar 15 12:56:09 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 12:56:09 +0000 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe In-Reply-To: from "Clyde A. Winters" at Mar 13, 97 08:59:58 pm Message-ID: Right, well, somebody has to say it, so it might as well be me. I am neither a Dravidianist nor any kind of Africanist, but I am a historical linguist, and I have some idea what linguistics looks like, and I don't see any here. C. A. Winters writes as follows in defense of some kind of Dravidian-African link: ************************************************************ > The first linguist to recognize the genetic relationship between > Dravidian and African languages was the french linguist > L. Homburger. Homburger explained the close relationship between > Dravidian languages and the Bantu and west atlantic group of African > languages back in the 1940's and early 1950's. "[C]lose"? Bantu isn't even very closely related to West Atlantic, though at least they *are* related. > Her research was confirmed by Upadhyaya, and the Senegalese linguist > C.T. N'Diaye who proved conclusively the genetic relationship > between Dravidian languages and the West atlantic group of African > languages. *Only* West Atlantic? Nothing else? > C.A. Winters, has discussed the proto-Indo-African terms > for African and Dravidian languages. he has also illustrated the > close relationship of the Dravidian group to Manding, Somali and > Nubian. This is absurd. Whatever "Manding" is, it's presumably Niger-Congo. Somali is Afro-Asiatic. Nubian is a group of languages commonly assigned to Nilo-Saharan. These three families are not known to be related at all. Now Winters is relating Dravidian to *all* of them at once? > Common Indo African Terms > English Dravidian Senegalese Manding > Mother amma ama ma > pregnancy basaru bir bara > skin uri guri guru > King mannan mansa mansa > Grand biru bur ba > Saliva tuppal tuudde tu > boat kulam gaal kulu > cultivate bey mbey be > stream kolli kal koli Dravidian is not a language, but a large family, so where do these words come from? If they're reconstructed Proto-Dravidian (I doubt it), they should have asterisks; if they're from a particular language, this should be identified; if they're from several languages, shame. And what on earth is "Senegalese"? I can find no record of such a language. Are we talking about Wolof, or what? And again I have little idea what "Manding" is supposed to be: is it even a single language? Nursery words like /ama/ `mother' have no business being cited in comparisons: they are worthless as evidence. The same is true of imitative words like /tu-/ for `spit, saliva', which are found all over the planet: Basque, Burushaski, Caucasian, Yeniseian -- you name it. And the rest? A little list of miscellaneous chance resemblances, of the sort that can always be found between arbitrary languages. > Pronominal Agreement > Language 1P SG 2nd P 3rd P > Dravidian an, naa,ne i a > Somali ani adigu isagu > Nubian anni ir tar > Bantu ni u a > Manding na, n i a > Hausa na kin ya > Wolof ma ya na A wild mixture of African languages and sub-families from unrelated families all over the continent. Half the languages cited aren't even identified. Sorry, Mr. Winters. This isn't evidence for anything. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Sat Mar 15 15:54:34 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 10:54:34 EST Subject: No subject Message-ID: ------------------ Original message (ID=2378D9) (79 lines) ---------------- -- Return-Path: Received: from UNIVSCVM (NJE origin SMTP at UNIVSCVM) by VM.SC.EDU (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 1911; Fri, 14 Mar 1997 19:18:46 -0500 Received: from mailhost.pi.net by VM.SC.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R3) with TCP; Fri, 14 Mar 97 19:18:45 EST Received: from mcv (asd45.pi.net [145.220.192.45]) by mailhost.pi.net (8.8.3/8.7.1) with SMTP id BAA20231 for ; Sat, 15 Mar 1997 01:19:01 +0100 (MET) Posted-Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 01:19:01 +0100 (MET) Message-Id: <199703150019.BAA20231 at mailhost.pi.net> Comments: Authenticated sender is From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" To: HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 01:19:09 +0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe Reply-to: mcv at pi.net Priority: normal In-reply-to: References: <199703131919.LAA02071 at netcom16.netcom.com> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v2.52) Clyde Winters wrote: > Common Indo African Terms > > English Dravidian Senegalese Manding There is no such language as "Senegalese". I take it you mean Wolof. > Mother amma ama ma > Saliva tuppal tuudde tu These two are meaningless. I can give dozens of languages with the same "ma" and "tu" words. > pregnancy basaru bir bara > Grand biru bur ba > King mannan mansa mansa What happened with Dravidian -sa- in ? Or with Wolof/Mandingo -sa- in ? > boat kulam gaal kulu > stream kolli kal koli > skin uri guri guru Sound laws? > cultivate bey mbey be Right... > Pronominal Agreement > Language 1P SG 2nd P 3rd P > Dravidian an, naa,ne i a > Somali ani adigu isagu > Nubian anni ir tar > Bantu ni u a > Manding na, n i a > Hausa na kin ya > Wolof ma ya na Are you aware of twentieth-century advances in African linguistics? Somali is a Cushitic language of the Afro-Asiatic phylum. Hausa is a Chadic language, also Afro-Asiatic. And Nubian is a West Sudanic language (Nilo-Saharan). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at pi.net From cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU Tue Mar 18 21:57:23 1997 From: cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU (Clyde A. Winters) Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 15:57:23 -0600 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 15 Mar 1997, Larry Trask wrote: > Right, well, somebody has to say it, so it might as well be me. I am > neither a Dravidianist nor any kind of Africanist, but I am a > historical linguist, and I have some idea what linguistics looks like, > and I don't see any here. > > C. A. Winters writes as follows in defense of some kind of > Dravidian-African link: > > ************************************************************ > > > The first linguist to recognize the genetic relationship between > > Dravidian and African languages was the french linguist > > L. Homburger. Homburger explained the close relationship between > > Dravidian languages and the Bantu and west atlantic group of African > > languages back in the 1940's and early 1950's. > > "[C]lose"? Bantu isn't even very closely related to West Atlantic, > though at least they *are* related. > > > Her research was confirmed by Upadhyaya, and the Senegalese linguist > > C.T. N'Diaye who proved conclusively the genetic relationship > > between Dravidian languages and the West atlantic group of African > > languages. > > *Only* West Atlantic? Nothing else? > > > C.A. Winters, has discussed the proto-Indo-African terms > > for African and Dravidian languages. he has also illustrated the > > close relationship of the Dravidian group to Manding, Somali and > > Nubian. > > This is absurd. Whatever "Manding" is, it's presumably Niger-Congo. > Somali is Afro-Asiatic. Nubian is a group of languages commonly > assigned to Nilo-Saharan. These three families are not known to be > related at all. Now Winters is relating Dravidian to *all* of them at > once? Manding is the term used to refer to the Malinke and Bambara languages. Moreover you have made the distinction that Somali is not related to the Other Black African languages this distinction is not accepted by most linguist of African languages that are of afrrican descent and know and speak the languages every day. The terms used in this discussion are mainly taken from the Tamil Family of Dravidian languages. > > > Common Indo African Terms > > > English Dravidian Senegalese Manding > > Mother amma ama ma > > pregnancy basaru bir bara > > skin uri guri guru > > King mannan mansa mansa > > Grand biru bur ba > > Saliva tuppal tuudde tu > > boat kulam gaal kulu > > cultivate bey mbey be > > stream kolli kal koli > The reason we can find analogy between the Senegambian (Wolof, Fula etc.) and the Manding and Dravidian languages result from their origin in Middle Africa. > Dravidian is not a language, but a large family, so where do these > words come from? If they're reconstructed Proto-Dravidian (I doubt > it), they should have asterisks; if they're from a particular > language, this should be identified; if they're from several > languages, shame. And what on earth is "Senegalese"? I can find no > record of such a language. Are we talking about Wolof, or what? And > again I have little idea what "Manding" is supposed to be: is it even > a single language? > > Nursery words like /ama/ `mother' have no business being cited in > comparisons: they are worthless as evidence. The same is true of > imitative words like /tu-/ for `spit, saliva', which are found all > over the planet: Basque, Burushaski, Caucasian, Yeniseian -- you name > it. > > And the rest? A little list of miscellaneous chance resemblances, of > the sort that can always be found between arbitrary languages. > These resemblances can not be called chance resemblances because of the clear analogy in their construction and meaning. > > Pronominal Agreement > > Language 1P SG 2nd P 3rd P > > Dravidian an, naa,ne i a > > Somali ani adigu isagu > > Nubian anni ir tar > > Bantu ni u a > > Manding na, n i a > > Hausa na kin ya > > Wolof ma ya na This is clear evidence of a close relationship between all of these languages as pointed out by Obenga and other African linguist. C.A. Winters From cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU Tue Mar 18 22:37:28 1997 From: cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU (Clyde A. Winters) Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 16:37:28 -0600 Subject: Tamil, Sumerian and Manding In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In the past debate many comments have been made about Greenberg's division of African languages. Although this view of African languages is accepted by many linguists some African linguists, led By Theophile Obenga disagree with this view of African languages. As a result I have presented a view of African languages which recognizes the languages spoken by most black Africans as one family given the grammatical and lexical affinities present among these languages. As I said earlier the Dravidian speaking people , the Elamites and Sumerians originated in Middle Africa below is some of the partial evidence to support this view. The is alternation of /b/, /f/ and /p/, and /d/ and /t/ in the Manding (Malinke-Bambara), Sumerian and Tamil languages English Sumerian Manding Tamil to heat, roast bil, bir bo to free bur buru to blow bun bu, bo-n porridge baba bulo parai old man baba-a baba town bar furu free bur foro sack, container bar fara ruler bara fara to shine itu du tulanku to recite sid siti to take dug du tekku soul ti dyo ulatu to push,press teg dege,telu tullu copper urudu kuuta uruttiran hole, cavity dul, tul du, tyolo tulai k g work kin ki ceykai [recious,best kal ka aruka arrow kak kala kakam boat kalam kulu kalam mountain kur kuru kunru granary, thrashing floor kur k'ur-k'ur kutir l l road sila sila caalai man lu al water bal al send, transport bala,bal b'la m m woman manus mansa mannan male mu moko makkal n n eye ini, en nya kan image nu n'ya body ni ni 'principal niram of life r r ear bur toro kurai to tear bir piri fori s s to buy se se to recite sid siti seed she se Grammatical Similarities The negative suffix in Manding is na, which is preceeded by ka and nt'i, e.g., kalu mba nt'. In the Sumerian languages the negation of the verb is expressed by the prefixes nu and la, e.g., nu-zu "not to know". The optative mood of the negative in Sumerian is formed by the -na element, na-ma pad "may she not'. This agrees with the Manding use of the -na element to form the negative. Parts of the body English Sumerian Tamil Manding heart, mind ul ul su body ni niram ni flesh uzu uu subu tongue eme naa na bone gir kura kura nose bun muso,mugu nu foot gir karal koro These are just a few of the analogous lexical items from Sumerian, Tamil and the Manding languages which illustrate the genetic relationship between these languages. C. A. Winters From gonzalor at JHU.EDU Wed Mar 19 02:12:28 1997 From: gonzalor at JHU.EDU (Gonzalo Rubio) Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 21:12:28 -0500 Subject: Sumerian, Manding, Somali, and "whatever" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Well, just to keep the record straight and spend some spare time, let's go through Mr. Winters' "Sumerian evidence": - bir does not mean "to heat", but "to scatter, disperse". - there is no "bur" meaning "to free", there are several "bur", but meaning "(stone) bowl", "food offering", and others attested in few texts, and whose meaning is very obscure. - bun doesn't mean "to blow", but "nose" and "breath". - his "baba-a" (actually ba-ba-a), meaning "old man" is a hapax legomenon, attested ONLY in one syllabic vocabulary from Ugarit (AS 16: 36, ba-ba-a = pur-$u-mu). - bar does not mean "town", but "outside, side, back, edge, etc.", and there is other bar meaning "liver", but no town, no town. I could go on, and on, and on for ever ("manus" is munus; he ignores the "numbers" of the signs, so "ruler" is bara2, not "bara"; "eye" is igi in Sumerian --his "ini, en" is obviously Semitic, cf. Akkadian i:nu, e:nu, etc., etc., etc...). Most of the words (almost all) in Mr. Winters' "Sumerian" column happen not to exist, are absolutely wrong, or mean completely different things. I'd like to be very respectful and there is nothing personal in this, but Mr. Winters' list illustrates *nothing* but the fact that he doesn't know Sumerian at all, and his "methodology" is anything but methodology. Moreover, I do not understand his mixing terms concerning ethnicity, race (whatever that is), and language, as in "Black African Languages". Somali is an East Cushitic language (concretely, Lowland East Cushitic), like Oromo, Bayso, Boni, etc. East Cushitic languages belong to the Afroasiatic macro-family. I'm afraid, Mr. Winters is far from being familiar with any scholarship on Cushitic (Ehret, Diakonoff, Dolgopolskij, Gragg, etc.). Furthermore, the way he uses the term "Manding" is misleading, and against all the current stuff about Mande studies (Dwyer, Mukarovsky, Welmers, De Wolf, etc.). I dare suggest he should look at two very basic overviews: D. J. Dwyer. "Mande". In _The Niger-Congo Languages_, ed. J. Bendor-Samuel. Pp. 47-65. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1989. P. P. De Wolf. "Das Niger-Congo (ohne Bantu)". In _Die Sprachen Afrikas_, ed. B. Heine et al. Pp. 45-76. Hamburg: Helmut Buske, 1981. I'm sorry if I sound rude, and I have no intention of hurting Mr. Winters' feelings --I'm sure he is a respectable and decent person. However, it is rather disappointing when someone tries to present that kind of marginal and amateurish stuff as a sort of "scientific truth". ------------------------ Gonzalo Rubio Near Eastern Studies Johns Hopkins University gonzalor at jhu.edu ------------------------ From bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Wed Mar 19 05:46:19 1997 From: bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU (benji wald) Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 21:46:19 -0800 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe Message-ID: Infra dig, but C. A. Winters wrote: >Moreover you have made the distinction that Somali is not related to the >Other Black African languages this distinction is not accepted by most >linguist of African languages that are of afrrican descent and know and >speak the languages every day. This misrepresents what Trask said. He said Mande is a branch of Niger-Congo, while Somali is not. It is a branch of Cushitic, in turn a branch of Afro-Asiatic. What Winter calls "Black Africans" speak Cushitic as well as Niger-Congo languages. Trask never said they didn't. He just said the two types of languages have never been demonstrated to be genetically related, while Clyde's Dravidian-"African" hypothesis presupposes (without argument other than racial, it seems) that they are. Somehow, Clyde seems to want to obscure this point for purposes of asserting the linguists of African descent agree with him and not Trask. No Somali that I know, linguist or not, thinks that Somali is more closely related to Bantu or any other Niger-Congo language than it is to Cushitic, and even to Arabic (which is also Afro-Asiatic). Similarly, no speaker of Mwini (Bantu: Niger-Congo), a language spoken in Somalia closely related to Swahili, thinks that Mwini is related to Somali, and that despite numerous Somali loanwords in Mwini. I doubt that Clyde has any names to back up his assertion who, in fact, speak Somali or any other relevant African language. He seems to be somehow confusedly and racistically arguing that the opinion of some African linguist (and perhaps only one) is worth more than some non-African linguist, regardless of knowledge of relevant languages, linguistic expertise, or, above all, method. His argument, to the extent that it is not totally truncated, is totally absurd. With regard to some resemblances across some Dravidian and "African" languages, Clyde wrote: >These resemblances can not be called chance resemblances because of the >clear analogy in their construction and meaning. This is the extent of Clyde's argument. I suggest that such arguments do not require further response, and that further discussion of Clyde's hypothesis, within his mode of arguing, is a matter of theology, not of linguistics. Linguists can only argue with those who accept linguistic (scientific) forms of argumentation. Linguists cannot argue against matters of unshakable conviction, which is what Clyde's hypothesis is to him. -- Benji From bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Wed Mar 19 05:46:30 1997 From: bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU (benji wald) Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 21:46:30 -0800 Subject: the meaning of "genetic relationship" Message-ID: There is a point about "genetic relationship" that I think is worth considering, because I think both sides on various controversies about it tend to ignore it. To begin with, we can take Ruhlen Merritt's fallacious argument that reconstruction presupposes genetic relationship, which he takes to mean that genetic relationship has already been "established" before comparative reconstruction can begin. For him it is established on the basis of the kinds of Greenbergian mass comparisons which have figured (or been attempted to figure) most recently in this list in the discussion of the relationship between Dravidian and the African families -- and, admittedly, in Greenberg's division of African languages into four genetic families, now generally accepted -- but not without further testing and refinement. Against the mass comparison method, other historical linguists have inevitably argued about the confounding effects of borrowing and chance resemblances. My thought, as follows, is that when we talk about genetic relationships among LANGUAGES, rather than parts of the lexicon, morphology etc etc, both sides obscure something. Thus, first, against Merritt's argument. He's absolutely wrong. Mass comparison gives the basis for a genetic HYPOTHESIS. Comparative reconstruction TESTS that hypothesis. Without it nothing has been proven, not genetic relationship, borrowing or chance resemblance. Next, to the extent that a comparative reconstruction is successful it does NOT demonstrate that the "languages" involved are genetically related, but only that those PARTS of the languages which are reconstructed are genetically related. Of course, it provides confidence that other parts of those languages are also genetically related, but, again, that is only DEMONSTRATED when reliable comparative reconstruction is performed on those other parts. Otherwise, it remains only a possibility. Creoles and mized languages show that genetic relationship of some parts of a set of languages do not always presuppose that other parts of the same languages are necessarily GENETICALLY related. And indeed, it is well-known that all languages borrow as well as genetically inherit. Thus, speaking about genetic relationship among "languages" as "wholes" is loose talk. The internal structure of trees intending to show branching genetic relationships are always a problem because different parts of a set of languages are not always related in the same way. Innovations begin in different areas and have different spreads according to the time of contact and subsequent events. This is well-known from dialect geography, but adds confusion to arguments about genetic relationship. Sometimes, it does little harm, but when we are in the mass comparison stage, it can result in much futile argument. Having said this, I admit that the poor quality of Winter's data and arguments have been worth pointing out. But I see no reason to postpone my thoughts until more competent proposals flare up. -- Benji From mcv at PI.NET Wed Mar 19 06:55:05 1997 From: mcv at PI.NET (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 06:55:05 +0000 Subject: Tamil, Sumerian and Manding In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Clyde Winters wrote: Just some comments on the Sumerian. > English Sumerian Manding Tamil > to heat, roast bil, bir bo bil = "to burn" bir = "to scatter" > to free bur buru bur2 = "to bare, to spread out (a garment), to loosen, to reveal" > to blow bun bu, bo-n This verb is variously given as bug~, bul, bun, actual pronunciation unclear [ may have been something like , ]. > porridge baba bulo parai Word unknown to me. Doesn't really matter, given that the Malinke and Tamil are not very similar at all. [This comment applies to most of the entries in the list, so I won't repeat it after this point]. > old man baba-a baba "old man, father" = ab.ba (probably Semitic loanword). > town bar furu "town" = uru (probably /iri/ or /eri/). > free bur foro Didn't we discuss this one just now? Ah, but the Manding word has changed... > sack, container bar fara bar = "skin" > ruler bara fara bara2.g = "sovereign; shrine" > to shine itu du tulanku itu = "moon" > to recite sid siti s^id = "to count, to recite, to read aloud" > to take dug du tekku can mean a lot of things (dug3="good, sweet; knee", dug4="to say", etc.), but not "to take". What is meant is probably tuku "to have". > soul ti dyo ulatu Yes, "rib, arrow, soul". > to push,press teg dege,telu tullu That's probably "to touch", zag...tag "to push, to put off". > copper urudu kuuta uruttiran Yes, urudu = "copper". I'll add the Tamil word to my collection of wandering metal words. Interesting. > hole, cavity dul, tul du, tyolo tulai Don't know this word. There's a verb "to dig (with a hoe)". > work kin ki ceykai Yes, kin...ak = "to work", where means "to do, make". Not sure what means, though. I've seen it as "sickle". > precious,best kal ka aruka kal = "mighty, strong" > arrow kak kala kakam I've got "arrow" as . () means "(wooden) peg". I've got a compound "arrow", from Hittite texts, but I'm not sure it's really Sumerian. > boat kalam kulu kalam kalam = "land". "boat" is ma2. > mountain kur kuru kunru You're absolutely right: kur (or hur.sag~) is "mountain". > granary, > threshing floor kur k'ur-k'ur kutir That's . > road sila sila caalai Don't know this word (except as a measure, sila2). Road is , I think. > man lu al , yes. > water bal al water = > send, transport bala,bal b'la Probably refers to "to cross, to transfer, to pour off" > woman manus mansa mannan "woman" = munus > male mu moko makkal male = nita(h) > eye ini, en nya kan eye = igi > image nu n'ya Don't know this word. I've got "statue, body", "figure". > body ni ni niram ni2 means "self". For body, I've got ad6 ("trunk") and alam ("statue"). > ear bur toro kurai ear = g~es^tug. Usually, people invent Sumerian words to *look like* the words they're supoposed to match. The above approach is new to me... > to tear bir piri fori bir = "to scatter". To "tear out" = bu.r, bu3.r. > to buy se se sa10 = "to buy, to sell" > to recite sid siti See s^id above. > seed she se s^e = "barley" > Grammatical Similarities > > The negative suffix in Manding is na, which is preceeded by ka and > nt'i, e.g., kalu mba nt'. In the Sumerian languages the negation of the > verb is expressed by the prefixes nu and la, e.g., nu-zu "not to know". > The optative mood of the negative in Sumerian is formed by the -na > element, na-ma pad "may she not'. This agrees with the Manding use of the > -na element to form the negative. The Sumerian prefix can be prohibitive ("do not") or affirmative ("indeed") depending on the aspect of the verb. > Parts of the body > > English Sumerian Tamil Manding > heart, mind ul ul su s^a3.g = "heart" > body ni niram ni see above. > flesh uzu uu subu yes, /utsu/. > tongue eme naa na indeed, with an /m/. > bone gir kura kura I must say I don't know the word for "bone" in Sumerian. > nose bun muso,mugu nu kiri4 = "nose" > foot gir karal koro g~iri3 = "foot" [Sumerian words given to the best of my knowledge, but there may be a few errors here and there. If so, and any experts are reading, I'd like to know about it.] In summary, I'd say there's little reason to continue this discussion. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at pi.net From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Mar 19 12:44:00 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 12:44:00 +0000 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe In-Reply-To: from "Clyde A. Winters" at Mar 18, 97 03:57:23 pm Message-ID: Clyde Winters writes: > Manding is the term used to refer to the Malinke and Bambara > languages. Moreover you have made the distinction that Somali is > not related to the Other Black African languages this distinction is > not accepted by most linguist of African languages that are of > afrrican descent and know and speak the languages every day. First, `Black African languages' is, at best, a purely geographical label, and a rather unfortunate one, at that: I would suggest `sub-Saharan languages', if a geographical label is required. Nothing whatever can be presumed in advance of investigation as to what connections, if any, might exist among these languages. In fact, considerable investigation has been carried out, resulting in the surprisingly small total of just four groupings for *all* African languages. Of these, Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic appear to be accepted by all specialists as established genetic families. Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan are more controversial, and the genetic unity of each is at present regarded by many specialists as unsubstantiated, though we continue to use these names as convenient geographical labels. Second, Somali belongs to the Cushitic branch of Afro-Asiatic, and its genetic connections therefore lie with languages in northern and eastern Africa and in the Middle East. Of evidence to connect Somali with the majority of sub-Saharan languages there is none. > The terms used in this discussion are mainly taken from the Tamil > Family of Dravidian languages. Fine. But Tamil (normally regarded as a single language) is unquestionably Dravidian, and a good deal of comparative work has been done on Dravidian. It is inappropriate to cite specifically Tamil forms if Proto-Dravidian forms are available. One must always use the earliest forms that are available and secure. > > > Common Indo African Terms > > > English Dravidian Senegalese Manding > > > Mother amma ama ma > > > pregnancy basaru bir bara > > > skin uri guri guru > > > King mannan mansa mansa > > > Grand biru bur ba > > > Saliva tuppal tuudde tu > > > boat kulam gaal kulu > > > cultivate bey mbey be > > > stream kolli kal koli > The reason we can find analogy between the Senegambian (Wolof, > Fula etc.) and the Manding and Dravidian languages result from their > origin in Middle Africa. No. The reason we can find these forms is that *all* languages exhibit miscellaneous chance resemblances. It could not be otherwise, unless languages were exempt from the ordinary laws of probability -- and they are not. Miscellaneous resemblances of this sort can be found between any arbitrary languages whatever. Hardly a week goes by that somebody doesn't produce just such a list of miscellaneous resemblances between some surprising languages: Scots Gaelic and Algonquian, Hungarian and Sumerian, Ainu and Norwegian -- you name it. I've done it myself. Miscellaneous chance resemblances are *always* present, and they are devoid of significance. Do you seriously suppose that, when Tamil-speakers were choosing their word for `boat', they got together to discuss it and made remarks like "Wait a minute -- we can't have that word, because they're already using it in Wolof"? > > Nursery words like /ama/ `mother' have no business being cited in > > comparisons: they are worthless as evidence. The same is true of > > imitative words like /tu-/ for `spit, saliva', which are found all > > over the planet: Basque, Burushaski, Caucasian, Yeniseian -- you name > > it. > > And the rest? A little list of miscellaneous chance resemblances, of > > the sort that can always be found between arbitrary languages. > These resemblances can not be called chance resemblances because of > the clear analogy in their construction and meaning. They *can* be called chance resemblances, because they *are* chance resemblances. Would you like me to demonstrate this? Let's look at you next table. > > > Pronominal Agreement > > > Language 1P SG 2nd P 3rd P > > > Dravidian an, naa,ne i a > > > Somali ani adigu isagu > > > Nubian anni ir tar > > > Bantu ni u a > > > Manding na, n i a > > > Hausa na kin ya > > > Wolof ma ya na > This is clear evidence of a close relationship between all of these > languages as pointed out by Obenga and other African linguist. Nope. Let me draw attention to Basque, which I choose because it's my favorite language. The first-person singular pronoun in Basque is /ni/, which matches your languages very well. The second-person singular pronoun is /i/ (written in the standard orthography, but pronounced /i/ by most Basques). Basque has no true third-person pronouns, and it uses demonstratives for the purpose. There is some regional variation in these demonstratives, but all specialists are agreed that the most conservative form of the third-singular distal demonstrative is the western form -- which is /a/. So, Basque, a language spoken on the Atlantic coast of Europe by a conspicuously non-African and non-Indian population, has /ni/, /i/, /a/, which matches both "Dravidian" and "Manding" better than most of the other languages you cite, and far better than Somali. Moreover, the universal Basque word for `mother' is -- wait for it -- /ama/, which matches both "Senegalese" and "Manding" fantastically well. And what is Basque for `spit, saliva'? Ready? It's /tu/ -- which matches "Manding" perfectly, and matches both "Dravidian" and "Senegalese" better than they match each other. So, what can we conclude? There are two possibilities: (1) All this is a waste of time. (2) Basque is *also* a "Black African" language! I prefer the first. If you, Mr. Winters, want to opt for the second, then please count me out. There is an American journal called Mother Tongue which will doubtless be happy to publish your discovery that Basque is an African language, and that the mysterious Basques are therefore descendants of emigrants from central Africa. You can have a great time conversing with a number of other MT contributors, who are busily proving that Basque is related to Abkhaz, Sumerian, Burushaski, Tibetan, Ket, and Apache (no, I am not making this up). But be aware that there already exists a substantial literature proving that Basque is related to African languages, and to the Mande languages in particular. With this approach, you can prove anything you like. You shouldn't find it difficult to prove that Norwegian or Eskimo is an African language, if that's what you want to do. Of course, you'll find it so much easier if, as Gonzalo Rubio has pointed out, you don't worry too much about whether the forms you cite actually exist or actually have the meanings assigned to them. I think you'll get on very well with the good folks at MT, who take a similarly robust view of their data. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Wed Mar 19 17:42:48 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 12:42:48 EST Subject: African and Dravidian Message-ID: Dear HISTLINGers, I do believe that we've exhausted the topic of African and Dravidian linguistic relationships. Following a prerogative of list moderators, I hereby announce that no more discussion of this topic will take place on the list. However, if any of you feel that this topic has not been explored to your satisfaction, you are certainly free to discuss it off-list. The discussion that has ensued over the past few weeks has been lively and informative and I would hate to see HISTLING go to sleep. Would anyone else like to propose a topic for discussion? Dorothy Disteheft From fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG Sat Mar 22 19:51:52 1997 From: fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG (Steven Schaufele) Date: Sat, 22 Mar 1997 13:51:52 -0600 Subject: solid tradition & winds of fashion In-Reply-To: Message-ID: This is in response to Prof. Rasmussen's recent `manifesto', and i am particularly grateful for the opportunity it provides me to get involved, however tangentially, in this discussion. I am a comparative syntactician and syntactic theorist, and my interest in phonology is pretty much limited to what would generally be expected of a comparative linguist and typologist. In short, i've been very interested in following this discussion of the history of certain details of IE morphophonolgy, without feeling that my own areas of expertise had much to contribute. Prof. Rasmussen closed his posting of the 18th in the Indo-European list with the following paragraph: > 6. This has come to be a major manifesto, so let me end by saying that it > is impressive how strong and solid tradition stands in IE Studies. The > good old phonological (better, phonetic) reconstruction of the stops is > good enough for the protolanguage from which all poststages come, and the > verbal system is indeed the one laid down in Brugmann's Grundriss. A few > laryngeals have been added, details of idiosyncratic histories of > particular lexical items are pouring out, and elucidation of the > prehistory of the protolanguage is in a state of revolution, but the > general descriptive picture of the single most important chronological > node represented by the final stage of the protolanguage stands basically > unshaken. In the field of IE scholars have been able to build continuously > on the results of their predecessors, adding ever new facets to the grand > picture in a straight line going back some 200 years. IE Studies have been > on the right track all along and have not had to "change paradigm" with > the whims of fashion. Ours is a healthy branch of linguistics. In *partial* agreement with the sentiments herein expressed, i will begin by recalling a statement by my Doktorvater, Hans Henrich Hock, who when he received his current job at the University of Illinois was told by (i believe) the then department chair, `Historical linguistics is d'emod'e; you should get more involved in generative syntactic or phonological theory; that's where the action is.' (I paraphrase, of course; this is a 3rd-hand retelling) His answer: `Historical linguistics, along with its research paradigm, has been around for over a century. It has survived every paradigm-shift in linguistic science; it will survive this one too.' As a general rule, what Prof. Rasmussen says is quite correct: Unlike a lot of synchronic (theoretical) linguists, who seem to spend a lot of their time reinventing the wheel (in his collection `The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax' Geoff Pullum has an essay on the history of the `unaccusative hypo- thesis' that offers some rather pithy examples), historical linguists in general and Indo-Europeanists in particular have been able to build solid- ly on the research of previous generations, much of which is regarded today as just as solid as when its validity was first established. (Not that there aren't some fuzzy areas. But that's where current research is going on, as in any science. While investigating those fuzzy areas, we can rely with a fair amount of confidence on a large body of previous research.) This is one of the main reasons I have found historical linguistics, in Indo-European and elsewhere, to be of such value for theoretical research. For one thing, it provides the theorist with a lot more data, including a diachronic dimension all too rarely brought to bear in theo- retical discussion. But more importantly, i find that historical- linguistic scholarship can often provide valuable test cases of theore- tical claims, precisely by bringing in that diachronic dimension that makes it possible for us to text whether correlations predicted or implied by a specific line of theoretical thought are actually attested in the processes of language change. I therefore object very strongly to a tendency I see all too often in academic linguistics to impose a dichotomy between theoretical linguis- tics on the one hand and more `empirical', especially historical linguis- tics on the other. I would not for a moment suggest that Prof. Rasmussen himself is guilty of this dichotomy; but i'm feeling rather sensitive on the issue because i've had recently to deal with some researchers who definitely are, on one side or the other. There is a tendency to assume that theorists and comparativists/typologists/reconstructionists have nothing worthwhile to say to each other. Which is a damn shame; the ongoing series of Diachronic Generative Syntax Conferences, for one, is to my mind evidence of the mutual relevance of historical linguistics and linguistic theory, at least in my own field of syntax, and the energy and fascination of these conferences is further evidence that there's a lot of interesting stuff to investigate in this interface. Not only does the discipline of historical linguistics offer linguistic theorists with a lot of data that is not only, as Prof. Rasmussen notes, methodologically reliable, but also *theoretically interesting*; from the other point of view, the ongoing speculations of theoretical linguists continue to raise interesting questions motivating empirical research into historical data. (This is, of course, a large part of the value of scientific theory, that it raises new research questions that might never have occurred under preceding paradigms. In this respect, different from the sense Prof. Rasmussen had in mind, linguistic theory is also a `very healthy' branch of linguistics.) As a result, each is able to enrich the other. Sincerely, Steven Schaufele --------------------- Dr. Steven Schaufele 712 West Washington Urbana, IL 61801 217-344-8240 fcosws at prairienet.org http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html **** O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum! *** *** Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis! *** From gonzalor at JHU.EDU Thu Mar 20 06:45:47 1997 From: gonzalor at JHU.EDU (Gonzalo Rubio) Date: Thu, 20 Mar 1997 01:45:47 -0500 Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... Message-ID: Changing the topic, I'd like to say something more or less unrelated to the last discussion --as a sort of Agustinian "confessio" (actually, the tone of this note may have more to do with my reading of St. Ignatius back in the Jesuits). In many e-mail lists of historical linguistics, ancient languages, or isolated languages (such as Basque), it is quite common to see messages posted by well-intentioned persons who attempt to prove Basque is an Algonquian language, or Albanian is not an Indo-European language, but a dialect of Kechua. It is nice to see that so many people are interested in languages within their historical context as a result of their amazement at both diversity and resemblance. However, one may wonder why so many of these well-intentioned ladies and gentlemen share their speculations with the scientific community almost *only* in our field(s). Scholars working on Quantum Physics, Psychology, or even History, don't have to deal with this deluge of "proposals" from outsiders or amateurs. If I tell my father I have a new interesting contribution to some surgical procedure (he's a physician), he would look at me with a very ironic smile and say "don't you have anything better to do?". Within this context, one may wonder what is the true epistemological nature of historical linguistics. When a teenager, I was completely in love with the idea that Basque was "the daughter" of Iberian. However, once I did study both Basque and the Iberian inscriptions (as far as we can understand them) in the University, I broke up with that lovely fiction. Now, slightly older and, who knows, perhaps somewhat wiser, I'm an Assyriologist who works especially on Sumerian (so, a Sumerologist). It is quite curious that a person who was (and is) that interested in historical linguistics, has ended up working in one (Sumerian) of the few completely isolated languages (together with Basque and Burushaski). It is natural that people, especially those who don't know a single word on these completely isolated languages, or even on historical linguistics, have some curiosity about them. And that's the beginning of the deluge. Does any of you know how many theories on the linguistic filiation of, for instance, Sumerian have been proposed? Well, just by heart, I can list several: - Dravidian (Aiyar, David, Sathasivam, Koskinen, Quintana) - the Indus Valley inscriptions --which nobody can read, but might be Dravidian, according to Asko Parpola's last book-- (Kinnier Wilson) - different Caucasian languages (Bork, Knobloch) - Indo-European (Autran, Holmer) - Old Persian (Schildmann) - Polynesian and Amerindian languages (Stucken) - "Sino-Caucasian"/"Dene-Caucasian" (Bengston, Blazek, Boisson) - "Uralo-Altaic" (Boisson, Zakar) - Hungarian (Gostony --if you want to have a good laugh, read the reviews of his _Dictionaire d'etymologie sumerienne..._ by Edzard, in _BSOAS 39 [1976], and by Hrushka, in _OLZ_ 74 [1979]) - "Nostratic" (Boisson, Bomhard, Koskinen) Rather than in this "comparative" stuff, I have found many interesting suggestions in those papers devoted to Wanderwoerter, Kulturwoerter, or Arealwoerter --especially those by Boisson, Blazek, and Militarev, three scholars whose stuff on this topic (Wanderwoerter and very early loans) is always a pleasure to read, although one may disagree with some of their points. However, most of the allegedly comparative studies I have just mentioned and have read very carefully in the last years, remind me of the title of the book published by le Chevalier de Paravey in 1885, _Memoire sur l'o¢rigin japonais, arabe et basque de la civilisation des peuple du plateau de Bogota_ (yes, it's Bogota, Colombia). My note/"confessio" is not about Sumerian, but about this amazing phenomenon: hundreds of well-intentioned dilettanti devoting their time and energy to the search for the Grail of linguistic filiations. Actually, somehow I admire them. Aren't they "the last Romantics"...? ------------------------ Gonzalo Rubio Near Eastern Studies Johns Hopkins University gonzalor at jhu.edu ------------------------ From alderson at NETCOM.COM Sat Mar 22 23:07:19 1997 From: alderson at NETCOM.COM (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Sat, 22 Mar 1997 15:07:19 -0800 Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... In-Reply-To: (message from Gonzalo Rubio on Thu, 20 Mar 1997 01:45:47 -0500) Message-ID: Gonzalo Rubio wrote: >However, one may wonder why so many of these well-intentioned ladies and >gentlemen share their speculations with the scientific community almost >*only* in our field(s). Scholars working on Quantum Physics, Psychology, >or even History, don't have to deal with this deluge of "proposals" from >outsiders or amateurs. I would like simply to note that this appears not to be true, based on the content of certain Usenet newsgroups. While many people equate "Usenet" with "sex pictures" and "massive cross-posting of unwanted commercials", there are many newsgroups still devoted to serious discussion of topics in physics, history, archaeology, and even psychology. (I have to admit that I have never spent any time in this last newsgroup, so what I have to say does not pertain thereto.) There are equivalent kinds of nonsense posted regarding Velikovskyan astronomy, Atlantean archaeology & history, and faster-than-light/time-travel physics, all greeted with the same incredulity by practitioners of those fields as we greet linguistic nonsense--and there are those who attempt to reason with the posters as well as those who swear that the mainstream is trying to keep the "truth" from the public. I used to do this in the area of historical linguistics; life is simply too short, after a while. So I would say no, there is no field that does not have its equivalent set of amateurs dead set on converting the world to some revealed truth or other. Rich Alderson From bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Sun Mar 23 02:37:42 1997 From: bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU (benji wald) Date: Sat, 22 Mar 1997 18:37:42 -0800 Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... Message-ID: I found the message by Gonzalo Rubio on the subject topic charming and thought-provoking. I particularly appreciated the pride of discipline (and I do mean "discipline") implicit in his passage: >If I tell my father I have a new interesting >contribution to some surgical procedure (he's a physician), he would look >at me with a very ironic smile and say "don't you have anything better to >do?". Within this context, one may wonder what is the true epistemological >nature of historical linguistics. With regard to the last sentence appended to the main thought of this passage, I would like to respond to it in combination with his later comment: >... about this amazing >phenomenon: hundreds of well-intentioned dilettanti devoting their time >and energy to the search for the Grail of linguistic filiations. Actually, >somehow I admire them. Aren't they "the last Romantics"...? Indeed the word "Romantic" is well chosen. It is a tribute to historical linguistics that it has captured the imagination of so many dilletantes that they have devoted so much of their spare time to their pet theories. I assume "spare time", because their naive methodologies suggest that they have not had the privilege (if I can use that word) of studying or appreciating the methodological issues which have evolved out of the original insight of the "genetic hypothesis" over the last 200 years. I say it is a tribute to historical linguistics, because it is the success of its methods that has given the genetic hypothesis its prestige and scientific standing -- considerations which encourage the dilettantes to want to make a contribution, though their lack of training/discipline prevents them from appreciating what is involved. Having said that, I also want to draw attention to the fact that those scholars who developed the methodology to back up the genetic hypothesis, most notably the method of comparative reconstruction, were inspired by the same EXTRA-linguistic impulses that motivate the dilettantes. The developers of Indo-European, most indefatiguably various German-speaking scholars of the 19th c., were inspired in an era which is generally called the "Romantic" era (or movement) in (European) history. They were particularly concerned with establishing the historical roots of their own nations (i.e., cultures) and legitimising their sense of nationalistic identity. As scholars they were driven, actually compelled by scholarly criticism, to go beyond mere assertion to develop the methods which give meaning to the genetic hypothesis and the phenomena underlying it. In this they departed from the dilettantes. They were interested in acquiring knowledge, not simply in egotistically claiming to possess it. This is where they differ from prophets proclaiming revealed truths and kindred myth-propagators. As in all sciences (as Richard M. Alderson III reminds us in his response to Gonzalo's message), a gap develops between those who simply appreciate a problem, and those who seriously develop methods to solve it -- and respond to criticism in so doing (and I don't mean to suggest that scholars resent criticism of their ideas any less than the dilettantes, but that scholars respect the criticism enough to do something about it -- in fact, they respect themselves and their desire for secure knowledge enough to do something about it. Of course, their concern for their standing within the community of scholars also forces them to do something about it. This is an advantage they have over the dilettantes who can be content to make excuses dismissive of criticism, So, scholars, be happy that you are criticised by other scholars.) Thus, it is not "amazing" that there are so many dilettantes interested in residual problems. Historical linguistics grew out of that originally dilettantish interest (which has various, probably even universal, cultural roots in concern with social identity). The difference is that scholarship has passed the dilettantes by. They only dimly understand the reasons for the success of historical linguistics, and are hardly aware of the problems which had to be overcome. Getting back to the motives for development of the genetic hypothesis, I suppose to some extent historical linguists are still driven by extra-linguistic considerations, having to do with a concern about human (cultural) history, and even the more specific challenges of isolated languages contrasting with the numerous successes of the genetic hypothesis and partial historical reconstruction of so many distinct language families. However, this is obviously NOT the guiding motivation for those historical linguists who continue to explore and reformulate the nature of Indo-European and various other language families which have already long been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt. Possibly in the back of their minds is the hope that if they can get these details right, they may have a chance to extend genetic affiliations further. Fine, as long as it stays in the BACK of their minds (until it deserves to come to the fore, which is not yet). Meanwhile, as the methodology of the genetic hypothesis and historical reconstruction developed, other INTRA-linguistic issues emerged which are the SUBSTANCE of historical linguistics but are hardly ever appreciated, much less addressed, by dilettantes, who remain uniquely inspired by the original notion of genetic relationship. These intra-linguistic issues involve the notion of "possible linguistic change" or "constraints on linguistic change". Reconstruction is not possible without this notion, and the genetic hypothesis is not meaningful without reconstruction. At this point, reconstruction no longer becomes an end in itself for the historical linguist, but a means to develop methodology and ideas about possible linguistic changes and constraints on linguistic change. These become of intrinsic interest, rather than just means to an end. Reconstruction becomes more than "recovery" of a proto-language, proto-state, or proto-historical situation, but reconstruction of a PATH of historical evolution from that proto-whatever to the observable present. It seems to me that without this consideration, interest in recovery of proto-whatevers is relatively trivial, an old-fashioned concern originally motivated by establishment of cultural "legitimacy", ancestor-worship, etc., and, in any case, not trust-worthy. Historical linguistics is a journey, not a known destination. It's just like any other science in this respect. It would be nice if we could get this message down to the dilettantes. Then what they do with their spare time might be more interesting and useful, and we would not have to deal with the professional barrier that separates us from them and breeds mistrust on both sides. -- Benji From fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG Sun Mar 23 03:13:33 1997 From: fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG (Steven Schaufele) Date: Sat, 22 Mar 1997 21:13:33 -0600 Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 20 Mar 1997, Gonzalo Rubio wrote: > However, one may wonder why so many of these well-intentioned ladies and > gentlemen share their speculations with the scientific community almost > *only* in our field(s). Scholars working on Quantum Physics, Psychology, > or even History, don't have to deal with this deluge of "proposals" from > outsiders or amateurs. If I tell my father I have a new interesting > contribution to some surgical procedure (he's a physician), he would look > at me with a very ironic smile and say "don't you have anything better to > do?". Within this context, one may wonder what is the true epistemological > nature of historical linguistics. Actually, i think a caveat should be issued here. As i understand it, scholars working in quantum physics, etc., *do* have to deal with something like what Rubio is describing. I seem to remember hearing/ reading a complaint to a science reporter from a major-league, Nobel- prize-winning physicist at some Ivy League university (i can't find the citation at the moment) that a certain amount of his daily office time was taken up with trying to (politely) turn away letters, etc. from cranks claiming to have discovered antigravity, or things like that. I wouldn't be surprised, however, if it were only Nobel prizewinners who have to deal with this; they have the notoriety that invites that kind of garbage. As Geoff Pullum noted in one of his essays in The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, there's no equivalent of the Nobel Prize in our profession. On the other hand, language has a universal fascination that seems to exceed that of mere physics. All intelligent humans seem, at whatever conscious or subconscious cognitive level, to have a sense that language is a fundamental aspect of human nature. So they're avidly curious about it. And relationships intrigue them; partly, of course, because of the fallacious but easy-to-fall-into belief that linguistic relationship is symptomatic of cultural or even biological relationship -- e.g., Hitler's ridiculous conclusion that the English were somehow more `German' than the French because, unlike the French, they were still speaking a Germanic language. So there are lots of people out there who are really fascinated by the subject matter of comparative and historical linguis- tics, a lot more, i daresay, than are fascinated by the mysteries of quantum mechanics, fascinating as those nevertheless are. And i think we need to encourage these people and their fascination. Partly because, as (presumed) voters, they have some indirect control over our research funding. We need to take the time and energy to cultivate their interest in our field, to explain to them why some relationships that seem plausible on the surface really aren't, but in such a way that they aren't discouraged but rather *en*couraged to get a better understanding of the matter scientifically. I'm certainly not saying i've found an unbeatable formula for educating the public about historical and comparative linguistics; i suspect only a crank could make such a claim. But i'm working on it! Wonder if the information superhighway might provide a means ... I'm already doing a series of lectures on syntactic theory over Internet ... Best, Steven --------------------- Dr. Steven Schaufele 712 West Washington Urbana, IL 61801 217-344-8240 fcosws at prairienet.org http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html **** O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum! *** *** Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis! *** From gonzalor at JHU.EDU Sun Mar 23 06:01:17 1997 From: gonzalor at JHU.EDU (Gonzalo Rubio) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 1997 01:01:17 -0500 Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The interesting replies from Benji Wald and Steven Schaufele are well taken, and I thank them for their kindness. However, I'd like to insist on the aspect of "dilettantism". Benji Wald makes an interesting point when he says that somehow most pioneers of historical linguistics were dilettanti. I guess, when Sir William Jones became a judge of the Bengal Supreme Court in 1783, there was no chair of historical linguistics. Figures such as Schlegel, W. von Humboldt, Rasmus Rask, Franz Bopp, Jacob Grimm, and Renan, had exceptional backgrounds in many languages, not only as scholars, but also as travelers --one of the few ways they had access to some of the languages they mastered. Before them, the first rather intuitive approaches to historical linguistics were made by people (Hervas, Adelung, Young, etc.) that got the best linguistic education one was able to get during the Enlightment. Obviously, someone working on a field before this field becomes a common discipline, could be called dilettante, in some way. However, I'd rather reserve this label for people attempting to address issues of disciplines already constituted as such, but who happen not to have a true (if any) background in them. When Jones started, there was no way to "learn" historical linguistics, there was no "theoretical framework" to work within. Nowadays, the situation is quite different. The difference between being a Romantic during the Romanticism (Humboldt, etc) and being a Romantic now, is painfully striking, I'm afraid. Anyways, thanks a lot for your very interesting comments. ------------------------ Gonzalo Rubio Near Eastern Studies Johns Hopkins University gonzalor at jhu.edu ------------------------ From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Sun Mar 23 15:25:38 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 1997 15:25:38 +0000 Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... In-Reply-To: from "Gonzalo Rubio" at Mar 20, 97 01:45:47 am Message-ID: Oh, I don't really think that HL necessarily attracts more dilettantes, cranks, and basket cases than other disciplines. But I *do* suspect that these misguided souls may find it somewhat easier to get their stuff published, at least in book form, when they've chosen to rave about language, rather than, say, about physics. I don't think linguistics has yet succeeded in imposing itself upon the public consciousness as a fully respectable scholarly discipline, an understanding of which requires years of painstaking study. Whereas physics, I suspect, is widely perceived as a priesthood whose mysteries are closed to outsiders, *everybody* is entitled to an opinion about language. Among other consequences of this difference, I suspect that a crank manuscript on physics is more likely to be passed to a physicist for scrutiny and shredding than a crank book on language is to be passed to a linguist for comparable treatment. Nevertheless, crank work on physics *does* get published. A splendid recent example is a book entitled _Has Hawking Erred?_, which is not about Hawking at all, but about Einstein's special and general theories of relativity, and which consists of about 350 pages devoted to saying "I don't understand any of this. How can it be right?" An even more wonderful example, whose title escapes me, is a book arguing that the earth is only a few thousand years old. I made a point of reading a few pages of this thing every time I was in the bookshop, because it made me laugh out loud every time. Among other gems, the author announced that he had *carbon-dated the atmosphere* and found it only a few thousand years old! (If you know anything about carbon-dating, you'll appreciate how wonderfully lunatic this idea is.) Another of my favorites is the helium problem. Helium is constantly seeping out of the earth, and the author calculated that there was far too little helium in the atmosphere to be consistent with the great age commonly assigned to the earth. Apparently he's never seen a helium balloon, or wondered why it does what it does. Both these books were published in the guise of serious science, and both were placed on the science shelves of the bookshop, instead of where they belonged, in that distressingly large section labeled "New Age", but more accurately to be labeled "Brain-dead Garbage". That said, I agree that it is worrying to see just how much linguistic garbage gets published and promulgated. Even the new coffee-table atlas of the world's languages, nominally edited by Bernard Comrie, no less, shows a distressing tendency to treat with great seriousness not only the more forgettable vaporings of Greenberg, Ruhlen, and company, but even Ruhlen's "Proto-World etymologies". I suspect that Bernard didn't really have that much to do with the content of the book, but I intend to have a word with him anyway when I see him. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH England larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From gd116 at CUS.CAM.AC.UK Sun Mar 23 19:15:11 1997 From: gd116 at CUS.CAM.AC.UK (Guy Deutscher) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 1997 19:15:11 +0000 Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Behind all the merriment that Gonzalo Rubio's posting has helped create, I think there lies a serious point concerning isolates . It is unquestionable that the romantic attraction of finding linguistic/cultural relatives among exotic peoples is one of the main reasons for the obsession of amateurs with isolate languages. But wouldn't it be fair to say that this attraction is strongly encouraged by the relative rarity of such languages, and so by the conception that an isolate language is abnormal, something strange which needs to be explained away? (And what better explanation than: it is not an isolate after all...) But why are isolate languages actually so rare? Why e.g. are there only a handful of 'Basque's 'Sumerian's or 'Etruscan's in Europe/Western Asia, rather than dozens of unrelated languages? Of course the question can be explained ad hoc each time by the peculiar historical circumstances of any given language, if we know what they are. But wouldn t it be helpful if linguists discussed in general terms what the conditions are for the survival of isolates , and why these conditions are (relatively) so rarely met? Guy Deutscher. ======================================= Guy Deutscher Trinity College Cambridge CB2 1TQ E-mail: gd116 at cam.ac.uk England Tel: 01223- 365994 From Bomhard at AOL.COM Sun Mar 23 22:11:19 1997 From: Bomhard at AOL.COM (Allan Bomhard) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 1997 17:11:19 -0500 Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... Message-ID: I would like to make an observation about Gonzalo Rubio's statements about cranks, cooks, crazies, etc. Linguistics is indeed not the only discipline plagued by dilettantes and amateurs, as has been pointed out by others who have posted to this list. However, ever so often, along comes the likes of Hermann Grassmann, Charles Ives, Thomas Alva Edison, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and many others -- amateurs all. They are rare, but ever so often, gifted individuals do appear from the ranks of amateurs. From mcv at PI.NET Sun Mar 23 23:49:16 1997 From: mcv at PI.NET (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 1997 23:49:16 GMT Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... In-Reply-To: <970323171118_-1906484504@emout06.mail.aol.com> Message-ID: Alan Bomhard wrote: >I would like to make an observation about Gonzalo Rubio's statements about >cranks, cooks, crazies, etc. Linguistics is indeed not the only discipline >plagued by dilettantes and amateurs, as has been pointed out by others who >have posted to this list. However, ever so often, along comes the likes of >Hermann Grassmann, Charles Ives, Thomas Alva Edison, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and >many others -- amateurs all. They are rare, but ever so often, gifted >individuals do appear from the ranks of amateurs. Let's not forget Michael Ventris. == Miguel Carrasquer Vidal ~ ~ Amsterdam _____________ ~ ~ mcv at pi.net |_____________||| ========================== Ce .sig n'est pas une .cig From gonzalor at JHU.EDU Mon Mar 24 01:16:20 1997 From: gonzalor at JHU.EDU (Gonzalo Rubio) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 1997 20:16:20 -0500 Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... In-Reply-To: <970323171118_-1906484504@emout06.mail.aol.com> Message-ID: I keep thinking there is a big difference between the scenario of our field(s) more than a century ago and now. Grassmann taught Mathematics in a Gymnasium, and he was an excellent scholar in IE linguistics. How could he? First of all, he did have an excellent background in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. Secondly, at that time the discipline was still in its initial stages, so one was able to master most of the published material. And even more important, teachers in the 19th century German Gymnasien were, for instance, the editors of most volumes of the Teubner series, and not all of them were professors of Greek or Latin. Nowadays, even among professional scholars who do learn the languages they talk about, there is no Noeldeke (one of the last Semitic scholars who produced excellent works on Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, etc.). Nobody can really master all the ancient and modern IE or Semitic languages we know now. When Grassmann wrote his _Woerterbuch zum Rig-Veda_ (1873, ?), the amount of secondary literature published by scholars and the number of original texts available in Western countries, were far smaller than what we have now. Of course, there exists the possibility of having an amateur producing an excellent idea or a masterpiece. However, day by day this possibility is less and less likely, just because of the growing amount of bibliography and materials one has to deal with. And, in this situation, dilettanti have a much harder time. Sometimes, I dare think Ventris' decipherment of Linear B was a sort of "disaster"... since it encouraged hundreds of individuals to "try" to do the same. Unfortunately, most of these persons (even if, for some strange reason, their crazy books get published by Brill) have more to do with Athanasius Kircher than with Ventris... Most (if not all) of the proposals concerning Sumerian and other languages I have read, present a very basic problem: the authors happen not to know Sumerian at all, and rely on very all (and frequently unreliable) secondary sources. Thus, one can see a verb "be" or "bi" meaning "to say" in some of those lists. However, that verb does not exist at all, although one can find it in some old books (Deimel's and so on). It is a case of incorrect analysis of forms like mu-na-be. The verb dug4 (or du11 --du-eleven), "to say", is a "complementary verb", whose sg. and pl. maru^ and pl. hamTu forms (hamTu and maru^ are the names given by Akkadian speaking scribes to the two Sumerian tenses/aspects, but that's a different topic) are e, just e and not be. In 1997, absolutely no Sumerologist would talk about a verb "be", but these well-intentioned amateurs keep including in their lists of look-alikes --and, the funniest thing is that, if you point this fact to some of them, they call you "ignoramus", "arrogant boy", etc. Weird. The list of "unreal presences" (paraphrasing Steiner) would be neverending. Somehow those dilettanti are a sort of unreal presence too. Isolated languages are there, we don't know why there are so few (historical and geographical reasons could be mentioned) and probably, centuries ago, they did have "sister" languages, nowadays dead or lost (as seems to be the case of Basque). I'm the only child my parents had, so I can undersdant linguistic isolation. ------------------------ Gonzalo Rubio Near Eastern Studies Johns Hopkins University gonzalor at jhu.edu ------------------------ From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Mon Mar 24 01:21:22 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 1997 20:21:22 EST Subject: dilettentes and amateurs Message-ID: In the discussion so far of dilettentes and amateurs, there seems to be something missing. The cases of the illustrious amateurs mentioned so far are people who were trained in linguistics/philology (e.g. Grassmann, Whorf) or in other sciences and who, for various reasons, did not pursue careers in the university. I also don't see lack of formal training -- either in the nineteenth or in the twentiety century -- as necessarily being a weakness: look at the huge number of us who are professional practitioners in areas outside of those in which The above cases are very different from the language (and science) dilettents who are neither formally nor self-trained. As was just pointed out by Gonzolo Rubio, they pick and choose among various bits and pieces of information scattered over the decades, and they put it together to fit whatever whim they're currently practicing. This lack of dedication to rigor clearly takes them out of the amateur class, which I interpret in its etymological meaning, and plants them firmly in the nut and crank class. Those of you who were on the list last year will remember HISTLING's Proto-World phase, which finally dissolved into a spate of etymological electronic umbrage being slung around the globe. This, you will also remember, was the motivation for turning HISTLING into a moderated list. And as moderator of this list, I received lots of private correspondence from these characters saying that I was acting to repress future Galileos -- I guess this made me a member of the Inquisition! Anyway, most of those dilletents signed off immediately, presumably looking for other lists on which on which they could plunder and pillage. The point of this rambling? That we can make another generalization about many who belong in the dilletent category: in addition to their lack of education about the facts of the field, they also haven't been educated as to style and standards of scholarly discourse. (Of course, some of you out there will immediately come up with a list of ill-mannered people who are/were also professional linguists, but those types have been marked as [+nasty] by their own colleagues.) Dorothy Disterheft you (usually silent) moderator From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Mon Mar 24 17:49:31 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 17:49:31 +0000 Subject: isolates In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19970323191511.006926e0@pop.cus.cam.ac.uk> from "Guy Deutscher" at Mar 23, 97 07:15:11 pm Message-ID: Guy Deutscher writes: > Behind all the merriment that Gonzalo Rubio's posting has helped > create, I think there lies a serious point concerning isolates . > It is unquestionable that the romantic attraction of finding > linguistic/cultural relatives among exotic peoples is one of the > main reasons for the obsession of amateurs with isolate > languages. But wouldn't it be fair to say that this attraction is > strongly encouraged by the relative rarity of such languages, and so > by the conception that an isolate language is abnormal, something > strange which needs to be explained away? (And what better > explanation than: it is not an isolate after all...) > But why are isolate languages actually so rare? Why e.g. are there > only a handful of 'Basque's 'Sumerian's or 'Etruscan's in > Europe/Western Asia, rather than dozens of unrelated languages? Of > course the question can be explained ad hoc each time by the > peculiar historical circumstances of any given language, if we know > what they are. But wouldn t it be helpful if linguists discussed in > general terms what the conditions are for the survival of isolates , > and why these conditions are (relatively) so rarely met? These questions have been at least briefly addressed by Johanna Nichols in some of her papers. If I remember correctly, she too expresses some surprise at the comparative rarity of isolates, on the ground that the typical number of daughters produced by a mother language is only around 1.6, which ought to give us more isolates than we see. (Hope I'm recalling this correctly.) In fact, there are perhaps more isolates around than we sometimes suppose, especially if we are cautious about accepting some of the remote proposals involving isolates. Among living languages, we have only Basque in Europe, but Asia gives us (at least) Burushaski, Nihali, Gilyak, Ainu, Korean, Japanese, Yukaghir, and Ket, the last two being languages which had known relatives that died out only recently. (Here I ignore several remote proposals which have not won general acceptance, as well as the Uralic-Yukaghir hypothesis, which seems better supported but perhaps not yet generally accepted.) In Africa, all of Songhai, Sandawe, and Hadza are assigned to various families perhaps more for bookkeeping reasons than because of hard evidence. There are several apparent isolates in New Guinea, including Porome, and perhaps quite a few more in North America, including Yuchi, Kutenai, and Haida, if the Na-Dene hypothesis for this last is not accepted. South America is messy, but may have more. Still, this is not an overly impressive total. But, rather than ask "What circumstances favor isolates?", I'd prefer to ask "Why are there so few isolates?" Or, perhaps I should put it "Why do so many isolates get blatted?" Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Mon Mar 24 15:17:13 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 15:17:13 +0000 Subject: Q: dictionary of HL Message-ID: I have just been commissioned to write a dictionary of historical and comparative linguistics. The (strict) word limit is 150,000 words, which I estimate at about 380 standard-sized pages, or maybe 400. And I am seeking advice as to what to include. Naturally, the top priority is the terms which are found in standard textbooks. But I expect to have space to include a fair number of further terms, and my question is this: which additional terms would it be most helpful to include. There are very many other terms that might be considered. Here are some examples. (1) More-or-less obsolete terms found in the older literature (`proethnic', `tenues', `Kreislauf'). (2) Technical terms from the study of IE (`hysterodynamic inflection', `vrddhi'). (3) Technical terms from the study of other languages (`rendaku', `Meeussen's Law'). (4) German terms sometimes used in English even when English equivalents are in use (`Wanderwort', `Ausnahmslosungkeit'). (5) Names of dead languages (`Iberian', `Lepontic'). (6) Names of significant ancient texts and inscriptions (`Appendix Probi', `Orkhon inscriptions'). (7) Names of scripts and writing systems (`Linear B', `cuneiform'). (8) Terms introduced by sociolinguists studying language change (`Bill Peters effect', `near-merger') (this group is very large, but arguably central). (9) The simply enormous number of terms coined (or borrowed from other fields) by individual authors in recent years, some (but not all) of which will undoubtedly become established (`metatypy', `residual zone', `exaptation', `gram', `apomorphy'). (10) Names of recently proposed principles (`Aoristic Drift Principle', `Upper Exit Principle'). (11) Anything else you can think of. It is intended that the book should be useful to students who have some background in linguistics but who are approaching the study of HL for the first time, but we also want it, within the limits of the space available, to be as useful as possible to advanced students and even professional practitioners. So: what terms would you *most* like to see in the dictionary? Please bear in mind that space is limited, and there is no possibility of including even 10% of all the terms that might conceivably be included. Please reply to me personally, and I'll publish a summary to HISTLING. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH England larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From vovin at HAWAII.EDU Tue Mar 25 03:59:08 1997 From: vovin at HAWAII.EDU (Alexander Vovin) Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 17:59:08 -1000 Subject: isolates In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I would like to offer some corrections for the following passage in Larry Trask's posting, as some of the claims regarding the certain Asian languages as isolates are out of date, I am afraid. First, there is a general consensus nowadays among all linguists working in historical Korean and Japanese that Korean and Japanese are related. Their link to the rest of Altaic remains more disputable, but even here majority of the scholars lean toward the acceptance of genetic relationship between Japanese, Korean, and Tungusic. In addition, none of these proposals are long-range, in the sense of long-range proposals concerning genetic affiliation of Basque or Nihali. Besides, both "Japanese" and "Korean" are to a great extent sociolinguistic terms: under "Japanese" we have a number of mutually unintelligible languages or "dialects", as they are usually called, with the depth comparable to that of Germanic. The same is true of "Korean": there are at least three Korean languages, again normally called "dialects", mutually unintelligible and with the depth comparable to that of Slavic. Thus, even if they were not related (but they are), each of them would represent a mini-family, and not a true isolate. Second, over last seven years there has been presented quite a chunk of evidence allowing us tentatively to link Ainu with Austronesian and Austroasiatic. There is a consensus between anyone who ever tried to venture in this field (late Murayama S., L. Reid, J. Bengtson, P. Sidwell, I.Pejros, Yanagizaki Y. , and myself) that Austric connection is the likeliest for Ainu. Although, none has yet come up with a proof beyond the reasonable doubt, this is the only connection among proposed for Ainu that cannot be easily disproved (contrary to the case, e.g., with Ainu and Altaic). Thus, this is situation remarkably different from Basque situation, where majority of specialists reject any remote proposals. Third, since both Ket and Yukaghir did have relatives in the recent past, this very fact seems to work against Larry Trask point that there are more isolates among us than we suppose. As a matter of fact, it shows us how isolates come into being: by extinction of the other family members. Thus, there are probably less true isolates than we suppose. In particular, as I intended to demonstrate above, Larry Trask's Asia list can be safely reduced to Gilyak, Nihali, and Burushaski. Among those remaining three, Gilyak looks like a Nostratic language (although it has yet to be proven), and I even will not be very surprised if ultimately it turns out to be a very abberant member of Altaic family: after all, scholars so far applied only internal reconstruction to Gilyak, but we should not overlook the fact that what we call Gilyak actually consists of three or four mutually untelligible and pretty much divergent languages, the fact that allows comparative reconstruction that is yet to be done. On Mon, 24 Mar 1997, Larry Trask wrote: > > In fact, there are perhaps more isolates around than we sometimes > suppose, especially if we are cautious about accepting some of the > remote proposals involving isolates. Among living languages, we have > only Basque in Europe, but Asia gives us (at least) Burushaski, > Nihali, Gilyak, Ainu, Korean, Japanese, Yukaghir, and Ket, the last > two being languages which had known relatives that died out only > recently. (Here I ignore several remote proposals which have not won > general acceptance, as well as the Uralic-Yukaghir hypothesis, which > seems better supported but perhaps not yet generally accepted.) > > Larry Trask > COGS > University of Sussex > Brighton BN1 9QH > UK > > larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk > From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Tue Mar 25 18:05:54 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 13:05:54 EST Subject: HISTLING membership list Message-ID: Dear HISTLINGers, >From time to time I post an updated membership list for those of you who don't feel like looking up the appropriate commands on your list of HISTLING instructions. Here's the latest list. -DD * HISTLING -- Historical Linguistics Mailing List dasher at NETCOM.COM alers at SPANPORT.UMASS.EDU abraham at LET.RUG.NL Werner Abraham Ahlqvist at UCG.IE Anders Ahlqvist jean.aitchison at WORCESTER.OXFORD.AC.UK Jean Aitchison alderson at NETCOM.COM Rich Alderson cindy.allen at ANU.EDU.AU Cynthia Allen SLALLEN at UGA.CC.UGA.EDU Sherry Allen eraLO at HAMP.HAMPSHIRE.EDU Emily Alling andersen at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Henning Andersen alotz at AIMNET.COM Deborah Anderson FinnSwede at AOL.COM Eric Anderson J.Arends at LET.UVA.NL Jacques Arends aristar at TAM2000.TAMU.EDU Anthony Aristar AARSEN41 at PORTLAND.CAPS.MAINE.EDU Angela Arsenault C.J.ARTHUR at UEL.AC.UK Catherine Arthur jayling at CUP.CAM.AC.UK Judith Ayling cbaez at UVIGO.ES Inmaculada C. B=E1ez baccouce at GUSUN.ACC.GEORGETOWN.EDU Ella Baccouche phb at PSU.EDU Phil Baldi a-kevba at MICROSOFT.COM Kevin Baldwin (S&TOnsite) cigdem.balim at NESSIE.MCC.AC.UK Cigdem Balim-Harding jacob.baltuch at INFOBOARD.BE Jacob Baltuch G.Banti at AGORA.STM.IT Giorgio Banti johanna.barddal at NORDLUND.LU.SE Johanna Barddal mbeard at SPRYNET.COM Michael C. Beard tbeasley at UCLA.EDU Tim Beasley Thomas.Becker at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE Thomas Becker W.Behr at EM.UNI-FRANKFURT.D400.DE Wolfgang Behr sberbeco at ISL.UIT.NO Steven Berbeco mfcpglb at FS1.ART.MAN.AC.UK Linda van Bergen mfcpgrb at FS1.ART.MAN.AC.UK Ricardo Bermudez-Otero hb17 at CORNELL.EDU Haraldur Bernhardsson 9408731b at UDCF.GLA.AC.UK Roberto Bertuol beths at WIM.LET.VU.NL Frank Beths nadiab at UNAGI.CIS.UPENN.EDU Nadia Biassou BIELLA at MAIL.LOC.GOV Joan Biella bjarne.birkrem at IBA.UIO.NO Bjarne Birkrem ibirks at PRATIQUE.FR Ivan Birks djbpitt+ at PITT.EDU David Birnbaum Claude.Boisson at MRASH.FR Claude Boisson Bomhard at AOL.COM Allan Bomhard Lars.Borin at LING.UU.SE Lars Borin jtang at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Joyce Tang Boyland sgbrady at UCDAVIS.EDU Sean Brady scronan at IOL.IE Brenda =?iso-8859-1?Q?N=ED?= =?iso-8859 U0044 at UVVM.UVIC.CA Arthur Brett brinton at UNIXG.UBC.CA Laurel Brinton wabrinton at UCDAVIS.EDU W. Aaron Brinton uclyjmb at UCL.AC.UK Judith Broadbent a.bruyn at LET.UVA.NL Adrienne Bruyn bdbryant at MAIL.UTEXAS.EDU Bobby Bryant vbubenik at MORGAN.UCS.MUN.CA Vit Bubenik james at COOMBS.ANU.EDU.AU James Bullen linkb at LURE.LATROBE.EDU.AU Kate Burridge l.campbell at LING.CANTERBURY.AC.NZ Lyle Campbell jonas.carlqvist at NORDISKA.SU.SE Jonas Carlqvist mcv at PI.NET Miguel Carrasquer AFNWAMC at PUKNET.PUK.AC.ZA Wannie Carstens JCastil264 at AOL.COM Janet Castilleja cathey at GERMAN.UMASS.EDU James E. Cathey khchen at NLG2.CSIE.NTU.EDU.TW Kuang-hua Chen yucho at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Young-Mee Yu Cho maritc at ADH.NO Marit Christoffersen cirsovius at DKRZ.D400.DE Werner Cirsovius richardc at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Richard Coates mimic at GAS.UUG.ARIZONA.EDU Mimi Colcord gaubin at EVE.ASSUMPTION.EDU George Aubin Assumption College vanessa at U-PARIS10.FR Vanessa Combet company at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX Concepcion Company dconnolly at CAS.ORG David Connolly rscook at WORLD.STD.COM Richard Cook costellj at IS2.NYU.EDU John R. Costello elizabeth.couper at UNI-KONSTANZ.DE Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen hiho at GUARANY.CPD.UNB.BR Hildo Couto mcovingt at AI.UGA.EDU Michael Covington csc21 at HERMES.CAM.AC.UK Claire Cowie cravens at MACC.WISC.EDU Thomas Cravens w.croft at MAN.AC.UK William Croft ohrc100 at HERMES.CAM.AC.UK Oliver Currie m.cysouw at LET.KUN.NL Michael Cysouw dakin at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX Karen Dakin A7541DAD at AWIUNI11.EDVZ.UNIVIE.AC.AT Christiane Dalton morpurgo at VAX.OX.AC.UK Anna Morpurgo Davies mdavies at RS6000.CMP.ILSTU.EDU Mark Davies FEN00BHD at UNCCVM.UNCC.EDU Boyd Davis dearmond at SFU.CA Richard DeArmond degraff at MIT.EDU Michel DeGraff delancey at DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU Scott DeLancey adench at UNIWA.UWA.EDU.AU Alan Dench d.denison at MAN.AC.UK David Denison gd116 at CUS.CAM.AC.UK Guy Deutscher jediaz at FIMO-CR.UCLM.ES Javier Diaz batllori at SKYWALKER.UDG.ES Montse Batllori Dillet gjdimmendaal at RULCRI.LEIDENUNIV.NL Gerrit Dimmendaal DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Dorothy Disterheft dobo at BTK.JPTE.HU Attila Dobo bdrinka at LONESTAR.JPL.UTSA.EDU Bridget Drinka DUDA at ZEUS.KUL.LUBLIN.PL Henryk Duda adufter at SUN1.CIP.FAK14.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE Andreas Dufter dupuis.fernande at UQAM.CA Fernande Dupuis idyen at MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU Isadore Dyen edwards at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Jane Edwards emarsico at DOCSRVR.MRASH.FR Marsico Egidio ehala at LIN.TPU.EE Martin Ehala ehret at HISTR.SSCNET.UCLA.EDU Christopher Ehret stig.eliasson at LING.UU.SE Stig Eliasson embleton at YORKU.CA Sheila Embleton Hans_Olav.Enger at NORDISKA.SU.SE Hans-Olav Enger. erickson at HAWAII.EDU Blaine Erickson gunnar at LING.SU.SE Gunnar Eriksson elumme at CC.HELSINKI.FI Lumme Erilt eska at VTAIX.CC.VT.EDU Joseph F. Eska aijiali at LELAND.STANFORD.EDU Charles Ettner EVANS at COOMBS.ANU.EDU.AU Bethwyn Evans janfaa at ALFA.AVH.UNIT.NO Jan Terje Faarlund faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU Alice Faber thfa4775 at STUDENT.UU.SE Thomas Fahrenholz FARROKHN at GUVAX.ACC.GEORGETOWN.EDU N. 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Grant ian.green at ANU.EDU.AU Ian Green j.n.green at BRADFORD.AC.UK John Green aqg3222 at IS.NYU.EDU Andrew Gross ng-ci at PING.CH Nicolas Grossfeld hale1 at ALCOR.CONCORDIA.CA Mark Hale Goran.Hallberg at DAL.LU.SE Goran Hallberg HALLIDAYG at SCHOOLS.MINEDU.GOVT.NZ George Halliday halling at MO.NET Conrad Halling mhansell at CARLETON.EDU Mark Hansell harma at CC.HELSINKI.FI Juhani Harma harrisac at CTRVAX.VANDERBILT.EDU Alice Harris lhartman at SIU.EDU Lee Hartman jharvey at UCLA.EDU Jasmin Bordbar Harvey haumann at WRCS1.URZ.UNI-WUPPERTAL.DE Dagmar Haumann hecht at ZEDAT.FU-BERLIN.DE Wolfgang Hecht ihegedus at BTK.JPTE.HU Iren Hegedus jph21 at CUS.CAM.AC.UK J P Heikkila phendrik at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU Peter Hendriks herzenbg at LGG.USR.PU.RU Leonhard Hertzenberg r.hickey at HRZ.UNI-ESSEN.DE Raymond Hickey Hines at CARDIFF.AC.UK John Hines hirst at UNIV-AIX.FR Daniel Hirst hoeksema at LET.RUG.NL Jack Hoeksema chogan at NL.CS.CMU.EDU Christopher Hogan r.m.hogg at MAN.AC.UK Richard Hogg J.Holberton at SHEFFIELD.AC.UK Jeff Holberton. 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Tauber thibalt at CC.UMANITOBA.CA Sylvie Thibault sally at ISP.PITT.EDU Sarah G. Thomason toivonen at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Ida Toivonen larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Larry Trask traugott at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Elizabeth Traugott tsuchida at TOOYOO.L.U-TOKYO.AC.JP Shigeru TSUCHIDA tuitekj at ERE.UMONTREAL.CA Kevin Tuite bill at HIVNET.UBC.CA Bill Turkel iris at U.WASHINGTON.EDU Siri G. Tuttle glen at METRO.NET Glen Uber KHC00344 at NIFTYSERVE.OR.JP Shinji Uchioke histling at COLI.UNI-SB.DE CoLi UdS usami at HAWAII.EDU Fumio Usami bvance at UCS.INDIANA.EDU Barbara Vance tvn at CIS.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE Theo Vennemann verda at LINGUA.FIL.UB.ES Isabel Verdaguer n.b.vincent at MAN.AC.UK Nigel Vincent VOTRUBA at VMS.CIS.PITT.EDU Martin Votruba vovin at HAWAII.EDU Alexander Vovin Orgetorix at INFOAVE.NET Matt Wagers bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Benji Wald dcwalker at ACS.UCALGARY.CA Douglas Walker tandy at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Tandy Warnow warrenb at ENGELSKA.SU.SE Beatrice Warren warvik at UTU.FI Brita Warvik D.J.L.Watt at NEWCASTLE.AC.UK Dominic Watt swatts at TCD.IE Sheila Watts LWEBSTER at FAC1.CSS.EDU Lee Webster LEEUWVW at RULLET.LEIDENUNIV.NL Andrea de Leeuw van Weenen david_weiss at GBINC.COM David Weiss Paula.West at MERTON.OXFORD.AC.UK Paula West cwharry at MAILCLERK.ECOK.EDU Cheryl Wharry maxw at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Max Wheeler jhwhite at TRUCOM.COM Jim White maw at ANNAP.INFI.NET Mark A. Wilson cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU Clyde Winters mew1 at SIU.EDU Margaret Winters cfwoolhiser at MAIL.UTEXAS.EDU Curt Woolhiser vdwouden at LET.RUG.NL Ton van der Wouden gwright at SNAP.ORG George Wright lcw21 at CUS.CAM.AC.UK Laura Wright l.wright at HERTS.AC.UK Laura Wright rhpwri at LIVERPOOL.AC.UK Roger Wright sw29 at CUS.CAM.AC.UK Susan Wright wurzel at FAS.AG-BERLIN.MPG.DE W.U. Wurzel JXING at POLYGLOT.UVM.EDU Janet Xing haruki at MSV.CC.IWATE-U.AC.JP Haruki Yamaguchi MZELLJADT at SMITH.SMITH.EDU Margaret S. Zelljadt Petr.Zemanek at FF.CUNI.CZ Petr Zemanek n-zide at UCHICAGO.EDU Norman Zide From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Tue Mar 25 15:59:22 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 15:59:22 +0000 Subject: isolates In-Reply-To: from "Alexander Vovin" at Mar 24, 97 05:59:08 pm Message-ID: Alexander Vovin writes: > I would like to offer some corrections for the following passage in > Larry Trask's posting, as some of the claims regarding the certain > Asian languages as isolates are out of date, I am afraid. Well, I am happy to be corrected, but I have my doubts about some of what follows. > First, there is a general consensus nowadays among all linguists > working in historical Korean and Japanese that Korean and Japanese > are related. "All"? I doubt it. I know that this idea has been gathering support, but it's news to me that *all* specialists now accept it as established. Anyway, I can name one specialist who certainly doesn't accept this "consensus": Masayoshi Shibatani, who has repreatedly characterized the proposed Japanese-Korean link as unsubstantiated. And Shibatani also repeatedly points out that views on the possible affiliations of Japanese are numerous, varied, and much debated. > Their link to the rest of Altaic remains more disputable, but even > here majority of the scholars lean toward the acceptance of genetic > relationship between Japanese, Korean, and Tungusic. Well, even if this is true, "leaning toward the acceptance" of a hypothesis is hardly the same thing as seeing it established to general satisfaction. As far as I know, Japanese has not been demonstrated to be securely related to anything else at all, and it remains an isolate, as does Korean. > In addition, none of these proposals are long-range, in > the sense of long-range proposals concerning genetic affiliation of > Basque or Nihali. Besides, both "Japanese" and "Korean" are to a > great extent sociolinguistic terms: under "Japanese" we have a > number of mutually unintelligible languages or "dialects", as they > are usually called, with the depth comparable to that of > Germanic. The same is true of "Korean": there are at least three > Korean languages, again normally called "dialects", mutually > unintelligible and with the depth comparable to that of > Slavic. Thus, even if they were not related (but they are), each of > them would represent a mini-family, and not a true isolate. This is news to me, and I am skeptical. No reference source available to me even so much as mentions the possibility that either Japanese or Korean might plausibly be regarded as a family of three or more languages. The most I have seen is a suggestion that the highly divergent Ryukyuan varieties of Japanese might be regarded as a distinct language, but even this appears to be a minority view today (though it was formerly more prominent). > Second, over last seven years there has been presented quite a > chunk of evidence allowing us tentatively to link Ainu with > Austronesian and Austroasiatic. > There is a consensus between anyone who ever tried to venture in > this field (late Murayama S., L. Reid, J. Bengtson, P. Sidwell, > I.Pejros, Yanagizaki Y. , and myself) that Austric connection is the > likeliest for Ainu. Although, none has yet come up with a proof > beyond the reasonable doubt, this is the only connection among > proposed for Ainu that cannot be easily disproved (contrary to the > case, e.g., with Ainu and Altaic). Thus, this is situation > remarkably different from Basque situation, where majority of > specialists reject any remote proposals. But no relationship has been established between Ainu and anything else at all, and it remains an isolate. Having a favorite conjecture is a far cry from having a persuasive case. Anyway, even Austric itself is not generally accepted as a valid construct. > Third, since both Ket and Yukaghir did have relatives in the > recent past, this very fact seems to work against Larry Trask point > that there are more isolates among us than we suppose. As a matter > of fact, it shows us how isolates come into being: by extinction of > the other family members. Thus, there are probably less true > isolates than we suppose. I don't follow this at all. If we can watch isolates come into existence before our eyes in historical times, then why is that an argument against the existence of numerous isolates which lost any relatives they may have had ages ago? > In particular, as I intended to demonstrate above, Larry Trask's > Asia list can be safely reduced to Gilyak, Nihali, and Burushaski. "Safely"? I don't think so. > Among those remaining three, Gilyak looks like a Nostratic language > (although it has yet to be proven), Er, um...but *Nostratic* is still very far from being established. > and I even will not be very surprised if ultimately it turns out to > be a very abberant member of Altaic family: after all, scholars so > far applied only internal reconstruction to Gilyak, but we should > not overlook the fact that what we call Gilyak actually consists of > three or four mutually untelligible and pretty much divergent > languages, the fact that allows comparative reconstruction that is > yet to be done. Interesting, certainly, but Gilyak is still an isolate. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From sally at ISP.PITT.EDU Tue Mar 25 14:22:58 1997 From: sally at ISP.PITT.EDU (Sarah G. Thomason) Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 09:22:58 -0500 Subject: isolates In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 24 Mar 1997 17:59:08 -1000." Message-ID: Alexander Vovin's confidence that some of the isolates listed by Larry Trask have been de-isolated by general consensus among specialists is probably too sanguine. A recent review in LANGUAGE, for instance, expressed doubts about the evidence for connecting Japanese with anything else (I don't remember the details of the reviewer's arguments; the review appeared three or four years ago; it's possible that the reviewer's focus was on Japanese + Austronesian rather than on Japanese + Korean). And I have my own concerns about evidence linking Ainu with anything else, to the extent that the evidence relies on the reconstructions in Vovin's book on Ainu (which contains proposals like Proto-Ainu *hd- for a large correspondence set in which most dialects have w- and the others have segments which could easily be reflexes of *w-; Vovin declines to reconstruct *w- here because there are few words with this correspondence set, whereas both *h and *d are reconstructible). Vovin's reasoning about when an isolate is not an isolate seems odd: if a language has no relatives, it is an isolate, regardless of whether it once had relatives. More importantly, from a methodological viewpoint, Vovin asserts that cases like Ket and Yukaghir show us "how isolates come into being". But what evidence have we, for any language that we all agree is an isolate and that has no attested former relatives, that it used to have some relatives? It's easy enough to imagine a situation in which no split will occur, ever: just situate your hypothetical language in a remote mountain valley (say), in a small area that only supports a small cohesive population -- a single speech community in which (roughly) everyone talks to everyone else -- and leave everyone there permanently. No split. A belief that there are no real-life cases of this general sort (it doesn't have to be a mountain valley, etc.) is a matter of faith, not science. Vovin is right, of course, in saying that Japanese is not an isolate even if it has no demonstrable relatives, if it is really a small family of very close-related languages. But then Proto-Japanese (still on the hypothesis that it has no established relatives) would be/have been an isolate, so it would still go into the total. -- Sally Thomason sally at isp.pitt.edu From Ralf.Georg at BONN.NETSURF.DE Wed Mar 26 09:00:06 1997 From: Ralf.Georg at BONN.NETSURF.DE (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 10:00:06 +0100 Subject: isolates Message-ID: Please add to the list of isolates mentioned so far the (recently extinct) Kusunda (Ban Raja) language of Western Nepal. It has been subsumed under Dene-Caucasian, however ( a fate not at all unlikely for *any* language isolate). Most general reference books put it into Tibeto-Burman, which is certainly not correct. A few months ago, I posted on NOSTRATIC-L a brief summary of what is known about the language together with an (almost exhaustive) bibliography. I'm still willing to send this to every one interested. Somewhat hesitantly, I feel compelled to mention yet another potential isolate: Itel'men. Yes, I *do* know that it is commonly counted as Chukchi-Kamchatkan, and it is *more than likely* that it does. But the best connoisseur of that language, A.P. Volodin, is now of the opinion that all the similarities (systematic correspondences among them) between Itel'men and, say, Koryak, are due to areal convergence rather than genetic inheritence. I had some fights with Aleksandr Pavlovich on that issue, since the languages share something which I regard as the most important thing for a realationship: morphology. While it is true that only part of the morphology is truely shared and the verbal morphology of Itelmen shows whole subsets which find no matches whatsoever in the Chukchi-Koryak languages (roughly it can be said that the *shared* morphology is that of prefixes, whereas suffixal verbal morphology in Itelmen seems to be largely independent - *roughly* I said, please don't count the affixes now !). The other thing: the lexicon seems to basically non-Chukchi-Koryak at all. Non-cognate (at least not *demonstrably* cognate, possibly an important caveat) lexical items by far outnumber those with visible Chukchi-Koryak connections (yes, I do know that the majority doesn't count as such, cf. Armenian). Now, I'm still inclined to see Itelmen as being related to Chukchi-Koryak (and those of you subscribing ALTAINET will know that I'm a hell of a splitter ! [just kidding, Sasha!]) *somehow*, but the simple dictum, as can be found in all the major handbooks on language-classification, that "Itel'men is Chukchi-Kamchatkan" (and period) is certainly an oversimplification. There *are* degrees of language relationship (certainly there are degrees of *discernability* of language relationship), relationship is simply not always a binary +/- thing. The recent discussion on mixed languages (CIA, Mbugu, perhaps Mogholi) is likely to reshape our views on relationship during the time to come. In the grammar of Itel'men I'm currently coauthoring with A.P. Volodin we will have to say something about the genetic position of that language (although there are *much more * interesting things about Itelmen than that !). I think we will be working towards some compromise wording on the matter, and after the book we will have some single-authored papers on the matter, fighting again, but one thing I'd like to say now: if asked, what language family belongs Itel'men in ?, I'd say at the moment: *I don't know*. And I'm actually working on that language .... (maybe if I weren't, things would be much easier ... ). Working on a language is perhaps the best antedote against the morbus classificationis praecocis, which seems to be plagueing some people in the field. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel/Fax +49-228-691332+ From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Wed Mar 26 12:45:05 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 07:45:05 EST Subject: HISTLING archives Message-ID: Dear Colleagues, A while ago, one of our members mentioned that she'd deleted a HISTLING posting that she now wished that she could refer to. HISTLING is archived, so there's no need to worry about keeping a file of your favorite postings. You can access the archives by sending the following messages to listserv at vm.sc.edu: index histling: first send this command in the body of the message to have a weekly index of all postings automatically sent to your address. get histling logXXXXX: next, send this command to get any specific week's postings, where the XXXXX refer to the date of the file you wish to retrieve, which is listed in the weekly index. If you wish to do a database search for a specific topic, send the message: search XXXXXX in histling where XXXXXX is the string you want to search. So, for example, if you want to search for the term Nostratic, send the message search nostratic in histling If you'd like to search for more than one term, for instance, Nostratic and Indo-European, just add the second term after the first: search nostratic indo-european in histling From delancey at DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU Wed Mar 26 17:36:59 1997 From: delancey at DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU (Scott DeLancey) Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 09:36:59 -0800 Subject: isolates Message-ID: On Tue, 25 Mar 1997, Sarah G. Thomason wrote: > But what evidence > have we, for any language that we all agree is an isolate and that > has no attested former relatives, that it used to have some > relatives? It's easy enough to imagine a situation in which no > split will occur, ever: just situate your hypothetical language in > a remote mountain valley (say), in a small area that only supports > a small cohesive population -- a single speech community in which (roughly) > everyone talks to everyone else -- and leave everyone there permanently. > No split. A belief that there are no real-life cases of this general > sort (it doesn't have to be a mountain valley, etc.) is a matter of > faith, not science. But this population must have arrived in its mountain valley from somewhere else (H. Sapiens didn't evolve in mountain valleys), and unless you believe that some isolated populations of H. Sap reinvented language ex nihilo, the language spoken by this population had relatives somewhere else. Those may have died out, leaving an isolate, but unless this population created a new language rather than bringing one with them, the language didn't start out as an isolate. To take a concrete example: Burushashki now has no demonstrable relatives. But it *can not possibly* have always been an isolate, unless you want to believe that it has developed separately and independently since the beginnings of human language (which, for even this to be a conceivable scenario, must have been efflorescently polygenetic). Scott DeLancey Department of Linguistics University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403, USA delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html From mcv at PI.NET Wed Mar 26 22:20:11 1997 From: mcv at PI.NET (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 22:20:11 GMT Subject: Ainu and Gilyak In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Alexander Vovin wrote: >Gilyak looks like a Nostratic language (although it has >yet to be proven), and I even will not be very surprised if ultimately it >turns out to be a very abberant member of Altaic family: after all, >scholars so far applied only internal reconstruction to Gilyak, but we >should not overlook the fact that what we call Gilyak actually consists of >three or four mutually untelligible and pretty much divergent languages, >the fact that allows comparative reconstruction that is yet to be done. One thing that caught my attention in the linguistic database from Johanna Nichols' "Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time" was the typological near-identity of Gilyak and Ainu. Of all the typological features listed, Ainu and Gilyak only differ in that Gilyak has numerical classifiers (26 of them). Is there any other evidence for contacts between Gilyak and Ainu? == Miguel Carrasquer Vidal ~ ~ Amsterdam _____________ ~ ~ mcv at pi.net |_____________||| ========================== Ce .sig n'est pas une .cig From bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Thu Mar 27 04:04:42 1997 From: bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU (benji wald) Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 20:04:42 -0800 Subject: on the epistemological nature of HL & isolates Message-ID: I was stimulated by many of the messages of the last few days, and would like to make some comments on them. First, I was a little surprised by Gonzalo Rubio's comments a few days ago to my last message: >Benji Wald makes an interesting point when he says that somehow most >pioneers of historical linguistics were dilettanti. ....Obviously, someone >working on a >field before this field becomes a common discipline, could >be called dilettante, in some >way. It did not occur to me that somebody might take my comments in that way. My major intention was simply to say that originally, and to some extent still, both dilettantes, whoever they may be, and the immediate originators of the discipline of historical linguistics were driven by the same concerns, in particular, recovering past history in order to make deductions about relatedness of peoples (actually the cultures of known groups of people). My point was also that this was/is basically an EXTRA-linguistic concern, a social concern. I wanted to emphasise this because I also wanted to point out that as methods for this endeavor were developed, various INTRA-linguistic concerns (esp about "possible linguistic change") developed. Then I pointed out that "dilettantes" rarely appreciate the INTRA-linguistic concerns, but remain focussed on the EXTRA-linguistic concerns, with dileterious effects on their methods of demonstration, which now seem naive and amateurish (in the "bad" sense) to us. Gonzalo interpreted me right only to the extent that I could be taken as implying that originally there was no basis, either in terms of disciplinary field or methodology, to distinguish "scholars" and "dilettantes" with respect to the driving issue characterised above. (At one point some "scholars" assumed that Hebrew as the mother of all languages, at a later point that Sanskrit was the mother of the Indo-European group, etc. All cultures seem to have a myth that their language is the "pure" or, more commonly, the "impure" form of some older language, and that there are other pure or impure forms of the same language -- the historical sense is there. That their language has relatively recently been "corrupted" one way or another is a very common cross-cultural belief.) On the same topic, Dorothy Disterheft wrote a separate message, addressed to distinguishing terms like "dilettante" and "amateur". With regard to terminology, I had decided in my last message to accept Gozalo's terms. But I did not take them all that seriously with respect to motives and methods. Instead I decided not to obscure the points I wanted to make by adding in that message that I considered the terms I was using somewhat "strawmen". I thought it would just be a distraction to bring up this additional point. In fact, I think that even some scholars (who should know better) get impatient with the lack of progress/agreement in uniting some isolates and "proto-isolates" (e.g., Proto-Indo-European, etc.) with something else, Like the dilettantes, they would like to be in future history books as (one of) "the first" to have "recognised" (or "claimed") the relationship between (Proto-)X and (Proto-)Y. They forget to bear in mind that a good future history of linguistics may add that they made the identification on the basis of shabby methods, though it was later (in the future) confirmed on the basis of sound methods, through no fault of the visionaries (except to the extent that we can honor, say, Kircher, as having correctly though accidentally guessed that Egyptian hieroglyphics reflected an old form of Coptic). Such impatiently glory-seeking scholars are not alone to blame, since current and past HL books do mention older scholars who made identifications later confirmed, but do not add that their reasoning and methods were faulty. (EG. maybe, that Egyptian is related to Hebrew, not because Hebrew is the mother of all languages, but because both descend from Proto-Afro-Asiatic, or whatever.) To mention writers of books on HL, Larry Trask wrote: I don't think linguistics has yet succeeded in imposing itself upon the public consciousness as a fully respectable scholarly discipline, an understanding of which requires years of painstaking study. Whereas physics, I suspect, is widely perceived as a priesthood whose mysteries are closed to outsiders, *everybody* is entitled to an opinion about language. What Larry wrote is quite true, I think. However, we must also consider that "physics" as such is not public property, whereas as a *social* phenomenon language is. It is not only the case that "everybody" is *entitled* to have an opinion about language, but that they are socially *required* to. I may just be critical of the generality of Larry's wording here, since if "language" were mystified for the public the same way "physics" is (mainly by the media ), the public (reporters, makers of educational documentaries, etc.) would defer to us, the experts. I must add, though, that I have my doubts that linguists are ripe for such a position, since language is an extremely important "public" property, and I'm not even sure that linguists know enough about the relation between language and society to take over in the public mind as the ultimate experts. It goes without saying, nevertheless, that the public believes a lot that we linguists know is false. What we don't always appreciate are the reasons that the "public" has the false beliefs it does, and how they function in the society. Until we understand that, and can replace those functions, we won't be able to replace those beliefs. The linguistic (but not social) pointlessness of the recent "Ebonics" controversy is a case in point (among many). That is relevant to HL to the extent that it was narrowed to the issue of whether the language of many black Americans is a descendent of "English" or not. The answer is one that "genetic" HL is not equipped to address, but a "genetic" answer was insisted upon by the disseminators of information to the society at large. Next, with regard to the discussion of isolates. We've already had some terminological quibbles. Clearly there were more "isolates" in the past than there are now. The assumption is simply that they are related to other languages (dead and/or still living) at a time depth that stymies us (temporarily, we hope). Guy Deutscher wrote: >But why are isolate languages actually so rare? ...wouldn t it be helpful >if linguists >discussed in general terms what the conditions are for the >survival of isolates , and >why these conditions are (relatively) so >rarely met? This is essentially the same issue as the current concern with the death of so many languages, and ultimately with the death of ANY "language". It has been cast by some, say, in reference to Johanna Nichols' ideas, as the death of language *families*, but, essentially that is the same as the death of ANY language. The question that really emerges which has a historical twist to it is: how long has the reduction of language families been going on in human history? Are the processes of destruction we see today essentially different from what has been going on for a tremendously long period in human history? There is a questionable assumption in this question that relates to Scott Delacey's point on isolates. He wrote: >unless this population created a new language rather >than bringing one with them, the language didn't start out as an >isolate. By extension, heshould assume that all languages are related *genetically*. Otherwise, various languages and/or current language families descended from independent isolates. The question then reaches back to the origin of language, and we will not know the answer until we have figured out how "language" arose and attained its current shape (universal/language-independent? shape, whatever that turns out to be). One possibility, which contradicts the assumption that there were NOT originally a number of language isolates, is that the diversification began before language reached its current "universal" form. It is dangerous to make that assumption, of course, because it invites all kinds of crackpots to keep presenting "survivals" of "pre-language" in selected current languages. But it is also dangerous to dismiss it out of hand since that allows the reverse crackpot-ism that ALL languages are "genetically" related in a fully formed "proto-world" language. (Of course, the way things are going that doesn't preclude that the lucky proto-world was only one of various pre-language isolates that managed to survive for non-linguistic reasons.) Both ideas (and more, perhaps) should be borne in mind as checks on each other, as both scholars and "dilettantes" continue on their quest. -- Benji From vovin at HAWAII.EDU Thu Mar 27 05:01:34 1997 From: vovin at HAWAII.EDU (Alexander Vovin) Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 19:01:34 -1000 Subject: isolates In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Reply follows. On Tue, 25 Mar 1997, Larry Trask wrote: > Alexander Vovin writes: > > > I would like to offer some corrections for the following passage in > > Larry Trask's posting, as some of the claims regarding the certain > > Asian languages as isolates are out of date, I am afraid. > > Well, I am happy to be corrected, but I have my doubts about some of > what follows. > > > First, there is a general consensus nowadays among all linguists > > working in historical Korean and Japanese that Korean and Japanese > > are related. > > "All"? I doubt it. I know that this idea has been gathering support, > but it's news to me that *all* specialists now accept it as > established. Anyway, I can name one specialist who certainly doesn't > accept this "consensus": Masayoshi Shibatani, who has repreatedly > characterized the proposed Japanese-Korean link as unsubstantiated. > And Shibatani also repeatedly points out that views on the possible > affiliations of Japanese are numerous, varied, and much debated. Shibatani is a syntactician, not a historical linguist. His most significant contribution to the historical Japanese linguistics is a chapter in his "Languages of Japan", which I believe, is the weakest part of the otherwise excellent book (I often use it as a textbook in my classes): it discusses indiscriminately various hypotheses of Japanese origins (without any reference to comparative method), and is seriously flawed and/or outdated in other respects. There are a number of "hypotheses" flourishing in Japan about the genetic origins of Japanese (probably no less than about Basque), but the general level of comparative linguistics in Japan remains very low (with several important exceptions, such as Hattori, Murayama, Osada etc.), as it is not based on comparative method, but on kokugogaku (national linguistics) methods undistingushable from folk etymology. Shibatani mentions several of them, but try to find any substantial discussion of any -- you won't. The center of research on Korean-Japanese relationship is now in the States, and it is one of the main cointributions of the scholars who belong to S. Martin's school. Anyway, let me refer you to the J. Whitman's dissertation: "Phonological Basis for the Comparison of Japanese and Korean", Harvard 1985, which together with a couple of articles published recently by S. Martin in Baldi's volume and in "Sprung from some common source" should persuade you that the two languages are related (I can provide you with some further reading, if you wish so). Well, even ground-breaking Martin's 1966 article is still valid at 75% percent, but you have to disregard the reconstructions proposed there. Well, anyway, among the people who are actively engaged in research on Japanese and Korean (and Shibatani is not one of them) it is accepted that two languages are related. > > > Their link to the rest of Altaic remains more disputable, but even > > here majority of the scholars lean toward the acceptance of genetic > > relationship between Japanese, Korean, and Tungusic. > > Well, even if this is true, "leaning toward the acceptance" of a > hypothesis is hardly the same thing as seeing it established to > general satisfaction. As far as I know, Japanese has not been > demonstrated to be securely related to anything else at all, and it > remains an isolate, as does Korean. Well, please see above. Japanese and Korean have been demonstrated to be related. That's enough for them not to be isolates. > > > In addition, none of these proposals are long-range, in > > the sense of long-range proposals concerning genetic affiliation of > > Basque or Nihali. Besides, both "Japanese" and "Korean" are to a > > great extent sociolinguistic terms: under "Japanese" we have a > > number of mutually unintelligible languages or "dialects", as they > > are usually called, with the depth comparable to that of > > Germanic. The same is true of "Korean": there are at least three > > Korean languages, again normally called "dialects", mutually > > unintelligible and with the depth comparable to that of > > Slavic. Thus, even if they were not related (but they are), each of > > them would represent a mini-family, and not a true isolate. > > This is news to me, and I am skeptical. No reference source available > to me even so much as mentions the possibility that either Japanese or > Korean might plausibly be regarded as a family of three or more > languages. The most I have seen is a suggestion that the highly > divergent Ryukyuan varieties of Japanese might be regarded as a > distinct language, but even this appears to be a minority view today > (though it was formerly more prominent). I can only say that you rely on sociolinguistically oriented sources. It is a matter of national policy in both Japan and Korea that everyone is "Japanese" and "Korean" and there is a "great national unity". This is not true as long as language divergence is concerned, and the break-off is not just bewtween Ryukyuan and Japanese. There are at least 5 branches within Ryukyuan: Okinawan proper, Northern Okinawan-Amami, Miyako, Hateruma, Yonaguni. None of them is mutually comprehensible, and they are all very divergent. The same is true about mainisland Japanese: a person from Tokyo will not understand a person from Toohoku )north-east), and will barely understand a person from Kyuushuu. A close situation exists in Korea: while most dialects spoken on the Korean mainland are mutually intelligible (Korean proper), a dialect spoken on the island of Ceycwuto (Chechudo, Quelpart) is too divergent to be understood by a person from Seoul. THe same is applicable to the Northeastern Hamkyeng dialect, spoken also in adjacent regions of China and in Russia, on which I myself have done a fieldwork. The mutual comprehension is almost out of question, and the languages have diverged to the point where they have almost different verbal suffixation. Hope this helps to dissolve your doubts. > > > Second, over last seven years there has been presented quite a > > chunk of evidence allowing us tentatively to link Ainu with > > Austronesian and Austroasiatic. > > > There is a consensus between anyone who ever tried to venture in > > this field (late Murayama S., L. Reid, J. Bengtson, P. Sidwell, > > I.Pejros, Yanagizaki Y. , and myself) that Austric connection is the > > likeliest for Ainu. Although, none has yet come up with a proof > > beyond the reasonable doubt, this is the only connection among > > proposed for Ainu that cannot be easily disproved (contrary to the > > case, e.g., with Ainu and Altaic). Thus, this is situation > > remarkably different from Basque situation, where majority of > > specialists reject any remote proposals. > > But no relationship has been established between Ainu and anything > else at all, and it remains an isolate. Having a favorite conjecture > is a far cry from having a persuasive case. Anyway, even Austric > itself is not generally accepted as a valid construct. It has been established that Ainu is UNLIKELY to be an isolate: for me it is enough to take off the list of definite isolates, if we want to be completely honest with ourselves. Let's place it into intermediate group. Austric (as consisting of Austronesian and Austroasiatic, but not including Kadai) is accepted nowadays by all known to me leading scholars in both Austroneasian and Austroasiatic. It is even accepted by R. Blust, who is one of the most carteful historical linguists known to me. > > > Third, since both Ket and Yukaghir did have relatives in the > > recent past, this very fact seems to work against Larry Trask point > > that there are more isolates among us than we suppose. As a matter > > of fact, it shows us how isolates come into being: by extinction of > > the other family members. Thus, there are probably less true > > isolates than we suppose. > > I don't follow this at all. If we can watch isolates come into > existence before our eyes in historical times, then why is that an > argument against the existence of numerous isolates which lost any > relatives they may have had ages ago? > Nope, it is an argument against your point that there are more isolates around us than we tend to think. About modern status of Ket and Yukaghir, please see my reply to Thomason. > > In particular, as I intended to demonstrate above, Larry Trask's > > Asia list can be safely reduced to Gilyak, Nihali, and Burushaski. > > "Safely"? I don't think so. As I always say, let us discuss the evidence. I remove Japanese and Korean from your list, and since it is accepted by virtually everyone who works in the historical and comparative Japanese field (using of course, comparative method, and not folk etymology), I believe that the burden of proof that Korean and Japanese are not related rests on your shoulders. Please present us with the evidence that the two languages in question are not related, using exactly the same technique as you apply for Basque: that is, showing that we have faulty etymologies etc. Then I will be happy to present counterevidence, showing, e.g. why such highly divergent words as Tokyo Japanese isi and Seoul Korean tol "stone" are in fact cognates. > > > Among those remaining three, Gilyak looks like a Nostratic language > > (although it has yet to be proven), > > Er, um...but *Nostratic* is still very far from being established. I don't know anything about the Southern branches of Nostratic: Kartvelian, Afrasian, and Dravidian (and I have grave doubts about Nostratic validity of the latter), but there are very few doubts in my mind that IE, Uralic and Altaic are related -- I have an article in a forthcoming volume on Nostratic from John Benjamins. Anyway, I believe Nostratic is not yet finally established, but I wouldn't call it "very far". > > > and I even will not be very surprised if ultimately it turns out to > > be a very abberant member of Altaic family: after all, scholars so > > far applied only internal reconstruction to Gilyak, but we should > > not overlook the fact that what we call Gilyak actually consists of > > three or four mutually untelligible and pretty much divergent > > languages, the fact that allows comparative reconstruction that is > > yet to be done. > > Interesting, certainly, but Gilyak is still an isolate. Rather, we should call it a small family with no apparent relatives. But it is not a single isolate -- the same as about Ket and Yukaghir. Alexander Vovin > > Larry Trask > COGS > University of Sussex > Brighton BN1 9QH > UK > > larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk > > From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Mar 27 10:20:00 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 10:20:00 +0000 Subject: isolates In-Reply-To: from "Alexander Vovin" at Mar 26, 97 07:01:34 pm Message-ID: Alexander Vovin writes: [To keep this posting down to a manageable length, I have snipped the remarks made by me and quoted by Vovin; hope that doesn't obscure the discussion. I have also snipped a few of Vovin's remarks on which I have nothing to say.] [snip Vovin on Shibatani] > The center of research on Korean-Japanese relationship is now in the > States, and it is one of the main cointributions of the scholars who > belong to S. Martin's school. Anyway, let me refer you to the > J. Whitman's dissertation: "Phonological Basis for the Comparison of > Japanese and Korean", Harvard 1985, which together with a couple of > articles published recently by S. Martin in Baldi's volume and in > "Sprung from some common source" should persuade you that the two > languages are related (I can provide you with some further reading, > if you wish so). Well, even ground-breaking Martin's 1966 article is > still valid at 75% percent, but you have to disregard the > reconstructions proposed there. Well, anyway, among the people who > are actively engaged in research on Japanese and Korean (and > Shibatani is not one of them) it is accepted that two languages are > related. [snip Trask] > Well, please see above. Japanese and Korean have been demonstrated > to be related. That's enough for them not to be isolates. Well, I am happy to be persuaded that Shibatani's views are not representative, and that some progress has been made in linking Japanese and Korean. However, I still entertain doubts about your flat assertion that the two languages "have been demonstrated to be related". Even Samuel Martin does not maintain that. In his article in the Lamb and Mitchell volume, he most emphatically does not assert that J and K are related beyond reasonable doubt, or anything close to this. Instead, he is exceedingly cautious. He opens with the words "There is no general agreement on the genetic relationships of either Japanese or Korean." He continues later with "I believe the majority view today would hold that Japanese and Korean are *more likely* to be related to each other than to any other language..." [emphasis added]. And that's about it. The only further remarks he offers are suggestions that his own work and the work of others are perhaps lifting the comparison of J and K above the level of mere speculation, but he acknowledges difficulties and uncertainties. This does not strike me as a ringing endorsement of your very confident assertion. Of course, Martin's private views may be rather different from what he is prepared to say in public, but I can only go by the latter. And Martin is not prepared to assert that Japanese and Korean are related. [snip Trask on languages versus dialects] > I can only say that you rely on sociolinguistically oriented > sources. It is a matter of national policy in both Japan and Korea > that everyone is "Japanese" and "Korean" and there is a "great > national unity". This is not true as long as language divergence is > concerned, and the break-off is not just bewtween Ryukyuan and > Japanese. There are at least 5 branches within Ryukyuan: Okinawan > proper, Northern Okinawan-Amami, Miyako, Hateruma, Yonaguni. None of > them is mutually comprehensible, and they are all very > divergent. The same is true about mainisland Japanese: a person from > Tokyo will not understand a person from Toohoku )north-east), and > will barely understand a person from Kyuushuu. A close situation > exists in Korea: while most dialects spoken on the Korean mainland > are mutually intelligible (Korean proper), a dialect spoken on the > island of Ceycwuto (Chechudo, Quelpart) is too divergent to be > understood by a person from Seoul. THe same is applicable to the > Northeastern Hamkyeng dialect, spoken also in adjacent regions of > China and in Russia, on which I myself have done a fieldwork. The > mutual comprehension is almost out of question, and the languages > have diverged to the point where they have almost different verbal > suffixation. Hope this helps to dissolve your doubts. What you're raising here is the old question of how we distinguish languages from dialects, and of course we can't. Yes, I'm aware of the mutual incomprehensibility of the several varieties of Japanese (though I didn't know about the similar case for Korean). But mutual comprehensibility is only one possible criterion for recognizing language boundaries, and it's not even the one we mainly rely on. Instead, political and social factors, where these exist, are more usually regarded as overriding comprehensibility. Hell, I can't understand the English of Tyneside in England, but nobody wants to see that as a distinct language. And I certainly can't understand the speech of large chunks of Scotland, but hardly anybody, apart from a few Scottish nationalists, wants to see Scots as a distinct language from English. [snip Vovin and Trask on Ainu] > It has been established that Ainu is UNLIKELY to be an isolate: for > me it is enough to take off the list of definite isolates, if we > want to be completely honest with ourselves. Let's place it into > intermediate group. Austric (as consisting of Austronesian and > Austroasiatic, but not including Kadai) is accepted nowadays by all > known to me leading scholars in both Austroneasian and > Austroasiatic. It is even accepted by R. Blust, who is one of the > most carteful historical linguists known to me. I'm sorry, but I simply cannot understand this. You are telling me that Ainu is "unlikely" to be an isolate, even though no relationship has been demonstrated between Ainu and anything else at all. I find this position incomprehensible. [snip] [snip Vovin and Trask on Asian isolates] > As I always say, let us discuss the evidence. I remove Japanese > and Korean from your list, and since it is accepted by virtually > everyone who works in the historical and comparative Japanese field > (using of course, comparative method, and not folk etymology), I > believe that the burden of proof that Korean and Japanese are not > related rests on your shoulders. Please present us with the evidence > that the two languages in question are not related, using exactly > the same technique as you apply for Basque: that is, showing that we > have faulty etymologies etc. Then I will be happy to present > counterevidence, showing, e.g. why such highly divergent words as > Tokyo Japanese isi and Seoul Korean tol "stone" are in fact > cognates. You are joking. It is not on my shoulders to demonstrate that any languages are not related; this is a logical impossibility. If you can demonstrate that J and K are related beyond reasonable doubt, I'll be delighted, since I prefer positive results to negative ones. [snip on Nostratic] > I don't know anything about the Southern branches of Nostratic: > Kartvelian, Afrasian, and Dravidian (and I have grave doubts about > Nostratic validity of the latter), but there are very few doubts in > my mind that IE, Uralic and Altaic are related -- I have an article > in a forthcoming volume on Nostratic from John Benjamins. Anyway, I > believe Nostratic is not yet finally established, but I wouldn't > call it "very far". You may be right, but my optimism on this point is a little more tempered than yours. [on the putative isolated status of Gilyak] > Rather, we should call it a small family with no apparent > relatives. But it is not a single isolate -- the same as about Ket > and Yukaghir. We are merely quibbling over words here. A small family of one language with no apparent relatives is my idea of an isolate. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From hale1 at ALCOR.CONCORDIA.CA Thu Mar 27 12:40:52 1997 From: hale1 at ALCOR.CONCORDIA.CA (Mark Hale) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 07:40:52 -0500 Subject: isoltes Message-ID: Alexander Vovin writes: > Austric (as consisting of Austronesian and > Austroasiatic, but not including Kadai) is accepted nowadays by all > known to me leading scholars in both Austroneasian and > Austroasiatic. No, it isn't. Or rather, maybe it is, but this only indicates that you don't know very many Austronesianists. An assertion that any such family (Austric) has been demonstrated to exist by the normal canons of the comparative method is absurd, given the published material on the subject. Indeed, the reconstruction of Austroasiatic itself is still very tentative -- if indeed it existed, which I personally seriously doubt. [I.e., I doubt there is any family which has the makeup of the currently declared makeup of Austroasiatic, though doubtless many of the languages within that putative group are related to one another.] Can someone tell me why the question of "isolates" is of any linguistic interest whatsoever? If we all accept, as I assume we must, that the definition of "language" is a socio-political one, then the question reduces to "why do we sometimes find groups of speakers, sociopolitically defined to be speakers of 'one language', who can't be demonstrated, given the limited nature of our evidence, the small number of scholars who have invested a small amount of time (seen from a human history perspective) working on them, and the extremely limited number of plausibly reconstructed language families which we could possibly relate them to, to be related to another language?" The answer is then, of course, contained in the question. We don't have the right kind of evidence (yet), for the reasons I've inserted into the question, and we may never have the evidence. Without such evidence, the languages will count as 'isolates'. But it isn't a property of the language -- it's a property of the evidentiary record. Sometimes it's good and allows reconstruction of an ancestor, sometimes it isn't and doesn't. Is this surprising or interesting in any way? Mark From MFCEPRH at FS1.ART.MAN.AC.UK Thu Mar 27 12:32:19 1997 From: MFCEPRH at FS1.ART.MAN.AC.UK (Richard Hogg) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 12:32:19 GMT0BST Subject: isolates and Scots Message-ID: On 27 Mar 97 at 10:20, Larry Trask wrote: > And I certainly can't understand the > speech of large chunks of Scotland, but hardly anybody, apart from a > few Scottish nationalists, wants to see Scots as a distinct language > from English. > Some of us, who are not "Scottish nationalists" [sic] will be coming to get Larry and carry him off to the Highlands. Richard ******************************************************************************** ********************** Richard M. Hogg Tel: +44(0)161 275 3164 Department of English Fax: +44(0)161 275 3256 and American Studies e-mail: r.m.hogg at man.ac.uk University of Manchester web: http://www.art.man.ac.uk/english/staff/rmh/home.htm Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL ******************************************************************************** ********************** From Ralf.Georg at BONN.NETSURF.DE Thu Mar 27 13:41:17 1997 From: Ralf.Georg at BONN.NETSURF.DE (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 14:41:17 +0100 Subject: Vovin on Nostratic and other things Message-ID: Alexander Vovin wrote: >I don't know anything about the Southern branches of Nostratic: >Kartvelian, Afrasian, and Dravidian (and I have grave doubts about >Nostratic validity of the latter), but there are very few doubts in my >mind that IE, Uralic and Altaic are related -- I have an article in a >forthcoming volume on Nostratic from John Benjamins. Anyway, I believe >Nostratic is not yet finally established, but I wouldn't call it "very >far". Well, Sasha, please let's not get into another soap-opera over this, but maybe you will wish to rephrase your first sentence. How is it possible that you "don't know anything" about Kartvelian, Afrasian and Dravidian, yet feel entitled to voice doubts about the proper classification of the latter (and not on the former two). Come on ... Did I ever tell you, btw, why I'm not a Nostraticist ? Because I lack the first-hand knowledge of Dravidian, that's why (sounds elitist, I know, but that's the way I've been educated here). And, just to join in with what Larry Trask said earlier this day: there is *absolutely no reason whatsoever* why the burden of proof should rest on the shoulders of people doubting a proposed relationship. Absolutely no. Never. The major reason being of course that this is, as Larry Trask pointed out before, logically impossible (and you wouldn't expect anybody to do a logically impossible thing, would you?). The burden of proof is always, only, and exclusively on those who *assert* something. Seems hard to swallow, but such is life. And another bitter pill: those who assert something cannot at the same time define the criteria by which skeptics are to judge those assertions. If it were so, you could just wave away *any* criticism by merely saying "That's irrelevant". Irrelevant to you maybe, but not necessarily to others. There is no such thing as a "universally applicable criterion for truth" or sth. like that (not only in linguistics, btw, I prefer the constructivist outlook on things, anyway). Especially in our trade, where argumentations cannot be totally kept free from hermeneutic procedures (however hard we try to, and I'm nothing less than an adherent of hermeneutics, to be sure !), where we cannot trust on experiments as falsifying instances etc., you can *never* expect to persuade everybody in the field that a - let's call it non-trivial - relationship really holds. You will, however, be successful to persuade those collegues in the field, to whom you can show that your assumptions are actually *useful* for their independent purposes, e.g. if you can show me that the assumption that, say, Mongolian is ultimately related to - among other languages - Japanese (in a meaningful way, i.e. allowing reconstructions) actually allows me to *understand* certain facts of Mongolian better (or *at all*) than it would be possible working with Mongolian data alone, you'll have won me over *in that very moment* into the pro-Altaic trenches (provided I find nothing to mouth about your data ;-) ...). That's - in short - the success story of Indo-European linguistics. There is an *awful* lot of things I begin to understand about, say, Slavic or Greek Morphology only after I start looking at other I.E. languages or at the Proto. Whether Altaic (Micro- or Macro) will look like that in - say - twenty years, remains to be seen, but I remain, as you will expect - skeptical. In order to say something irenic (sic!, not "ironic") on the eve of the (Western) Easter holidays, I'd like to add that I myself - without being a specialist in neither Japanese nor Korean - find the progress which has been made recently in the comparison of those two languages quite impressive and I'd like to see the efforts at reconstructing the underlying proto prolongued. And I *am* sympathetic to the idea of that Proto being related to Proto-Tungusic - for the simple reason that there - provided the Japanese and Korean reconstruction I've seen are correct, which I am in no position to assert - seem to be some systematic correspondences in morphology between them, so we may expect something interesting from this side in the future. My opinion on Turkic and Mongolian as members of that same "Altaic" language family is known to you (skeptical, what else ?). Serdechnyj privet, Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel/Fax +49-228-691332+ From johanna at UCLINK.BERKELEY.EDU Thu Mar 27 01:43:10 1997 From: johanna at UCLINK.BERKELEY.EDU (Johanna Nichols) Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 17:43:10 -0800 Subject: Ainu & Gilyak, Japanese & Korean Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > >One thing that caught my attention in the linguistic database from >Johanna Nichols' "Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time" was the >typological near-identity of Gilyak and Ainu. Of all the typological >features listed, Ainu and Gilyak only differ in that Gilyak has >numerical classifiers (26 of them). Is there any other evidence for >contacts between Gilyak and Ainu? > CAUTION -- That database should be used as a pointer to the descriptive publications, not as a full typological description in itself. If Gilyak and Ainu exhibit typological near-identity, that just goes to show you how impoverished a typological description is compared to the real thing, because those two languages are very different. (More generally, Gilyak is very different from any other language on earth.) Since the question of Japanese and Korean has come up on the list, I have a question for Alexander Vovin and/or others who have worked on these languages: what, in a nutshell, is the evidence that Japanese and Korean are related? I've read as much of the relevant literature as I could find, and the only support offered seems to be that if you assume they are related you can find sound correspondences and apply the comparative method. But what is the evidence for assuming relatedness in the first place? Thanks for any help anyone can give me. Johanna Nichols Slavic Languages, UC Berkeley From mcv at PI.NET Thu Mar 27 18:33:54 1997 From: mcv at PI.NET (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 18:33:54 GMT Subject: isoltes In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19970327074050.009ce6d0@alcor.concordia.ca> Message-ID: Mark Hale wrote: >Can someone tell me why the question of "isolates" is of any >linguistic interest whatsoever? If we all accept, as I assume we >must, that the definition of "language" is a socio-political one, >then the question reduces to "why do we sometimes find groups of >speakers, sociopolitically defined to be speakers of 'one >language', who can't be demonstrated, given the limited nature >of our evidence, the small number of scholars who have invested >a small amount of time (seen from a human history perspective) >working on them, and the extremely limited number of plausibly >reconstructed language families which we could possibly relate >them to, to be related to another language?" You are confusing "relatedness" with "reconstruction", something which Merritt Ruhlen just loves to denounce. You don't need a reconstructed proto-language to know whether two languages are related or not. A case in point is Afro-Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic), considered a valid grouping for over a century, where only now we are seeing serious attempts at reconstruction (and they differ enough among themselves to cast doubts on whether they are all equally "plausible"). The reconstruction of PIE has not changed the membership of the family one bit [although it has shown for instance that Armenian is in fact not an Iranian language], which was obvious from the start [Hittite and Tocharian were discovered later]. What reconstruction *can* do, is to show relationships that were not quite so obvious previously, and, most importantly, it can show that relationships which were thought possible (but not obvious) previously are in fact false. I would imagine, for instance, that the work done on reconstructing Old Chinese has been crucial in dismissing any close genetic relationship between Chinese and Thai or Vietnamese. == Miguel Carrasquer Vidal ~ ~ Amsterdam _____________ ~ ~ mcv at pi.net |_____________||| ========================== Ce .sig n'est pas une .cig From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Fri Mar 28 00:33:29 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 19:33:29 EST Subject: No subject Message-ID: Return-Path: Received: from UNIVSCVM (NJE origin SMTP at UNIVSCVM) by VM.SC.EDU (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 5477; Thu, 27 Mar 1997 18:26:28 -0500 Received: from relay1.Hawaii.Edu by VM.SC.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R3) with TCP; Thu, 27 Mar 97 18:26:21 EST Received: from uhunix2.its.hawaii.edu ([128.171.44.7]) by relay1.Hawaii.Edu with SMTP id <587007(4)>; Thu, 27 Mar 1997 13:21:33 -1000 Received: from localhost by uhunix2.its.Hawaii.Edu with SMTP id <148527(8)>; Thu, 27 Mar 1997 13:26:25 -1000 Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 13:26:23 -1000 From: Alexander Vovin X-Sender: vovin at uhunix2 To: Dorothy Disterheft Subject: Re: your posting to HISTLING In-Reply-To: <97Mar27.013543hwt.370800(8)@relay2.Hawaii.Edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII > I believe that that I again have make some corrections... > > On Tue, 25 Mar 1997, Sarah G. Thomason wrote: > > > S.T.: > > > Alexander Vovin's confidence that some of the isolates > listed > by Larry Trask have been de-isolated by general consensus among > > specialists is probably too sanguine. A recent review in LANGUAGE, > > for instance, expressed doubts about the evidence for connecting > > Japanese with anything else (I don't remember the details of the > > reviewer's arguments; the review appeared three or four years ago; > > it's possible that the reviewer's focus was on Japanese + Austronesian > > rather than on Japanese + Korean). > A,V.: [NOTE: this passage has been modified from an original version by order of our moderator. Since this is the only way to get my reply through, I had to comply] > Well, I believe that this is not the way how the refutation of a genetic > claim has to be presented. Prof. Thomason cites some review in "Language", which in my opinion cannot be used as a "proof" that Japanese and Korean are not related, especially in the light of the fact that there are many other works on the subject with which Prof. Thomason does not seem to be familiar with. (I suspect that the review in question is that by B.Comrie of Starostin 1991 -- published in Language 69.4 (1993) -- that as far as I remember does not state that Japanese is an isolate, but dicusses the claim that Japanese is Altaic). > S.T.: > > > > And I have my own concerns about evidence linking Ainu with > > anything else, to the extent that the evidence relies on the > > reconstructions in Vovin's book on Ainu (which contains proposals > > like Proto-Ainu *hd- for a large correspondence set in which most > > dialects have w- and the others have segments which could easily be > > reflexes of *w-; Vovin declines to reconstruct *w- here because > > there are few words with this correspondence set, whereas both *h and > > *d are reconstructible). > > A.V.: > Sorry, but this is a gross misrepresentation of my work. First, PA *hd is > not a proposal for a large correspondence set, and my TENTATIVE hypothesis > that Ainu IS LIKELY to be genetically related to Austroasiatic is not > build on this correspondence alone. It is true that reconstruction *hd > might explain nicely such cases as Ainu wakka < *hdakka "water" and PAA > *?dAk "id". It is also true that majority of Ainu dialects have either w- > or G- or h- in this case. But it is not comparative evidence that warrants > a reconstruction of some kind of cluster there. *hd was again a tentative > solution, but if Prof. Thomason have a better explanation for the > morphonological alternation between w- and s- (which I believe may reflect > interdental voiced D (as in English "the", denoted in my book as /d/), I > will gladly listen to the proposal. NOTE: since that time I have given up > on reconstructing *hd in the word "water", now I believe that w- in this > word is rather prothetic, as some of the earliest materials on Ainu have > just AKKA or AK. > > A.V.: > What's important in my humble opinion that HISTORICALLY these languages > are not isolates. Today they became isolates: so how can it prove that we > have more isolates than we tend to think? > > S.T.: > But what evidence > > have we, for any language that we all agree is an isolate and that > > has no attested former relatives, that it used to have some > > relatives? It's easy enough to imagine a situation in which no > > split will occur, ever: just situate your hypothetical language in > > a remote mountain valley (say), in a small area that only supports > > a small cohesive population -- a single speech community in which (roughly) > > everyone talks to everyone else -- and leave everyone there permanently. > > No split. A belief that there are no real-life cases of this general > > sort (it doesn't have to be a mountain valley, etc.) is a matter of > > faith, not science. > > A.V.: > None, of course. But note that we do not discuss such hypothetical cases > as you propose. We do discuss real-life situations, where of course > neither Ket nor Yukaghir are isolates from the historical perspective. > I'll tell more: they are not isolates even from the synchronic > perspective: 1) Ket is represented by two "dialects", Sym and Imbat, that > are more like two separate languages, and they are not mutually > intelligible; 2) Yukaghir's "dialects", Tundra Yukaghir and Kolyma > Yukaghir are again independent languages, highly divergent, and not > miutually intelligible. So off the list they go. Regarding your > hypothetical language in a small valley, I would very much like to see an > example (no splits, completely homegeneous, and no outside relations > whatsoever -- so an example like Batsbi won't work). I am unaware of such > cases -- and until I see one I won't be able to agree that belief in such > cases is more scientific than the other way around. S.T.: > > Vovin is right, of course, in saying that Japanese is not an isolate > > even if it has no demonstrable relatives, if it is really a small > > family of very close-related languages. But then Proto-Japanese (still > > on the hypothesis that it has no established relatives) would be/have > > been an isolate, so it would still go into the total. > > > A.V.: > Unfortunately, this hypothesis is wrong. It has been demonstrated that > Japanese is related to Korean beyond a reasonable doubt. There are many > works on this subject by S.Martin, Murayama S., Lee Ki-moon, R.Miller, > J. Whitman, L. Serafim, B.Mathias, and myself written in English and > German, leaving aside a vast literature in more exotic Japanese, Korean, > and Russian. Let us discuss the evidence presented in these works rather > than to reach verdict on the basis of a single close-to-anonymous review > in "Language". > From vovin at HAWAII.EDU Thu Mar 27 23:46:25 1997 From: vovin at HAWAII.EDU (Alexander Vovin) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 13:46:25 -1000 Subject: isoltes In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19970327074050.009ce6d0@alcor.concordia.ca> Message-ID: On Thu, 27 Mar 1997, Mark Hale wrote: > Alexander Vovin writes: > > > Austric (as consisting of Austronesian and > > Austroasiatic, but not including Kadai) is accepted nowadays by all > > known to me leading scholars in both Austroneasian and > > Austroasiatic. > > No, it isn't. Or rather, maybe it is, but this only indicates that > you don't know very many Austronesianists. I can only return the compliment: if my memory is correct you were not present at CAMAC 1993, where Diffloth, Blust, Reid, Starosta and others were present, and where the issue was discussed at length in connection with Reid's presentation, published in the last issue of Oceanic Linguistics for 1994 (?#32). Of course, Benedict who was there too, denies the PAN-PAA connection, but I believe the consensus reached was that AA-AN is the only fruitful link to follow. An assertion that any such > family (Austric) has been demonstrated to exist by the normal canons > of the comparative method is absurd, given the published material > on the subject. Is not as absurd as you think. PAN and PAA share very striking common morphological markers -- please see Reid's article I mentioned above. It is rather quantitative than qualitative difficulty that gets in the way: there are very few cognates discovered so far. But the few that are there are quite impressive. Of course it is a long way before Austric reaches the stage of elaboration of IE, but this is no reason to throw it in a junk basket now and to condemn all research in this area. Indeed, the reconstruction of Austroasiatic itself > is still very tentative -- if indeed it existed, which I personally > seriously doubt. [I.e., I doubt there is any family which has the > makeup of the currently declared makeup of Austroasiatic, though > doubtless many of the languages within that putative group are > related to one another.] You are of course right in one aspect: there is no comprehensive AA reconstruction yet. However, I believe that in the rest you are going too far. It is true that some scholars doubt the relationship of Munda with the rest of the family. But are you seriously suggesting e.g. that Vietnamese is not related to Mon, and none of them is related to Nikobarese or Aslian? > > Can someone tell me why the question of "isolates" is of any > linguistic interest whatsoever? If we all accept, as I assume we > must, that the definition of "language" is a socio-political one, > then the question reduces to "why do we sometimes find groups of > speakers, sociopolitically defined to be speakers of 'one > language', who can't be demonstrated, given the limited nature > of our evidence, the small number of scholars who have invested > a small amount of time (seen from a human history perspective) > working on them, and the extremely limited number of plausibly > reconstructed language families which we could possibly relate > them to, to be related to another language?" The answer is then, > of course, contained in the question. We don't have the right > kind of evidence (yet), for the reasons I've inserted into the > question, and we may never have the evidence. Without such evidence, > the languages will count as 'isolates'. But it isn't a property > of the language -- it's a property of the evidentiary record. > Sometimes it's good and allows reconstruction of an ancestor, > sometimes it isn't and doesn't. Is this surprising or interesting > in any way? It remains unclear to me why we all must accept language as "socio-political" in the first place. From sally at ISP.PITT.EDU Thu Mar 27 18:41:24 1997 From: sally at ISP.PITT.EDU (Sarah G. Thomason) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 13:41:24 -0500 Subject: isolates Message-ID: In discussing the hypothesis of Japanese-Korean relationship, Alexander Vovin says, rightly, that I shouldn't have referred to a review without checking the exact reference. So I have now checked: the reviewer was David Solnit, the review was of Paul Benedict's JAPANESE/AUSTRO-TAI (Ann Arbor: Karoma), and the review appeared in LANGUAGE 68:188-96 (1992). Solnit concludes his review as follows: "Finally, the correspondences with Austronesian and with Altaic, to the extent that both are valid, need to be evaluated and placed in relation to each other, whether that entails choosing one as inherited and the other as borrowed, or whether Japanese is one of those rare cases having in its past a break in normal genetic transmission." Larry Trask has already made it clear in his own response to A.V.'s posting that not all specialists agree that a relationship between Japanese and Korean has been established. A.V. goes on to say that I have grossly misrepresented his own work, in my reference to his reconstruction of *hd- for a correspondence set consisting mainly of w's. My methodological point was that a claim of genetic relationship that rests in part on such reconstructions is not one that I, at least, would place very much confidence in. He asks if I can offer a better reconstruction for the correspondence set in question. I do believe that I can: I propose *w. The fact that *w would, on the evidence of the dialects, be a rare Proto-Ainu phoneme doesn't bother me nearly as much as A.V.'s own proposal. Here is the relevant material from his book A RECONSTRUCTION OF PROTO-AINU (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993): 1. The correspondence set (which I call large because it ranges over a large number of dialects): w : w : w : w : w : w : w : w : w : w : u-/w- : -G- : v : v : -gu- 2. A.V.'s rationale for reconstructing *hd-: He does not reconstruct *w because "[w] is extremely rare in common Ainu. It occurs initially in five words, one of which is doubtful, and in medial position in three words....the distribution of [w] is quite peculiar -- it occurs mostly before [a], once before [e], and once before [o]...." He also considers, and rejects, reconstructing *hw- or *gw-, saying that "the existence of such a cluster seems quite unnatural in a system which lacks [w] itself." Therefore, he continues, "we have to look for some sound which existed in PA and could produce the [w] sound in the process of development." He likes *h for the first segment because it "can be easily reconstructed on the basis of [two particular dialects, the ones with -G- and -gu-]"; and he likes *d for the second segment in the cluster because "it could undergo spirantisation *d > [eth, sorry no voiced interdental fricative on my computer], and the shift * > w is rather probable." The consonant system that A.V. reconstructs for Proto-Ainu is /p t k q d g m n s y h r/ (where q = glottal stop). I no longer have the book at hand, but I don't recall any elaborate C clusters at all, much less something as weird as hd-, in any of the dialects. The sound changes A.V. posits from this very strange C cluster are themselves not compelling. Since we are talking about dialects of the same language, there also isn't much time for the weird cluster to undergo all these INDEPENDENT changes in every single dialect....changes that just happen to lead to the very same rather surprising result in ten dialects, for instance. I leave it to other HISTLINGers to judge the plausibility of this reconstruction (and others in the book). -- Sally Thomason sally at isp.pitt.edu P.S. The point I made in the same message about isolates in remote mountain valleys was a methodological one, not a claim either about polygenesis of human language or about the existence of such cases ...though Basque comes close. I made no reference to complete homogeneity of my hypothetical speech community, as A.V. suggests in his reply. From fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG Fri Mar 28 00:22:25 1997 From: fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG (Steven Schaufele) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 18:22:25 -0600 Subject: isoltes In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19970327074050.009ce6d0@alcor.concordia.ca> Message-ID: Mark Hale writes, > Can someone tell me why the question of "isolates" is of any > linguistic interest whatsoever? If we all accept, as I assume we > must, that the definition of "language" is a socio-political one, > then the question reduces to "why do we sometimes find groups of > speakers, sociopolitically defined to be speakers of 'one > language', who can't be demonstrated, given the limited nature > of our evidence, the small number of scholars who have invested > a small amount of time (seen from a human history perspective) > working on them, and the extremely limited number of plausibly > reconstructed language families which we could possibly relate > them to, to be related to another language?" The answer is then, > of course, contained in the question. We don't have the right > kind of evidence (yet), for the reasons I've inserted into the > question, and we may never have the evidence. Without such evidence, > the languages will count as 'isolates'. But it isn't a property > of the language -- it's a property of the evidentiary record. > Sometimes it's good and allows reconstruction of an ancestor, > sometimes it isn't and doesn't. Is this surprising or interesting > in any way? Frankly, i would say the question of `isolates' is of interest primarily to researchers who find motivation in the label. As Mark points out, to call a language an isolate is to confess that we don't *yet* have any good evidence of its affiliation with any (other) known language or language family. The label thus constitutes an invitation for further research. I suspect in most cases the invitation falls on deaf ears; most of us frankly can't get too excited about the possible affiliation of, say, a certain language of Northern Australia with certain languages of New Guinea. But for those of us whose areas of interest and/or expertise happen to include one or both of these areas, the suggestion is a spur to possibly fruitful work. So i guess what i'm saying is that `isolate', as a technical term in linguistics, is of peculiarly `in-house' value. It doesn't mean much to tell the general public `Basque/Burushaski/whatever is a "linguistic isolate"', but saying the same thing to a competent linguist may spur hann on to some good serious work that may or may not establish a previously unknown affiliation and, whether it does or not, may along the way provide us with some very useful/interesting real information. In any case, Mark is quite right when he says that the label really tells us more about the current state of scholarship on a particular language than about the language itself. Best, Steven --------------------- Dr. Steven Schaufele 712 West Washington Urbana, IL 61801 217-344-8240 fcosws at prairienet.org http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html **** O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum! *** *** Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis! *** From delancey at DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU Fri Mar 28 01:02:44 1997 From: delancey at DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU (Scott DeLancey) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 17:02:44 -0800 Subject: Chinese and Tai (was: isoltes) In-Reply-To: <3367bd90.100160075@mailhost.pi.net> Message-ID: On Thu, 27 Mar 1997, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > and Tocharian were discovered later]. What reconstruction *can* do, > is to show relationships that were not quite so obvious previously, > and, most importantly, it can show that relationships which were > thought possible (but not obvious) previously are in fact false. I > would imagine, for instance, that the work done on reconstructing Old > Chinese has been crucial in dismissing any close genetic relationship > between Chinese and Thai or Vietnamese. Well, no, as a matter of fact. Reconstruction of Old Chinese does a lot to strengthen the case for Sino-Tibetan, i.e. the relationship between Chinese and Tibeto-Burman, as reconstructed OC looks a lot more like TB than later stages do. I think, though I'm not up-to- date on the literature, that recent work on comparative Tai-Kadai reconstructs a proto-language which is phonologically less similar to Chinese than modern Tai languages are, and thus bolsters the case against Sino-Tai. But none of this is "crucial"; the case against the relationship of Chinese, Tai, and Vietnamese is pretty clear without any reconstruction of anything. The original basis for the notion of Sino-Tai was resemblances in phonological structure (tones, monosyllabicity, similarities of syllable structure) and a large body of shared vocabulary, with nice, tolerably regular, correspondences and everything. The original splitting suggestion (Paul Benedict's, published in 1942) was based on the observation that this common vocabulary is virtually all the sorts of thing that we know are easily borrowed (technological items, metallurgy, trade goods, conspicuous animals originally characteristic of only one language area ('elephant', 'horse'), terms referring to markets, etc.). None of the basic vocabulary (pronouns, kin terms, natural phenomena, geographical features, body parts) is shared. This makes a pretty good case that all this is borrowed (the borrowing went in both directions, it turns out), and thus not evidence for relationship. The splitting case is strengthened when we look at Sino-Tibetan. It turns out that very little of this shared vocabulary turns up in Tibeto-Burman--but the vocabulary common to Chinese and T-B contains all kinds of items, including pronouns and other pretty basic stuff. So Sino-Tibetan is pretty secure. But there's no way to construct a family tree linking Chinese to both T-B and Tai, when the sets of vocabulary that it shares with each are essentially disjunct. (So, by the way, while as others have noted, it is impossible in principle to demonstrate that two languages are absolutely not related at all, it *is* possible to demonstrate that they are not related at some particular level--e.g. that, regardless of whether English and French are related at some level, French is clearly not Germanic, or that, even if Chinese and Tai might be remotely related, Tai is definitely not Sino-Tibetan). Scott DeLancey Department of Linguistics University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403, USA delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Fri Mar 28 01:14:02 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 20:14:02 EST Subject: ICHL workshop Message-ID: ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS ================================ Typological change: Causes and course Workshop at 13th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Duesseldorf, Friday August 15 1997 Research in recent years has increased our knowledge of the possible causes of typological change. Internal motivation, such as the operation of Wackernagel's Law or the promotion of topicalised word-order to canonical word-order, is now seen to have played a distinct role in the development of well-known cases such as English and German. Less mainstream language groups such as Celtic have gone through a shift to an unusual type in a relatively short time which could imply the impact of external forces, i.e. contact with substrates which imposed their native word order. These are standard issues in typology but the field is taken to cover more than this and to touch on other aspects of language structure in a cross-linguistic context. The intention of the proposed workshop is to bring together colleagues working in the broad area of typology and to present material and discuss issues concerning both how typological change could have been triggered and what course a change takes once established. We hope that these matters can also be illuminated by colleagues who are working outside the context of Indo-European to provide additional perspectives for the workshop. The focus is expected to be syntactic, but hopefully in a broad sense which would encompass such aspects as grammatical relations and hierarchies, iconicity, conceptual distance, notions of prototypes and markedness, competing motivation and alternative strategies in sentence structure. The unifying factor is the relevance to typological change and development and colleagues interested in this field are cordially invited to register. The workshop is planned for Friday August 15 1997. There will be approximately 6 hours for papers and discussion, assuming that it starts at 9 in the morning and continues until mid-afternoon with a short break for lunch (the finishing time will be between 3 and 4 as the ICHL business meeting is scheduled for late afternoon). This time could be divided into 10 slots of 30 mins each (20 mins presentation, 10 mins discussion) with a concluding discussion. This arrangement is at present a suggestion and depends on the number of colleagues who might be interested in participating. For a maximum degree of effectiveness we suggest that participants first register and then, on confirmation, send us a pre-version of their paper in which their standpoint, hypotheses, tentative conclusions, etc. are outlined succinctly. This material can be disseminated to other participants in the workshop to ensure that everyone is appropriately informed about the subject matter of each contribution. The first step, however, is to get into contact with either Columbia or Essen by 31st March 1997 so that the arrangements for time slots and the workshop programme can be made in April and material disseminated quickly. Raymond Hickey Dorothy Disterheft English Linguistics Linguistics Program Essen University University of South Carolina Germany Columbia, SC 29208 email: r.hickey at uni-essen.de email: disterh at univscvm.csd.scarolina.edu From vovin at HAWAII.EDU Fri Mar 28 01:41:41 1997 From: vovin at HAWAII.EDU (Alexander Vovin) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 15:41:41 -1000 Subject: Ainu & Gilyak, Japanese & Korean In-Reply-To: Message-ID: First, I would like to voice my support in favor of Johanna Nichols statement that Ainu and Gilyak are very different. Indeed, on the surface they might look alike, and they even share some bizarre morphological markers, like object prefix i-/e-, but the more you look inside the history of these languages, the more fundamentally different they appear. There have been contacts between Ainu and Gilyak for centuries, and, of course, they influenced one another to a considerable extent. Late Prof.R. Austerlitz have done a formidable research on Ainu-Gilyak contacts, but unfortunately not everything from his scholarly heritage on the subject has been published. Second, I would like to answer Johanna Nichols question of what constitutes a nutshell evidence for the genetic relationship of Japanese and Korean -- a quite right question to ask in the light of the present discussion. Of course, the main evidence are the regular correspondences, that can be established on the basis of lexical and morphological comparisons, as this would be the only evidence acceptable for any other language family as well. The lists of these correspondences are published elsewhere, cf. e.g. Vovin 1994 in Diachronica XI.1:98, so I'll save myself the labor of repeating them. I will divide the nutshell into two parts, first dealing with morphological evidence (to please Stefan, of course, :-), as morphological evidence is not readily available except some part of it in S. Martin's articles that I mentioned in one of the previous postings, which might be difficult to digest for a person not familiar with the history of both languages. As I mentioned earlier, I believe that both Japanese and Korean are related to Tungusic, and more distantly to Mongolic and Turkic (but still on the family, and not macrofamily level). Here, however, I will discipline myself, and will exclude Turkic and Mongolic from further discussion, but will add Tungusic, as I believe that Tungusic's relationship to both Korean and Japanese is equidistant to that of Japanese and Korean. Much remains to be done in this area, especially in the domain of vowel correspondences and in reconstruction of consonant clusters in medial position. Yet, the following, I believe can be interpreted only in the way of genetic relationship. I will center on the evidence from Old Japanese language (OJ)(8th. century) and Middle Korean (MK) (15th century), occasionally referring to reconstructions of the corresponding Proto-Languages. As the earliest known Tungusic language, Manchu is known only from the 17th century (still earlier Jurchen materials are poorly deciphered and provide very little data on morphology), I will also appeal to Prto-Tungusic and to various other Tungusic languages, since Manchu does not always contain all necessary data. Finally, the place where I access e-mail is away from my research library, so quite a bit of what I'm going to provide is based on my memory and I won't be able to provide chapter and verse for all data. NOTE 1: important addition to correspondences is provided in Vovin 1997 (forthcoming in Japanese/Korean linguistics v. 6): Proto-Japanese voiced and voiceless opposition does not reflect voiceless and voiced of PA, rather PA initial voiced are reflected as PJ words with low register and PA initial voiceless (both aspirated and non-aspirated) as PJ words with high register). NOTE 2: Both OJ and MK are given in Yale romanization, with the exception of OJ otsu-rui /o/ that it typed as o2, as underlining is not possible in my e-mail. PART 1: MORPHOLOGY VERBAL MORPHOLOGY Both OJ and MK have very complex systems of verbal morphology, but a huge chunk of it is of considerably later origin. Among the primary morphological markers the following parallels can be suggested: Old Japanese Middle Korean Tungusic -an- < *ana an(h) *ana, Manchu akU <*an-ku negative negative negative accent class 2.5 -m --- on some deverbal deverbal noun nouns, reflecting earlier *-m -ey < *(a)Ci< *(a)gi -Gi, ki, hi etc. -gi causative relic, cf. transitivity flipper transitivity flipper e.g. Manchu al-gi- "let know" -uru -(V)l? Manchu -ra/-ro/-re participle irrealis participle imperfect. participle -u < *-wi < *-bi OK -ta-wi <* -bi -bi, Manchu, Nanai etc.-bi final predicate marker id id -yi <*-i -e/-a ---- coordinative gerund id -myi < *-mi -mye -me gerund of quality verbs gerund gerund (Manchu -me, -kyi < *-ki MK -e/-a ?< *Ga/Ge Manchu xa/xe/xo < *kV retrospective perfective perfective -te- < *-ta-Ci- -te-/ta- ---- perfective perfective -(i)n- -(V)n ----- perfective realis participle -ama- ----- -Vme tentative tentative-volitive -na- -no- ----- assertive "present tense" -yi < *-i -i ----- nominalizer nominalizer This is the nutshell for verbal system. Of course, the above chart represents my views, and I alone can be held responsible for it (in particular, I do not accept Unger's views on all OJ consonantal verbs as ending in -a). I am sure that every scholar in the J/K field may want to add something to the chart above, or take out a couple things off it, but overall I believe it represents the nutshell. NOMINAL MORPHOLOGY AND PARTICLES ARE TO FOLLOW Sincerely, A.Vovin On Wed, 26 Mar 1997, Johanna Nichols wrote: > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > > > >One thing that caught my attention in the linguistic database from > >Johanna Nichols' "Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time" was the > >typological near-identity of Gilyak and Ainu. Of all the typological > >features listed, Ainu and Gilyak only differ in that Gilyak has > >numerical classifiers (26 of them). Is there any other evidence for > >contacts between Gilyak and Ainu? > > > > CAUTION -- That database should be used as a pointer to the descriptive > publications, not as a full typological description in itself. If Gilyak > and Ainu exhibit typological near-identity, that just goes to show you how > impoverished a typological description is compared to the real thing, > because those two languages are very different. (More generally, Gilyak is > very different from any other language on earth.) > > Since the question of Japanese and Korean has come up on the list, I have a > question for Alexander Vovin and/or others who have worked on these > languages: what, in a nutshell, is the evidence that Japanese and Korean > are related? I've read as much of the relevant literature as I could find, > and the only support offered seems to be that if you assume they are > related you can find sound correspondences and apply the comparative > method. But what is the evidence for assuming relatedness in the first > place? Thanks for any help anyone can give me. > > Johanna Nichols > Slavic Languages, UC Berkeley > From alderson at NETCOM.COM Fri Mar 28 01:42:01 1997 From: alderson at NETCOM.COM (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 17:42:01 -0800 Subject: Ainu & Gilyak, Japanese & Korean In-Reply-To: (message from Johanna Nichols on Wed, 26 Mar 1997 17:43:10 -0800) Message-ID: Johanna Nichols writes: >what, in a nutshell, is the evidence that Japanese and Korean are related? >I've read as much of the relevant literature as I could find, and the only >support offered seems to be that if you assume they are related you can find >sound correspondences and apply the comparative method. But what is the >evidence for assuming relatedness in the first place? I'm a little confused by the question. The assumption of relatedness is the hypothesis tested by the application of the comparative method; what evidence is needed to form such an hypothesis? As historical linguists we may decide heuristically that some such hypotheses are too difficult to pursue based on the number of cognate sets we may expect to find, but there is never (_pace_ the Greenberg/Ruhlen camp) a requirement for any particular sort of evidence of relationship prior to starting the comparison. Put another way, hypotheses of relationship, like hypotheses in any scientific discipline, are made first by the imagination of the researcher, and then put to rigourous test. The researcher's experience and training in the field, any field at all, provides a first-cut filter on hypotheses in that field--which the researcher is free to ignore if a particular insight seems to call for it. What have I misunderstood? Rich Alderson From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Fri Mar 28 19:04:35 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU) Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 14:04:35 EST Subject: posting format Message-ID: Dear HISTLINGers, The question of my requesting revisions to contributions was mentioned in a posting yesterday, so this might be a good time for me to make the following requests of people who contribute to our conversations: (1) Make you contribution as short as possible; i.e., when you copy someone else's posting within your own text, please copy only the relevant portions. (2) Make your contribution as econominal as possible, i.e., edit for redundancy, long-winded arguements, etc. While this type of forum is very informal, its readers are professionals who do not have unlimited time to sort through their mailboxes. (3) Be sure that your contribution has historical linguistics content: I have returned a few postings because they have not fulfilled this requirement. And yes, I should have returned Richard Hogg's cute remark to Larry Trask yesterday and I apologize for this slip-up. However my eyes were crossed from dealing with a deluge of mail. (4) Address your comments to others' work in a polite, professional tone, even if you might think that they should be committed to an insane asylum for their views. I tell my graduate students that, in their criticism of published work, they should compose their remarks as if the person they're criticizing were in their presence. Besides, they may meet that person face to face someday or even have to work with them. Any contri- butions which do not follow the Golden Rule in their reference to colleagues will be returned for editing. Thanks for your attention, Dorothy Disterheft From kruskal at RESEARCH.BELL-LABS.COM Fri Mar 28 19:36:00 1997 From: kruskal at RESEARCH.BELL-LABS.COM (kruskal at RESEARCH.BELL-LABS.COM) Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 14:36:00 EST Subject: No subject Message-ID: To: Historical Linguistics List, Prof Dorothy Disterheft Dear Professor Disterheft, Prof Johanna Nichols suggested that I send the announcement below for distribution on the Historical Linguistics List. Sincerely, Joseph B Kruskal <>----------------<>----------------<>----------------<>-----------------<> Joseph B Kruskal, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies Room 2C-281, Murray Hill, NJ 07974 EMAIL kruskal at research.bell-labs.com PHONE 908-582-3853 FAX 908-582-3340 HOMEPAGE http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/departments/sia/kruskal/index.html Sent on Mar 28 14:30 EST 1997 <>----------------<>----------------<>----------------<>-----------------<> Paul Black and I wish to announce that the Comparative Indoeuropean Data Corpus, collected by Isidore Dyen with contributions by Black and me, is now available from two sources. It includes --200-item lexicostatistical lists for 95 Indoeuropean speech varieties, --cognation judgments between the lists, --lexicostatistical percentages, --individual replacement rates for 200 meanings, and --time separations based on these rates. It also includes an annotated bibliography of lexicostatistics by Paul Black. For those of you who have seen parts of this before, the form has been improved, so it is much easier to use than before, and contains full and careful explanations of many aspects of the data. One source is the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) in the United States, http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/ where it is currently located at http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/ldc/service/comp-ie/HEADPAGE.html We thank Mark Liberman for permitting us to put this in LDC, and Sarah Parnum for her efforts in actually entering it. The other source is the Northern Territory University, Australia, where it is at http://www.ntu.edu.au/education/langs/ielex/HEADPAGE.html These data have provided the basis for several publications, including this monograph: Isidore Dyen, Joseph B. Kruskal & Paul Black. 1992. "An Indoeuropean classification: A lexicostatistical experiment" (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society Vol. 82, Part 5) American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Sent to: Phipps Arabie, Luca Cavalli-Sforza, James Corter, Osamu Fujimura, John Gower, Richard Harshman, Donald Hindle, Leanne Hinton, Eric Holman, Robert Hsu, Arthur Kendall, Henk Kiers, Peter Kroonenberg, Mitchell Marcus, Jim Mayberry, Jacqueline Meulman, Eric Minch, Johanna Nichols, P A Piazza, William Poser, Donld Ringe, James Rohlf, Pascale Rousseau, David Sankoff, Gillian Sankoff, Margaret Sharpe, Robert Sokal, William S-Y Wang, Joe Ward, Tandy Warnow Copies to: Paul Black, Mark Liberman, Sarah Parnum From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Sun Mar 30 15:12:40 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Sun, 30 Mar 1997 10:12:40 EST Subject: No subject Message-ID: > Return-Path: > Received: from UNIVSCVM (NJE origin SMTP at UNIVSCVM) by VM.SC.EDU (LMail > V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 3180; Thu, 27 Mar 1997 21:21:29 -0500 > Received: from relay1.Hawaii.Edu by VM.SC.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R3) with TCP; > Thu, 27 Mar 97 21:21:28 EST > Received: from uhunix2.its.hawaii.edu ([128.171.44.7]) by relay1.Hawaii.Edu with > SMTP id <587056(3)>; Thu, 27 Mar 1997 16:16:42 -1000 > Received: from localhost by uhunix2.its.Hawaii.Edu with SMTP id <148529(4)>; > Thu, 27 Mar 1997 16:21:36 -1000 > Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 16:21:30 -1000 > From: Alexander Vovin > X-Sender: vovin at uhunix2 > To: Larry Trask > cc: HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU > Subject: Re: isolates > In-Reply-To: > Message-ID: > MIME-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII > [in reply to L. Trask on Japanese and Korean] > Well, I hope that the "Japanese-Korean in a nutshell" that I have started > to post will further help to dissolve your doubts. As for S. Martin's > cautious position, he is always cautious in his statements, but please > read a little bit further into the article, and you will see that he > treats two languages as cognate, that is he discusses parallels between J and K as cognates, and not as chance resemblances, or a result of borrowing. And after all, he has done more work demonstrating that Japanese and Korean are related than any other > linguist, and I trust that it is presented evidence that counts more than > a general statement. > Besides, if you start to treat every signle family in the world where > a lot of work remains to be done (as is with case of Japanese and Korean, > nobody denies that) and which is not yet done as elaborately as IE, you'll > end up having thousands of isolates that "sprung from some different sources" > instead of having certain quite persuasive theories which need to be > further elaborated. Nikolai Marr would be really proud of such a picture. > In sum, it is misleading to place Japanese and Korean in the same > company as Burushaski and Nihali: we have no clue about the external > relationships of the latter, but we do know quite a lot about Japanese and > Korean so that to treat them as cognate, although keeping in mind that > further considerable polishing needs to be done. Ainu will fall in the > middle of the two, that does not make him a 'classical" isolate either. > From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Sun Mar 30 15:14:12 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Sun, 30 Mar 1997 10:14:12 EST Subject: No subject Message-ID: > Return-Path: > Received: from UNIVSCVM (NJE origin SMTP at UNIVSCVM) by VM.SC.EDU (LMail > V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 4172; Fri, 28 Mar 1997 04:08:37 -0500 > Received: from relay1.Hawaii.Edu by VM.SC.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R3) with TCP; > Fri, 28 Mar 97 04:08:36 EST > Received: from uhunix2.its.hawaii.edu ([128.171.44.7]) by relay1.Hawaii.Edu with > SMTP id <586881(6)>; Thu, 27 Mar 1997 23:03:51 -1000 > Received: from localhost by uhunix2.its.Hawaii.Edu with SMTP id <148527(4)>; > Thu, 27 Mar 1997 23:08:46 -1000 > Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 23:08:45 -1000 > From: Alexander Vovin > X-Sender: vovin at uhunix2 > To: Larry Trask > cc: HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU > Subject: Re: isolates > In-Reply-To: > Message-ID: > MIME-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII > > Whoops, I forgot to answer the following points. > > On Thu, 27 Mar 1997, Larry Trask wrote: > > > > > What you're raising here is the old question of how we distinguish > > languages from dialects, and of course we can't. Yes, I'm aware of > > the mutual incomprehensibility of the several varieties of Japanese > > (though I didn't know about the similar case for Korean). But mutual > > comprehensibility is only one possible criterion for recognizing > > language boundaries, and it's not even the one we mainly rely on. > > A.V.: > You of course are right that languages are not to be defined solely on the > mutual intelligibility. Being a native speaker of Russian, I can > understand Ukranian and Belourussian without any effort at all, and with > more strain even good chunks of Polish and Bulgarian, which are all, of > course, different languages. Here I used mutual intellgbility solely to > demonstrate that there is considerable linguistic diversity in both Japan > and Korea, which you seemed to doubt in your previous posting. I can > easily demonstrate that we deal with various languages, not dialects by > other means: showing that they have divergent morphology and lexicon. I > can do it if you are still in doubt. > > L.T.: > > > > I'm sorry, but I simply cannot understand this. You are telling me > > that Ainu is "unlikely" to be an isolate, even though no relationship > > has been demonstrated between Ainu and anything else at all. I find > > this position incomprehensible. > > A.V.: > Should I repeat again that there have been established a number of > Ainu-Austric parallels which do satisfy the principle of > regularity of phonetic correspondences. The regularity of many correspondences has been demonstrated, but there is still many things > left. Nevertheless, most of the proposed etymologies withstood the scrutiny of the specialists. Did we hear anyone who specializes in Austric and/or Ainu saying otherwise? Don't you think that this is a different situation from your Basque? > > > L.T.: > > > > You are joking. It is not on my shoulders to demonstrate that any > > languages are not related; this is a logical impossibility. If you > > can demonstrate that J and K are related beyond reasonable doubt, I'll > > be delighted, since I prefer positive results to negative ones. > > A.V.: > > If you maintain the point of view that it is impossible to demonstrate > that two or more languages are not related, then you obviously cannot > demonstrate that Basque is unrelated to North Caucasian or whatever. > Meanwhile, this is exactly the opposite what you did over the last year: > showing your > audience the impossibility of the connection. What is true for Basque, > should be > true for other languages. Demonstrate that Japanese-Korean etymologies are > either faulty, because they are build on erroneous reconstructions, or > that there are no regular correspondences, or even better both -- exactly > like you do with Basque. This is in my opinion a quite logical way to > disprove a genetic relationship. > > > A.V.: > > [on the fact that there are two living Yukaghir and two living Ket languages] > > L.T.: > > > > We are merely quibbling over words here. A small family of one > > language with no apparent relatives is my idea of an isolate. > > A.V.: > Again, neither Yukaghir, nor Ket are in fact a single language: there are > two living languages in each case and more extinct ones. If you are going > to call a family consisting of more than one language an isolate, then > where is going to be the line? From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Sun Mar 30 15:16:04 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Sun, 30 Mar 1997 10:16:04 EST Subject: No subject Message-ID: >> > Return-Path: > Received: from UNIVSCVM (NJE origin SMTP at UNIVSCVM) by VM.SC.EDU (LMail > V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 4623; Fri, 28 Mar 1997 05:10:12 -0500 > Received: from relay1.Hawaii.Edu by VM.SC.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R3) with TCP; > Fri, 28 Mar 97 05:10:11 EST > Received: from uhunix2.its.hawaii.edu ([128.171.44.7]) by relay1.Hawaii.Edu with > SMTP id <586789(6)>; Fri, 28 Mar 1997 00:05:24 -1000 > Received: from localhost by uhunix2.its.Hawaii.Edu with SMTP id <148523(2)>; > Fri, 28 Mar 1997 00:10:13 -1000 > Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 00:10:08 -1000 > From: Alexander Vovin > X-Sender: vovin at uhunix2 > To: "Sarah G. Thomason" > cc: HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU > Subject: Re: isolates > In-Reply-To: <9222.859488084 at pogo> > Message-ID: > MIME-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII > > The response follows... > > On Thu, 27 Mar 1997, Sarah G. Thomason wrote: > > > In discussing the hypothesis of Japanese-Korean relationship, > > Alexander Vovin says, rightly, that I shouldn't have referred > > to a review without checking the exact reference. So I have now > > checked: the reviewer was David Solnit, the review was of Paul > > Benedict's JAPANESE/AUSTRO-TAI (Ann Arbor: Karoma), and the review > > appeared in LANGUAGE 68:188-96 (1992). Solnit concludes his review > > as follows: "Finally, the correspondences with Austronesian and with > > Altaic, to the extent that both are valid, need to be evaluated and > > placed in relation to each other, whether that entails choosing one as > > inherited and the other as borrowed, or whether Japanese is one of > > those rare cases having in its past a break in normal genetic > > transmission." > > A.V.: > Several things needed to be mentioned. First, David Solnit is an > excellent specialist in Thai and Karen, but not a Japanologist, therefore > he can hardly evaluate Japanese side of things. Moreover, since we were > once both in the U of Michigan, I recollect directing him to some of the > materials on Japanese-Altaic, but I believe that he could not fully > utilize Starostin 1991 book, as he does not have a command of Russian. I > have wrote myself a longer review of the same book by Benedict, in > Diachronica XI.1 and a longer analysis of Japanese-Austronesian > "hypotheses"(sic) by Benedict and Kawamoto (they do not agree between > themselves reagarding almost a single etymology, since plural) in Oceanic > linguistics in 1994. In both cases I have demonstrated that both Benedict > and Kawamoto completely disregard Japanese language history, misanalyze > morphemic structure of Japanese words, etc., etc. I have also demonstrated > in these two publications that there is no regularity in Benedict > Austro-Japanese correspondences (Kawamoto does not bother about > correspondences at all, at least not in the sense like it is done by those > of us who work within comparative method). There are also alternative > Altaic etymologies cum phonetic correspondences. In sum, > Japanese-Austronesian fares no better than Japanese-Dravidian or > Japanese-Sumerian, or Japanese-Basque. HISTLINGers can judge for > themselves. > > > S.T.: > > > > A.V. goes on to say that I have grossly misrepresented his own work, > > in my reference to his reconstruction of *hd- for a correspondence set > > consisting mainly of w's. My methodological point was that a claim of > > genetic relationship that rests in part on such reconstructions is not > > one that I, at least, would place very much confidence in. > > A.V.: > I have to repeat once again, that Ainu-Austroasiatic hypothesis does not > stand on this particular reconstruction: there are only two etymologies > where *hd is involved among 50+. > > S.T.: > He asks if > > I can offer a better reconstruction for the correspondence set in > > question. I do believe that I can: I propose *w. > > a.V.: > > I thought about this solution, but *w does not explain why there is an > alternation between /w/ and /s/: > > cf.: wan '10', tu-pe-san '8' (lit.: two-thing-ten), sine-pe-san '9' > (one-thing-ten). > > S.T.: > > The fact that *w would, > > on the evidence of the dialects, be a rare Proto-Ainu phoneme doesn't bother > > me nearly as much as A.V.'s own proposal. Here is the relevant material > > from his book A RECONSTRUCTION OF PROTO-AINU (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993): > > > > 1. The correspondence set (which I call large because it ranges over a > > large number of dialects): > > > > w : w : w : w : w : w : w : w : w : w : u-/w- : -G- : v : v : -gu- > > > > > > 2. A.V.'s rationale for reconstructing *hd-: He does not reconstruct *w > > because "[w] is extremely rare in common Ainu. It occurs initially in > > five words, one of which is doubtful, and in medial position in three > > words....the distribution of [w] is quite peculiar -- it occurs mostly > > before [a], once before [e], and once before [o]...." He also considers, > > and rejects, reconstructing *hw- or *gw-, saying that "the existence of > > such a cluster seems quite unnatural in a system which lacks [w] itself." > > Therefore, he continues, "we have to look for some sound which existed in > > PA and could produce the [w] sound in the process of development." He > > likes *h for the first segment because it "can be easily reconstructed on > > the basis of [two particular dialects, the ones with -G- and -gu-]"; and > > he likes *d for the second segment in the cluster because "it could undergo > > spirantisation *d > [eth, sorry no voiced interdental fricative on > > my computer], and the shift * > w is rather probable." > > A.V.: > > Prof. Thomason omits the part where I say about w/s alternation > from my reasoning (see above). If I relied exclusively on comparative data > and disregarded internal reconstruction, I'd reconstruct *hw or *gw. > However, it cannot be disregarded. If anyone knows of examples where *w > > s, I will gladly accept Prof. Thomason proposal > > S.T.: > > > I no longer have the > > book at hand, but I don't recall any elaborate C clusters at all, much > > less something as weird as hd-, in any of the dialects. > > A.V.: > I am afraid that this is again incorrect. I reconstruct a number of > consonantal clusters for PA, and cluster tr- is attested for Sakhalin and > Kuril dialects. Besides, lack of clusters in modern dialects cannot be > hardly used as a proof against existence of clusters not only in the > protolanguage but even in the recent past. Modern Vietnamese does not have > any clusters, but there is plenty of them in Proto-Vietic, and even de > Rhodes dictionary reflecting 17th century Vietnamese has a lot of words > with clusters. > > > S.T.: > The sound changes > > A.V. posits from this very strange C cluster are themselves not compelling. > > Since we are talking about dialects of the same language, there also isn't > > much time for the weird cluster to undergo all these INDEPENDENT changes > > in every single dialect....changes that just happen to lead to the very > > same rather surprising result in ten dialects, for instance. > > > > I leave it to other HISTLINGers to judge the plausibility of this > > reconstruction (and others in the book). > > > > A.V.: > Well, I would prefer to have uncompelling sound changes in dialects > rather than unexplained morphonological alternation, and I believe that a > reconstruction *w does not explain it -- it rather sweeps things under the > rug. > > S.T.: > > > > P.S. The point I made in the same message about isolates in remote > > mountain valleys was a methodological one, not a claim either about > > polygenesis of human language or about the existence of such cases > > ...though Basque comes close. I made no reference to complete > > homogeneity of my hypothetical speech community, as A.V. suggests in > > his reply. > > > A.V.: > I believe that "no splits" suggests homogeneity in this particular case. > > > From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Fri Mar 28 12:13:18 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 12:13:18 +0000 Subject: isolates In-Reply-To: from "Alexander Vovin" at Mar 27, 97 11:08:45 pm Message-ID: Alexander Vovin writes: > You of course are right that languages are not to be defined solely > on the mutual intelligibility. Being a native speaker of Russian, I > can understand Ukranian and Belourussian without any effort at all, > and with more strain even good chunks of Polish and Bulgarian, which > are all, of course, different languages. Here I used mutual > intellgbility solely to demonstrate that there is considerable > linguistic diversity in both Japan and Korea, which you seemed to > doubt in your previous posting. I can easily demonstrate that we > deal with various languages, not dialects by other means: showing > that they have divergent morphology and lexicon. I can do it if you > are still in doubt. To be honest, I see little point in pursuing this. If you prefer to see Japanese and Korean as small families rather than as single languages, fine. > L.T.: > > I'm sorry, but I simply cannot understand this. You are telling me > > that Ainu is "unlikely" to be an isolate, even though no relationship > > has been demonstrated between Ainu and anything else at all. I find > > this position incomprehensible. > A.V.: > Should I repeat again that there have been established a number of > Ainu-Austric parallels which do satisfy the principle of phonetic > regularity? If under these circumstances you still maintain that "no > relationship has been demonstrated between Ainu and anything else at > all", I just give up. It has been demonstrated, but there is still > many things left. Don't you think that this is a different situation > from your Basque? We are going in circles. It is already clear from other postings that the validity of Austric is not generally accepted, in which case no Ainu-Austric link can possibly be generally accepted. Moreover, I think there are grounds for doubting your assertion that Ainu has been shown, to general satisfaction, to be related to *something*. > L.T.: > > You are joking. It is not on my shoulders to demonstrate that any > > languages are not related; this is a logical impossibility. If you > > can demonstrate that J and K are related beyond reasonable doubt, I'll > > be delighted, since I prefer positive results to negative ones. > A.V.: > If you maintain the point of view that it is impossible to > demonstrate that two or more languages are not related, then you > obviously cannot demonstrate that Basque is unrelated to North > Caucasian or whatever. Yes, of course. > Meanwhile, this is exactly the opposite what you did over the last > year: showing your audience the impossibility of the connection. Absolutely not: this is a fundamental misunderstanding. I neither provided nor even attempted any such demonstration. What I did was quite different. Bengtson and his colleagues had put forth what they regarded as evidence for a Basque-Caucasian genetic link. What I did was merely to demonstrate, to my own satisfaction at least, that the evidence on offer *did not stand up to scrutiny*, and hence that their case could not be accepted. And that is a very different thing from proving the absence of a relation. So, Bengtson's case fails. There remain at least three logical possibilities: (1) Basque and Caucasian really are discoverably related, but no one has yet uncovered the available evidence. I can't scrutinize a case that has never been made. (2) Basque and Caucasian are indeed very remotely related, but the evidence for that relationship has long since disappeared and cannot be recovered. There is no earthly way I could disprove this possibility. (3) Basque and Caucasian are not related at any level. Again, there is no earthly way I could prove this. > What is true for Basque, should be true for other languages. Yes, of course, but I've never maintained otherwise. > Demonstrate that Japanese-Korean etymologies are either faulty, > because they are build on erroneous reconstructions, or that there > are no regular correspondences, or even better both -- exactly like > you do with Basque. This is in my opinion a quite logical way to > disprove a genetic relationship. It is a very reasonable procedure, and indeed the only possible way of disposing of a proposed comparison. But it is most emphatically *not* a way of disproving a genetic relationship. The evaluation of your case will have to await the scrutiny of specialists in the relevant languages. If your case withstands that scrutiny, you win; if it doesn't, you lose. That's the way it is in this business. > A.V.: > Again, neither Yukaghir, nor Ket are in fact a single language: > there are two living languages in each case and more extinct > ones. If you are going to call a family consisting of more than one > language an isolate, then where is going to be the line? > Again, we are merely quibbling about words. Being an isolate is not an intrinsic property of a language; it's merely, as others have pointed out, a property we project onto a language as a result of our investigations to date. It's purely a matter of taste whether we want to apply the term to a living language with no known living relatives but with known extinct relatives. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From Ralf.Georg at BONN.NETSURF.DE Fri Mar 28 22:24:50 1997 From: Ralf.Georg at BONN.NETSURF.DE (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 23:24:50 +0100 Subject: Japanese/Korean/Tungus Message-ID: Since I have been addressed in Sasha Vovin's posting, let me throw in a few remarks. Basically, Sasha, this time, I'm on your side, I have no quarrel with the notion that Japanese and Korean are related (and there might be a relationship with Tungus after all). Your Diachronica paper helped much to form my opinion on this, since there you managed to show morphological evidence, just the thing which - as you correctly observe - I want to see. (A note of caution though: I'm not an expert on neither Korean nor Japanese, so my readiness to accept their relationship *might* have something to do with that very fact ;-) ...). No, your list is impressive, but some points, I think, will have to be clarified before you can win over most of the skeptics: For Japanese you list such forms as (I believe the unasterisked forms represent attested Old Japanese): -ey < *(a)Ci< *(a)gi (to be compared with Korean -Gi etc.)[in Diachronica XI you give it without the bracketed initial *a, what does that mean ?] -u < *-wi < *-bi (to be compared with Korean * -bi, Tungus *-bi etc.), and some minor cases where the actually compared form on the Japanese side is a reconstruct. Could you please help to clarify for us non-Japanologists, how the proto-Japanese reconstructs are arrived at ? In all possible brevity, of course, i.e. are there divergent dialects (old or new) which prompt them, has Ryukyuan something to do with them, are there compelling structural reasons which make them inevitable or what is it ? Of course it will be difficult for us to form an opinion about those forms, without knowing the reasons for those reconstructs. What I'm especially after is, of course, the question: Would they look exactly like that in a - hypothetical - world, where we would know nothing about Korean or Tungus ? Please, Sasha, note that I'm not doubting that exactly this is the case, I know that you share my views on keeping internal and external evidence strictly apart (in other words: that you are no Ruhlenist !), I'd just like to be sure, that's all. While I'm at it, let me add a few observations on the Tungus in your list. First, I think you were a little bit too pessimistic on Jurchen, since at least some of the markers in your list can indeed be found in Jurchen texts (the -me converb and the -ha verbal noun at least). I'm not so happy with *-gi "causative relic" and your Manchu example. Why don't you cite straightforwardly Evenki -gi: (with a long vowel, which is probably of proto-Tung. status) 'transitivizer' ? It does the job much better, since the Manchu verb algi- you give doesn't mean "let know" at all, but rather "to become or be known, famous", rather an intransitive/anticausative formation to the root found in ala- "to report, say". The proto-Tungus negative marker (an independent particle in all probability) is given in Diachronica XI, by you as *aana (a:na, with a long vowel), I think that reconstruction is the one which should be preferred, since Evenki a:chin 'not, yok' seems not to leave another choice. Btw., do you have any idea about those obscure elements as Manchu -kU or Evenki (and other Tungus lgs.) -chi(n) here ? In the same Diachronica paper you give the MK (Middle Korean ?) equivalent as /ani/, here as an(h); which is correct ? On the correspondence pattern: -kyi < *-ki MK -e/-a ?< *Ga/Ge Manchu xa/xe/xo < *kV retrospective perfective perfective you give in Diachronica XI (*if* this is the same cognate set, I may of course be totally wrong here), as equivalent to Manchu -ha/-he/-ho < -*kV a Japanese "past marker" *-iki : is this the same thing as "retrospective -kyi < *-ki"? In the same list you give as MK (unasterisked, therefore attested ?) -ke-, here -e/-a ?< *Ga/Ge, could you please clarify what is actually attested, what is reconstructed and on what reasons ? On the cognate set -te- < *-ta-Ci- -te-/ta- ---- perfective perfective we read in Diachronica XI: Jap. *-ita-Ci-, MK -te- (and Tungus *-taa-, which I don't know well, there seem to be several dental suffixes you could have in mind, would you mind giving an example ?). Again, which is the state-of-the-art ? Furthermore, is the MK "realis participle" -(V)n the same thing as the *-na- suffix from Diachronica XI, which is there compared with Jap. *-in- "perfective" ? The "tentative/volitive" suffix from your posting (Jap. -ama-, Tung. -Vme-) looks in your paper again a little bit differently: Jap. *-am- (OK, I think, the latter is the reconstruct, whereas the former the attested form, or ???) and Tung. *-m-. I'm not too familiar with that latter suffix, so one or two examples might help a bit. OK, this has become a long wish-list, most questions answer themselves for any specialist, I'm pretty sure. But, Sasha, you have been asked to present the nutshell evidence for the relationship, which has been doubted on this list. Since Japanese and Korean are two major literary languages of this planet, which *all* we non-specialists would like to know more about, I think my questions are justified, for, if I'm going to answer the questions of students about the genetic situation in North-East Asia I'd like to know exactly what I'm talking about. Just imagine, if I tell a student, who actually *knows* Japanese and Korean (synchronically): "related, and demonstrably so !" and then begin to write "evidence" on the blackboard which mixes attested and reconstructed forms and stuff like that, the damage done to comparative Japanese-Korean studies might be bigger than if I just said "isolates" or (which would in my case of course the most appropriate thing to say) "don't know". Hope, I'm not asking you too much (you may have indeed better things to do than answering silly questions like these !), maybe the issues are of interest not only to me alone, best wishes, i - kak vsegda - vsego luchshego, Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel/Fax +49-228-691332+ From vovin at HAWAII.EDU Sat Mar 29 03:49:29 1997 From: vovin at HAWAII.EDU (Alexander Vovin) Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 17:49:29 -1000 Subject: Ainu & Gilyak, Japanese & Korean In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Continuing on the nutshell evidence for the relationship of Japanese, Korean, and Tungusic. ADDENDUM FOR VERBAL MARKERS Old Japanese Middle Korean Tungusic ---- -W- < *bV Manchu -bu-, Evk. -w- relic causative causative/passive MK solW- "inform", alwoy- 'let know' cf. sol- say', al- 'know' -(a)ku -key, -kuy Manchu -ge in -ngge deverbal noun gerund (nominalizer) (action verbs), gerund (quality verbs) -as- -osi-, -usi- -------- politeness marker politness marker I believe it might be useful to provide a list of primary verbal suffixes in all three languages, for which at the present no external parallels can be suggested: Old Japanese: iterative -ap-, causative -sase-, passive -raye- Middle Korean: gerund -kwo, deverbal noun -ti, 'emphatic' -wo/wu-, emotive -two- Manchu: conditional -ci, optative -ki It is quite clear that most primary verbal markers in any language have external parallels in other two. NOMINAL MORPHOLOGY CASE MARKING Old Japanese Middle Korean Tungusic -i -i ------- active ergative -no2 -~n *-~n (can be recon- structed only) genitive genitive genitive -wo < *-bo OK G"il < *bV-l Manchu -be, Evenki -wa absolutive/accusative "accusative" accusative -tu ----- -du (manchu -de) genitive-locative dative/locative -ra Old Korean -la -laa (not in Manchu) locative locative locative -ywo <*duCa,-yu<*du ----------- -duk (not in Manchu) ablative ablative ------------ *-li (like in ili) -lii lative prolative PLURAL MARKERS OLd Japanese Middle Korean Tungusic -tati -tolh ? Manchu -ta polite pl. plural marker relic plural marker -ra ---- -l PRONOUNS PERSONAL PRONOUNS Old Japanese Middle Korean Tungusic wa- < *ba(n) "I, we" wuli < *(b)uli (see note) bi 'I', Manchu be, Evenki bu 'we' si, so2- 'thou' ------- si 'thou' na 'thou', 'you' ne 'thou', ne-huy 'you' ------ NOTE: correspondence of MK zero to OJ w- and Tungusic b- is irregular, p- would be expected. However, there are two other good examples supporting this irregular correspondence: Old Japanese Middle Korean Tungusic wi- < bi- "is", "exists" is- 'id' bi-, bisi- 'id.' The fact that Korean once had p- there is supported by the negative form of the same verb: eps- < *e-pis- "is not, does not exist' pi 'ice' :el- < *elV- 'freeze' bu-kse el-um 'ice' 'ice' OJ word is a good match: it has an initial LOW register, reflecting original *b- (see the note in the beginning of the previous posting). DEMONSTRATIVE PRONOUNS Old Japanese Middle Korean Tungusic ko2- 'this' ku 'that' ------ --------- i 'this' e- 'this' -------- tye 'that over there' te- 'that' NUMERALS Old Japanese Middle Korean Tungusic ------- Early MK twubul(h) 2 juwe 2 myi- < mi- 3 MK seyh, -~ne 3 *(~n)"ila-n 3 < *~ne yo2- < *do2- 4 neyh < *de- 4 Manchu duin,Evk diGin 4 itu- 5 ta-sos 5 Manchu sunja, Evk tung~na 5 mu- 6 ----- Manchu ninngun,Evk.~nungu-n 6 nana- 7 ----- nada-n 7 ya- < *da- 8 ---- *ja(b) 8 ko2ko2no2- 9 ---- *xeg"u-n 9 to2wo < *to2bo 10 ---- juwa-n 10 mwomwo 100 ------- Evk. ~nama NOTE: there is an untrivial correspondence of OJ m- to Tungusic ~n- in this chart. Also, in J dentals and palatals merged as dentals. PARTICLES Old Japanese Middle Korean Tungusic -do2 Message-ID: On Fri, 28 Mar 1997, Larry Trask wrote: > Alexander Vovin writes: > >L.T.: > We are going in circles. It is already clear from other postings that > the validity of Austric is not generally accepted, in which case no > Ainu-Austric link can possibly be generally accepted. Moreover, I > think there are grounds for doubting your assertion that Ainu has been > shown, to general satisfaction, to be related to *something*. A.V.: I'm sorry but may be you can enlighten me and the rest of us what is "general acceptance" and "general satisfaction"? Is it a matter of the vote? More people accept IE than Austric, but you of course can find more people who had some experience with IE than with Austric. And of course Austric cannot be as developped as IE: the very idea of Austric is younger than a century. I agree that neither Austric nor Ainu-Austric are finally proven, but it is accepted as the only perspective direction of research by people who work in this particular field, and I named several. However, neither you nor Mark Hale gave a specific reference to anyone who outright refutes Austric. Instead, we see references to "general acceptance". It seems to me that you a priori throw away all cases under construction, whether it is Austric or Nostratic. Baby can be gone with the water (:-). L.T.: [snip] > What I did > was merely to demonstrate, to my own satisfaction at least, that the > evidence on offer *did not stand up to scrutiny*, and hence that their > case could not be accepted. And that is a very different thing from > proving the absence of a relation. A.V.: Using the formal logic, you are right, but as a matter of fact the impossibility to prove the relationship means that there is no possibility to prove the relationship, therefore it should not concern us as long as we are doing science and not entertaining the speculations. Therefore the relationship is non-existent for analysis, not in GENERAL, of course. L.T.: > > So, Bengtson's case fails. There remain at least three logical > possibilities: > > (1) Basque and Caucasian really are discoverably related, but no one > has yet uncovered the available evidence. > > I can't scrutinize a case that has never been made. > > (2) Basque and Caucasian are indeed very remotely related, but the > evidence for that relationship has long since disappeared and cannot > be recovered. > > There is no earthly way I could disprove this possibility. > > (3) Basque and Caucasian are not related at any level. > > Again, there is no earthly way I could prove this. A.V.: Of course, since all three are speculative solutions. L.T.:> > The evaluation of your case will have to await the scrutiny of > specialists in the relevant languages. If your case withstands that > scrutiny, you win; if it doesn't, you lose. That's the way it is in > this business. A.V.: I agree with this point, but please note that evaluation by the specialists in the relevant languages is very different from "general acceptance" which you used as a criterion before. Therefore I'd like to suggest to you asking a poll opinion of SPECIALISTS in historical Japanese and Korean (not only me, of course) or in Austronesian and Austroasiatic before you pronounce them isolates (J and K) or unrelated (AN and AA). > > > A.V.: > > > Again, neither Yukaghir, nor Ket are in fact a single language: > > there are two living languages in each case and more extinct > > ones. If you are going to call a family consisting of more than one > > language an isolate, then where is going to be the line? > L.T.: > > Again, we are merely quibbling about words. Being an isolate is not > an intrinsic property of a language; it's merely, as others have > pointed out, a property we project onto a language as a result of our > investigations to date. It's purely a matter of taste whether we want > to apply the term to a living language with no known living relatives > but with known extinct relatives. A.V.: Hopefully for the last time. Even leaving aside extinct relatives there are in fact TWO (2) Yukaghir and TWO (2) Ket languages. May be checking out the standard descriptions of Yukaghir and Ket such as Kreinovich 1957, 1968 and Dul'zon 1968 will finally persuade you that there is more than ONE (1) LIVING LANGUAGE and that I am not making that up. Therefore none of this cases is similar to Nihali that is much more homogeneous, and can be called a real isolate. From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Sat Mar 29 17:04:05 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 17:04:05 +0000 Subject: isolates once more In-Reply-To: from "Alexander Vovin" at Mar 28, 97 06:53:47 pm Message-ID: For more reasons than one, I suspect this may be my final contribution to this debate. Alexander Vovin writes: [on my assertion that Austric is not generally accepted] > I'm sorry but may be you can enlighten me and the rest of us > what is "general acceptance" and "general satisfaction"? Is it a > matter of the vote? More people accept IE than Austric, *Everybody* accepts IE. The status of IE, including elaborate reconstructions of phonology, lexis and grammar, has long since reached the point at which anybody who rejected IE would be regarded, rightly or wrongly, as a lunatic. It is perfectly clear that Austric is nowhere near that state. > but you of course can find more people who had some experience with > IE than with Austric. And of course Austric cannot be as developped > as IE: the very idea of Austric is younger than a century. > I agree that neither Austric nor Ainu-Austric are finally proven, And that is the point I was making. End of discussion? > but it is accepted as the only perspective direction of research by > people who work in this particular field, and I named several. Hardly the same thing, is it? A medical scientist who satisfies himself that there is only one prospective direction for tackling AIDS is not a medical scientist who has conquered AIDS. > However, neither you nor Mark Hale gave a specific reference to > anyone who outright refutes Austric. Instead, we see references to > "general acceptance". It seems to me that you a priori throw away > all cases under construction, whether it is Austric or Nostratic. > Baby can be gone with the water (:-). I have thrown away nothing, a priori or otherwise. It is impossible to find a reference work anywhere on the planet which declines to accept IE, or Afro-Asiatic, or Algonquian, or Austronesian, or Dravidian, or... well, you get the picture. It is also impossible to find a reference work which accepts even Austric, let alone Ainu-Austric, as beyond dispute. If the specialists have decided that Austric is real, then either they're keeping mighty quiet about it, or there's a monstrous conspiracy to gag them. And you've already admitted that neither of these engaging scenarios is the case. Instead, the specialists simply have not concluded that Austric is real, and there is no more to be said at present. > L.T.: > > What I did was merely to demonstrate, to my own satisfaction at > > least, that the evidence on offer *did not stand up to scrutiny*, > > and hence that their case could not be accepted. And that is a > > very different thing from proving the absence of a relation. > A.V.: > Using the formal logic, you are right, Is there some useful way of proceeding which is *not* logical? ;-) > but as a matter of fact the impossibility to prove the relationship > means that there is no possibility to prove the relationship, > therefore it should not concern us as long as we are doing science > and not entertaining the speculations. Therefore the relationship is > non-existent for analysis, not in GENERAL, of course. Sorry; again I don't follow this at all. When I speak of two languages as being "related", I mean "discoverably related", and I am often (but not always) careful to say so. I see no point in pondering the possibility that certain languages are related at some impossibly remote time depth but that we can never discover the fact. [Here I've snipped a bit I didn't understand, but it didn't seem that you were disagreeing with me.] [on my point that a genetic proposal must be evaluated] > I agree with this point, but please note that evaluation by the > specialists in the relevant languages is very different from > "general acceptance" which you used as a criterion before. I meant "general acceptance" by the relevant specialists. I don't think a specialist in Algonquian or Bantu is well placed to evaluate a case for Austric. > Therefore I'd like to suggest to you asking a poll opinion of > SPECIALISTS in historical Japanese and Korean (not only me, of > course) or in Austronesian and Austroasiatic before you pronounce > them isolates (J and K) or unrelated (AN and AA). Alexander, I have better things to do than to organize opinion polls. If any of the several genetic links you endorse comes to be accepted by specialists, tomorrow or a hundred years from now, as established beyond reasonable dispute, then I will no doubt hear about it, if I'm still around. So far I have heard nothing of the sort, and Samuel Martin's very guarded remarks do not lead me to believe that things are likely to change soon. [I have nothing further to say on Yukaghir and Ket.] Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From vovin at HAWAII.EDU Sun Mar 30 05:00:26 1997 From: vovin at HAWAII.EDU (Alexander Vovin) Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 19:00:26 -1000 Subject: Ainu and Gilyak In-Reply-To: <3347a119.27326520@mailhost.pi.net> Message-ID: Actually, there are classifiers in both Ainu and Gilyak, although the Ainu system is very limited: the two most frequently used are -p (from pe 'thing') for unanimate objects and -n (after vowel stems) or -iw (after consonant stems) (<*niw "person') for human beings. All languages in Southern part of North East Asia have classifiers: Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Manchu, Ainu, Gilyak. It is often viewed as Sinitic influence, but it has never been proven. Oldest Japanese texts, for example, which are almost free of any Chinese influence, already exhibit some classifiers, although the system is not as elaborate as in the modern language. There are numerous examples of Gilyal loanwords in Ainu and vice versa. Thus, e,g. the second classifier *niw for 'person' does look like a Gilyak word for 'person' (nivx, niGvng etc., depending on 'dialect', hence Nivx -- the name of the language as it is used in Russia today). However, I am unaware of any Gilyak word which could be a source for the first classifier. You can find some information on Ainu-Gilyak contacts in the following works by late Prof. R. Austerlitz, one of the best connoisseurs of Gilyak, and undoubtedly one of the greatest linguists of our time: "Shaman.", Ural-Altaische Jahrb"ucher 58: 143-144 (1986) "Native seal nomenclatures in South-Sakhalin". Papers of the CIC Far Eastern Institute, 1967. pp. 133-141 "L'appelation du renne en japonais, ai"nou et surtout en ghilyak", Tractata Altaica, Otto Harrassowitz 1976 pp. 45-49 There is also a big article by him in Russian, "O nivxsko-ainskom simbioze na ostrove Sakhalin", to appear in "Ainskaia problema". St.Petersbourg, 199? There is also a short list of plausible loanwords in my 1993 book "A reconstruction of Proto-Ainu", Leiden: E.j> Brill. Sincerely, Alexander Vovin On Wed, 26 Mar 1997, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > > One thing that caught my attention in the linguistic database from > Johanna Nichols' "Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time" was the > typological near-identity of Gilyak and Ainu. Of all the typological > features listed, Ainu and Gilyak only differ in that Gilyak has > numerical classifiers (26 of them). Is there any other evidence for > contacts between Gilyak and Ainu? From vovin at HAWAII.EDU Mon Mar 31 21:26:53 1997 From: vovin at HAWAII.EDU (Alexander Vovin) Date: Mon, 31 Mar 1997 11:26:53 -1000 Subject: Japanese/Korean/Tungus In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Stefan, Thanks for support -- and, of course, all the questions you ask are right to the point and need to be answered -- I'll try to do it below. Note that I have to comply with our moderator directions, and therefore, can leave only essential part of your posting in order to make it short. On Fri, 28 Mar 1997, Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote: > Since I have been addressed in Sasha Vovin's posting, let me throw in a few > remarks. Basically, Sasha, this time, I'm on your side, I have no quarrel > with the notion that Japanese and Korean are related (and there might be a > relationship with Tungus after all). Your Diachronica paper helped much to > form my opinion on this, since there you managed to show morphological > evidence, just the thing which - as you correctly observe - I want to see. > > For Japanese you list such forms as (I believe the unasterisked forms > represent attested Old Japanese): > > -ey < *(a)Ci< *(a)gi (to be compared with Korean -Gi etc.)[in Diachronica > XI you give it without the bracketed initial *a, what does that mean ?] > -u < *-wi < *-bi (to be compared with Korean * -bi, Tungus *-bi > etc.), and some minor cases where the actually compared form on the > Japanese side is a reconstruct. > > Could you please help to clarify for us non-Japanologists, how the > proto-Japanese reconstructs are arrived at ? A.V.: Reconstruction of -ey as *(a)Ci is based on the following facts. We do know from internal evidence that OJ ey comes from *aCi (cf. sakey 'rice wine', but saka-dukyi 'cup for sake', examples of this sort are abundant). We have to posit a *C between the vowels, as no vowel clusters are allowed in the proto-language. The proposal that *C goes back to *g belongs to Martin, and is based, if I remember correctly, on observation that this while only two other consonants (*r and *m) can be lost in intervocalic position, their loss is accountable for (Whitman's law), while we can't accont for *C disappearance here. In addition, *g is exactly the stop lacking in the proto-system (only p, t, k, b, d are reconstructable), so we pose *g for pre-Japonic. Now, *(a) is included to account for the pairs like tuk- 'be attached' : tukey- 'to attach' (Unger reconstructs the stem *tuka- for the intransitive pair here, and I do not accept this final *-a, for the reasons too long to list here, but you can trust me that there are other counterarguments that in my opinion outweight benefits of reconstructing *-a for the majority of PJ verbal stems). Reconstruction of final -u as -bi I believe might be warranted by final -mi in some Ryukyuan dialects (cf. Okinawan -N) corresponding to -u in OJ. There is also -mi in OJ which in certain cases may be argued as quality verb final, although the evidence is more slippery here. S.G.: > I'm not so happy with *-gi "causative relic" and your Manchu example. Why > don't you cite straightforwardly Evenki -gi: (with a long vowel, which is > probably of proto-Tung. status) 'transitivizer' ? It does the job much > better, since the Manchu verb algi- you give doesn't mean "let know" at > all, but rather "to become or be known, famous", rather an > intransitive/anticausative formation to the root found in ala- "to report, > say". A.V.: Yes, you are right about Evenki -gi: -- it slipped my mind, as I said that I was typing the list on the basis of my memory, and I know Manchu better than any other Tungusic language. As for Manchu algi-, you are right, it means "be known", but known that this -gi- can still be compared with Korean 'transitivity flipper", since the latter goes both ways. S.G.: > The proto-Tungus negative marker (an independent particle in all > probability) is given in Diachronica XI, by you as *aana (a:na, with a long > vowel), I think that reconstruction is the one which should be preferred, > since Evenki a:chin 'not, yok' seems not to leave another choice. Btw., do > you have any idea about those obscure elements as Manchu -kU or Evenki (and > other Tungus lgs.) -chi(n) here ? In the same Diachronica paper you give > the MK (Middle Korean ?) equivalent as /ani/, here as an(h); which is > correct ? A.V.: You are right again about the vowel length in Tungusic, should be *a:na. I would compare J and K forms to Even a:n etc. (TMS 1.41a), rather than to Evk. a:cin, although they are probably also related. As for Manchu akU, I have demonstrated recently that Manchu -k- < *-nk- (forthcoming in JSFOu), that gives us *ankU. It is not possible to separate -KU as such, but I trust that we can of course have *ank-U on the basis of the other Manchu negative waka. MK ani appears to be the original form, and anh- (verbal stem) is a contraction of ani-ho- "not-do", although there is, I believe some scanty evidence fro dialects permitting to pose two of them as equal variants. S.G.: > > On the correspondence pattern: > -kyi < *-ki MK -e/-a ?< *Ga/Ge Manchu xa/xe/xo < *kV > retrospective perfective perfective > > you give in Diachronica XI (*if* this is the same cognate set, I may of > course be totally wrong here), > > as equivalent to Manchu -ha/-he/-ho < -*kV a Japanese "past marker" *-iki : > is this the same thing as "retrospective -kyi < *-ki"? In the same list you > give as MK (unasterisked, therefore attested ?) -ke-, here -e/-a ?< *Ga/Ge, > could you please clarify what is actually attested, what is reconstructed > and on what reasons ? > > On the cognate set > -te- < *-ta-Ci- -te-/ta- ---- > perfective perfective > > we read in Diachronica XI: Jap. *-ita-Ci-, MK -te- (and Tungus *-taa-, > which I don't know well, there seem to be several dental suffixes you could > have in mind, would you mind giving an example ?). Again, which is the > state-of-the-art ? A.V.: The discrepancy here is due to the fact that I have changed some of my views recently. My original position was that retrospective and perfective markers in OJ do not follow the infinitive (gerund) marker -i, therefore I posited *-iki and *-ita-. Now, I am persuaded by majority's point of view that they do follow *-i, and therefore, I presented *-ki and *-ta-Ci- here. S.G.: > > Furthermore, is the MK "realis participle" -(V)n the same thing as the > *-na- suffix from Diachronica XI, which is there compared with Jap. *-in- > "perfective" ? A.V.: Stefan, I believe you were looking at the wrong column in Diachronica XI, which compares PJ *-in-, MK -n (which is the same as -(V)n here, and PMT *-na- (which I did not include here this time). S.G.: > The "tentative/volitive" suffix from your posting (Jap. -ama-, Tung. -Vme-) > looks in your paper again a little bit differently: Jap. *-am- (OK, I > think, the latter is the reconstruct, whereas the former the attested form, > or ???) and Tung. *-m-. I'm not too familiar with that latter suffix, so > one or two examples might help a bit. A.V.: If OJ subjunctive -amasi is not build on tentative *-ama- and -si (also appearing in negative tentative -azi < ?*-an-si), then tentative should be reconstructed as -am- rather than -ama-, but this is a difficult choice to make. I forgot to add Korean promisory -(V)ma to this list, btw. Tungusic - *-m- or (V)me- (likely the first one, as I told I was typing from my memory this time) is taken from O.Sunik's "Glagol v tunguso-man'chzhurskikh iazykakh", which is at home at present time, so I can't give you the exact reference to the page (you'll find it in the section on mood markers). Again, from my memory, Even has -mna- for tentative, and -mci- for subjunctive (cf. Evk. subjunctive -mca:-, I don't remember the Evk. tentative form), on which Sunik builds his reconstruction. Finally, I might be overcautious with Jurchen data (you are right, there are markers that resemble -me and -re both phonetically and functionally), but this is the same point I've already brought once in our discussion of the "Secret History": until the careful Chinese-oriented reconstruction of Jurchen is done, it might be premature to operate with Jurchen data, in the sense that preference should be given to Manchu, since our understanding of Manchu phonology is better than that of Jurchen. I hope this will clarify the matter, Cheers, Sasha From martinez at EM.UNI-FRANKFURT.DE Fri Mar 7 19:24:11 1997 From: martinez at EM.UNI-FRANKFURT.DE (Fco. Javier Mart nez Garc a) Date: Fri, 7 Mar 1997 20:24:11 +0100 Subject: TITUS: Indo-European Course Register (Sommer 1997). Message-ID: TITUS has the new Indo-European Course Register (Sommer Semester 1997) We have now incorporated it into the TITUS Project web pages under following URL: http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/idg-ss97.html Best Regards J. Martinez From emil.hersak at ZG.TEL.HR Sat Mar 8 19:29:30 1997 From: emil.hersak at ZG.TEL.HR (Emil HERSAK (by way of B. Reusch)) Date: Sat, 8 Mar 1997 11:29:30 -0800 Subject: Dravidian/Uralic Message-ID: (I'm sending this to the list as the original sender has been unable to subscribe yet. Please excuse x-posting.) Beatrice From: Emil HERSAK Sent: 1997. To: Members of the list Subject: Dravidian/Uralic Dear Indologists, The short short encyclopaedic questions, that I would very much appreciate if someone could answer: First, regardless of whether the term Indo-European can be attributed to Thomas Young, as is sometimes claimed, can anyone give me the birth and death dates of Young. Second, in his book "In Search of the Indo-Europeans" (1992), in a very useful critique of the various "racial" interpretations of Indo-European, J.P. Mallory wrote: "Cannon Isaac Taylor, for example, once proposed the notion that the Indo-Europeans were essentially 'an improved race of Finns'" (page 268). Can anyone provide information on the context for this quote. Namely Mallory, does not give any information on the source, or on Taylor himself. BTW, for the sake of bibliographic precision, I would be pleased to find out what Mallory's own initials stand for (J.P.). Third, it would be very interested in hearing anything on the present state of the theory of ancient language links between Dravidian and Uralic. I am aware that this has been rejected by many linguistis, but nevertheless the theory is still often encountered in the literature. In this context, bellow I give a quote from a text by Janos Harmatta presented at a conference in Dushanbe several years ago. Unfortunately, in Harmatta's work there seem to be inconsistencies, and despite my attempts, I have not found any information on either HARALI or the Sumerian he mentions in the following quote. Some persons I contacted on the matter assumed the references were pure fabrication. Nevertheless, before rejecting the idea, I would appreciate your comments. "Historical and linguistic research often presumed that the Dravidians came from Northern territories lying around Lake Aral, where they had intensive linguistic contacts with Finno-Ugrian tribes. It was even assumed that Dravidian and Finno-Ugrian were genetically related languages. Linguists tried to assure a linguistic basis for this theory, but even the latest effort to point out a great number of common elements in Finno-Ugrian and Dravidian vocabulary did not arrive at any conclusive result. In any case, however, if the golden land H(+hook sub)arali (later Arali, Arallu) of the Sumerian hymm on trade with Tilmun, situated beyond Tukris(+hachek) in the far North-East, can be sought in Iran, and perhaps, even in Ancient Khorazmia indeed, then this name may be of Dravidian origin (cf. Tamil ar[+dieresis sub]al "to burn, to shine", ar[+dieresis sub]ali "fire", ar(+dieresis sottoscritto)alo[+macron]n "Agni, sun") and its meaning could be the same as that of Khorazmia, reflecting Old Iranian *Xva(macron)ra+zmi- "land of the Sun". If the localisation of H(+hook sub)arali and this interpretation is correct, then this toponym may give a hint for the ancient home of the Proto-Dravidians" (p 81). Source: J. Harmatta, "Proto-Iranians and Proto-Indians in Central Asia in the 2nd Millenium B.C. /linguistic evidence/. Etnicheskie problemy istorii central'noj azii v drebnosti /II tysjacheletie do n.e. - Ethnic problems of the History of Central Asia in the Easly Period/ Second Millenium B.B. - Moscow, 1981, pp. 75-83. Sincerely, Emil Hersak Institut for Migration and Ethnic Studies, Zagreb, Croatia. e-mail: emil.hersak at zg.tel.hr From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Sun Mar 9 11:08:58 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 11:08:58 +0000 Subject: Thomas Young Message-ID: Young's dates are 1773-1829. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH England larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From gonzalor at JHU.EDU Sun Mar 9 08:09:36 1997 From: gonzalor at JHU.EDU (Gonzalo Rubio) Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 03:09:36 -0500 Subject: Dravidian/Uralic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 8 Mar 1997, Emil HERSAK (by way of B. Reusch) wrote: > there seem to be inconsistencies, and despite my attempts, I have not found > any information on either HARALI or the Sumerian he mentions in the > following quote. Some persons I contacted on the matter assumed the > references were pure fabrication. Nevertheless, before rejecting the idea, I'm afraid I'm not an Indologist, but an Assyriologist with an "Indo-European past". However, I'll try to answer some of your questions. a-ra-li (also written a-ra-a-li, a-ra-al-li, arali [E2.KUR.BAD or just KUR.BAD, and perhaps arali2 [URUxGAL]) was the name of the steppe between Uruk and Badtibira (bad3-tibira-KI) from very early texts (Presargonic and so on), and later on it was the name of a place in which demons dwell, the netherworld, etc. You may want to look at the _Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary_ A/1: 136ff. This a-ra-li is different from ha-ra-li, the place where gold comes from in Sumerian texts. Some stuff you may find interesting is Jacobsen's note in _Journal of the American Oriental Society_ 103 (1984): 195; Stol _Studies in Old Babylonian History_ 41 f.; _Chicago Assyrian Dictionary_ A/2: 227 (under arallu^). I cannot think of any example in which a-ra-li and Dilmun occur in the same text or context. However, since Dilmun seems to have been a sort of mythical paradise for the Sumerians, it's sound pretty likely that ha-ra-li (but not a-ra-li), the source of gold, may have been mentioned together with Dilmun. Regarding your other questions. The term "Indo-European" seems to have been coined by Thomas Young in his review of Adelung's _Mithridates_ (Berlin 1806-1817), "Mithridates, oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde", in _The Quarterly Review_ 10 (1813): 250-292. Thomas Young was born in 1773 and died in 1829. Concerning Dravidian and its alleged relations to other language families, from Rask's "Scytian" to McAlpin's Elamite hypothesis (and also the different Uralic and Altaic theories proposed by Caldwell, Schoebel, Schrader, Burrow, Bouda, and Menges), you may want to read Kamil V. Zvelebil's highly informative review of McAlpin's _Proto-Elamo-Dravidian_ (Philadelphia 1981), in _Journal of the American Oriental Society_ 105 (1985): 364ff. I hope this may help you. ------------------------ Gonzalo Rubio Near Eastern Studies Johns Hopkins University gonzalor at jhu.edu ------------------------ From cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU Sun Mar 9 22:40:12 1997 From: cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU (Clyde A. Winters) Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 16:40:12 -0600 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe Message-ID: In recent posting to this list various authors have suggested that the Dravidians came from Europe or the North. This is highly unlikely, it would appear that the Dravidians originated in Middle Africa and migrated to the Indus Valley and India sometime after 3000 B.C. The Dravidians came from the Sahara before it became a desert. Affinities exist between Nubia ware and pottery from Ennedi and Tibesti. These Saharan people were round-headed ancient Mediterranean type. They were often referred to as Cafsa or Capsians; a group of people not devoid of negroid characteristics according to J Desanges.(11) Wyatt MacGaffey, claims that the term "Mediterranean" is an anthropological euphemism for "Negro". The boats of the Saharan people are similar to those found on ancient engravings of boats in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. Many of the boats found in the eastern desert of Egypt and among the Red Sea Hills show affinities to Mesopotamian models. S.N. Kramer in , claimed that Makan was Egypt, Mekluhha was Nubia-Punt, and the Indus Valley was Dilmun. Today Dilmun is believed to be found near Arabia. But the archaeological evidence suggest that the Indus Valley which was settled by Dravidian speakers was the source of the lapis lazuli , which made Dilmun famous .(2) Archaeological research has confirmed that cultural interaction existed between the contemporary civilizations of the 4th and 3rd millenia B.C. Extensive trade routes connected the Proto-Dravidians of the Indus Valley, with African people in Egypto-Nubia, and the Elamites and Sumerians. P. Kohl discovered that vessels from IVBI worshop at Tepe Yahya, have a uniform shape and design. Vessels sharing this style are distributed from Soviet Uzbekistan to the Indus Valley, and Sumerian, Elamite and Egyptian sites. (2) In addition, we find common arrowheads at Harappan sites, and sites in Iran, Egypt, Minoan Crete and Heladic Greece. It appears that the locus for this distribution of cultural traditions and technology was the Saharan-Nubian zone or Kush. This would explain why the Sumerians and Elamites often referred to themselves as "ksh". For example the ancient Sumerians called their dynasty "Kish". The words "kish", "kesh" and "kush" were also names for ancient Nubia-Sudan. The Elamites also came from Kush. According to the classical writer Strabo, Susa the centre of the Elamite civilization was founded by Tithonus, king of Kush. B.B. Lal has shown conclusively that the Dravidians came from Nubia and were related to the C-Group people who founded the Kerma dynasty.(3) They both used a common black-and-red ware (BRW) which Lal found was analogous to ceramics used by the megalithic people in India who also used analogous pottery signs identical to those found in the corpus of Indus Valley writing. (4) Singh believes that this pottery spread from Nubia, through Mesopotamia and Iran southward into India.(5) The earliest examples of this BRW date to the Amratian period (c4000-3500 B.C.). T This same BRW was found at the lowest levels of Harappan sites at Lothal and Rangpur. After 1700 B.C. This ceramic tradition spread southward into megalithic India.(6) Dilmun was an important source of lapis lazuli. If the Indus Valley civilization was Dilmun as hypothesized by Kramer, it would explain the control of the Harappans/ or Dilmunites of this important metal. The Indus Valley people spoke a Dravidian language.(7) The Harappans controlled the lazurite region of Badakhshan, and the routes to the tin and copper fields of central Asia.(8) The major city of the Harappans/Dilmunites in the lapis lazuli region was Shortughai. Francefort believes that many lapis lazuli works were transported to Iran and Mesopotamia from Shortughai.(9) The BRW at Shortughai is typically Harappan. When we put all of this evidence together we must agree that there were connections between the Dravidian and African people. The evident linguistic connections between Uralic and Dravidian are probably the result of the Dravidian migrations into Central Asia and contact with Uralic speakers during this proposed period. Footnotes (1)C.B. Rawlinson, "Notes on the early history of Babylon", (First Series) 15, p.230. (2). Philip L. Kohl, "The balance of trade in the mid-Third millenium BC", , 19 (1978), pp.463-492. (3)B.B. Lal, "From megalithic to the Harappan: Tracing back the graffiti on pottery", , 16 (1960). (4)B.B. Lal, "The only Asian mission in threatened Nubia", , 20 April 1963. (5) H.N. Singh, , Delhi, 1982. (6) C.A. Winters, "The Dravido-Harappan Colonization of Central Asia", , 34 (1-2), pp.120-144. (7) C.A. Winters, "The Dravidian language of the Harappan script", , (1990). (8) B. Brenjes, "On Proto-Elamite Iran", , 24 (2) (1984), pp. 240-. (9) Henri-Paul Franceport, "La civilisation de l'Indus aux rives de l'Oxus", , (Decembre) p.50. (10) Ibid., p.49. (11) J. Desnages, "The Proto-Berbers". In vol.2, (Ed.) by G. Mokhtar (Heinemann Educational Books, London) p.25. C.A.Winters From fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG Sun Mar 9 23:09:17 1997 From: fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG (Steven Schaufele) Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 17:09:17 -0600 Subject: Dravidian/Uralic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Concerning the possible glossogenetic connection between Dravidian and Uralic (what i like to call the `Dravido-Uralic Hypothesis'), i have a paper, copies of which i would be happy to make available to anyone interested; this paper is basically an attempt at a critical survey of what has been said in the published literature on the subject, from Caldwell up to the present. Any requests for copies of this paper will be honoured, provided they are accompanied by snail-mail addresses, assuming i can find it in my `archives' (probably down in the basement). Here i will say that i, personally, am favourably disposed towards the Dravido-Uralic Hypothesis, and this comes across in the above-mentioned paper. However, the necessary time-depth is such, and (consequently?) the proposed cognate morphemes so short (though, it seems to me, in such tantalizingly large numbers), that it is extremely difficult to demon- strate cognacy beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt. I'm hoping VERY MUCH for an opportunity to pursue this matter further, if i ever get a chance to do any original research, but it's going to have to be done a LOT MORE critically than it has been in the past. Too much of what has been written and published on the matter has been coloured too heavily by the authors' attitude, whether pro or con, on long-distance reconstruc- tion in general and the Dravido-Uralic Hypothesis in particular. And that, at the moment, is my very brief perspective on the current state of scholarship on this question. Best, Steven --------------------- Dr. Steven Schaufele 712 West Washington Urbana, IL 61801 217-344-8240 fcosws at prairienet.org http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html **** O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum! *** *** Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis! *** From mcv at PI.NET Mon Mar 10 12:45:51 1997 From: mcv at PI.NET (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 12:45:51 +0000 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Clyde A. Winters wrote: > In recent posting to this list various authors have suggested > that the Dravidians came from Europe or the North. This is highly > unlikely, it would appear that the Dravidians originated in Middle > Africa and migrated to the Indus Valley and India sometime after > 3000 B.C. This highly unlikely. We now have a 6000 BC date for Neolithic Mehrgarh in Baluchistan, and the roots of the Elamite civilization can be traced at least back to Susa A, c. 4000 BC, and the earlier Susiana a-e phase (c. 5000-4000 BC). McAlpine's Proto-Elamo- Dravidian can be put with some confidence in the Southern Zagros by the start of the Neolithic, c. 8000 BC, spreading from there to the Indus (and the Amu-Darya?) by a Neolithic "wave of advance" not unlike the model proposed by Colin Renfrew for the spread of agricultural peoples across continental Europe. Since this is a linguistic list after all, what linguistic evidence might there be for an origin of Elamo-Dravidian in Nilo-Saharan territory as recently as 3,000 BC? ---------------------------- Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at pi.net ---------------------------- From fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG Mon Mar 10 05:21:53 1997 From: fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG (Steven Schaufele) Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 23:21:53 -0600 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In response to Clyde Winters' remarks about the ethnic affinities of South Indians, i don't think anybody contests that, in terms of physical anthropology, they are closely affiliated with certain African groups. What's this got to do with language? We all know that linguistic affiliation has no necessary connection with biological affiliation. Nowadays, the English language counts members of all ethnic groups among its speakers; that doesn't change the fact that it's historically (and glossagenetically) a Northwestern European language, a Low-German dialect of the Indo-European family. Suppose some near-universal cataclysm wipes out all English-speaking communities outside of Australia & New Zealand. Will our descendants conclude therefrom that, since these regions were settled from Southeast Asia and, possibly, indirectly Africa, that English must be either a Southeast Asian or an African language in its origin? It should also be borne in mind that there is a Dravidian island along the Afghan/Pakistani border. I've usually understood that this datum could be used to support a hypothesis that the Dravidian family was originally indigenous to the Indus Valley area, that in late prehistoric times expanded into the Indian subcontinent, overwhelming whatever languages were used by the local population (which in whole or in part had come from Africa) before being in turn overwhelmed in much of the northern half of the subcontinent by invading Indo-European speakers. Not that i'm necessarily promoting such a hypothesis, but i don't know of a great deal of evidence on the subject one way or another. My point is that it is not usually a very good idea to build an argument for the linguistic affiliation of a certain ethnic group on the basis of its undeniable *physical* affinities. Best, Steven --------------------- Dr. Steven Schaufele 712 West Washington Urbana, IL 61801 217-344-8240 fcosws at prairienet.org http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html **** O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum! *** *** Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis! *** From Bomhard at AOL.COM Mon Mar 10 02:28:08 1997 From: Bomhard at AOL.COM (Allan Bomhard) Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 21:28:08 -0500 Subject: Dravidian/Uralic Message-ID: Genetic relationship between (Elamo-)Dravidian and Uralic(-Yukaghir) has been proposed within the conext of the Nostratic hypothesis, first by V. M. Illich-Svitych and A. B. Dolgopolsky and then by A. R. Bomhard. There is no special relationship between Uralic and Dravidian. Dravidian appears to be related to Elamite (if the views of D. McAlpin are accepted). According to J. H. Greenberg, Uralic is part of the Eurasiatic family of languages, along with Indo-European, Altaic, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Gilyak, and Eskimo-Aleut. A. R. Bomhard considers Eurasiatic to be one of the branches of Nostratic. These and other issues are discussed in detail in: A. R. Bomhard and J. C. Kerns. _The Nostratic Macrofamily._ 1994. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. A. R. Bomhard. _Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis._ 1996. Charleston, SC: Signum. From cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU Wed Mar 12 22:36:48 1997 From: cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU (Clyde A. Winters) Date: Wed, 12 Mar 1997 16:36:48 -0600 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 9 Mar 1997, Steven Schaufele wrote: > > In response to Clyde Winters' remarks about the ethnic affinities of > South Indians, i don't think anybody contests that, in terms of physical > anthropology, they are closely affiliated with certain African groups. > What's this got to do with language? We all know that linguistic > affiliation has no necessary connection with biological affiliation. > Nowadays, the English language counts members of all ethnic groups among > its speakers; that doesn't change the fact that it's historically (and > glossagenetically) a Northwestern European language, a Low-German dialect > of the Indo-European family. Suppose some near-universal cataclysm wipes > out all English-speaking communities outside of Australia & New Zealand. > Will our descendants conclude therefrom that, since these regions were > settled from Southeast Asia and, possibly, indirectly Africa, that > English must be either a Southeast Asian or an African language in its > origin? This would be highly unlikely because we would probably use oral tradition and comparative linguistic methods to show that English could not have originated in these areas. If such an event did occurn the English speakers would more than likely adopt the languages of the "native" people since much of their culture would probably change as a result of being separated from the major centers of Western culture. It seems that in this event English woulf be recognize as a substratum language. > > It should also be borne in mind that there is a Dravidian island along > the Afghan/Pakistani border. I've usually understood that this datum > could be used to support a hypothesis that the Dravidian family was > originally indigenous to the Indus Valley area, that in late prehistoric > times expanded into the Indian subcontinent, overwhelming whatever > languages were used by the local population (which in whole or in part > had come from Africa) before being in turn overwhelmed in much of the > northern half of the subcontinent by invading Indo-European speakers. The archaeological data fails to support this view. The work of B.B. Lal, makes it clear that the red-and-black ware common to the Indus Valley dwellers and the South Indians appear to have originated in Africa. This along with the evidence for a genetic relationship between Dravidian languages and African languages indicate that the Dravidians did not originate in the Indus Valley or Iran. It would appear that while Dravidian elements remained in the Indus Valley after the decline of the Harappan ciivlization, other elements migrated southward into India, while Tamilian speakers moved into North Asia and Southeast Asia. The Dravidian traditons, and linguistic evidence indicate that the Tamilian speakers migrated from Southeast Asia down into South India. > Not that i'm necessarily promoting such a hypothesis, but i don't know of > a great deal of evidence on the subject one way or another.. My point is > that it is not usually a very good idea to build an argument for the > linguistic affiliation of a certain ethnic group on the basis of its > undeniable *physical* affinities. This theory is not based on physical affinities, it is based on the archaeological and linguistic evidence that point to Africa as the original home of the Dravidian speakers. C.A. Winters From cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU Wed Mar 12 22:42:17 1997 From: cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU (Clyde A. Winters) Date: Wed, 12 Mar 1997 16:42:17 -0600 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe In-Reply-To: <199703101143.MAA22700@mailhost.pi.net> Message-ID: On Mon, 10 Mar 1997, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Clyde A. Winters wrote: > > > In recent posting to this list various authors have suggested > > that the Dravidians came from Europe or the North. This is highly > > unlikely, it would appear that the Dravidians originated in Middle > > Africa and migrated to the Indus Valley and India sometime after > > 3000 B.C. > > This highly unlikely. We now have a 6000 BC date for Neolithic > Mehrgarh in Baluchistan, and the roots of the Elamite civilization can > be traced at least back to Susa A, c. 4000 BC, and the earlier > Susiana a-e phase (c. 5000-4000 BC). McAlpine's Proto-Elamo- > Dravidian can be put with some confidence in the Southern Zagros by > the start of the Neolithic, c. 8000 BC, spreading from there to the > Indus (and the Amu-Darya?) by a Neolithic "wave of advance" not > unlike the model proposed by Colin Renfrew for the spread of > agricultural peoples across continental Europe. You are right about the early dates for the Mehrgarh culture. This culture has nothing to do with the historic south Indian cultures which we use as the Proto-type culture for the Dravidians. The evidence makes it clear that the pottery used by the South Indian Dravidians and the Harappans are similar. The cultural evidence, markings on pottery and etc. for the Mehrgarh and the South Indian and Harappan cultures are dissimilar. > > Since this is a linguistic list after all, what linguistic > evidence might there be for an origin of Elamo-Dravidian in > Nilo-Saharan territory as recently as 3,000 BC? > There is plenty of evidence for this relationship which I will post at a later date. C.A. Winters From alderson at NETCOM.COM Thu Mar 13 19:19:09 1997 From: alderson at NETCOM.COM (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Thu, 13 Mar 1997 11:19:09 -0800 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe In-Reply-To: (cwinter@ORION.IT.LUC.EDU) Message-ID: Clyde A. Winters writes: >This theory is not based on physical affinities, it is based on the >archaeological and linguistic evidence that point to Africa as the original ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >home of the Dravidian speakers. As has already been pointed out, this is a linguistics mailing list. Please post citations of the linguistic evidence adduced for such a relationship, with bibliography if possible. Rich Alderson From bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Fri Mar 14 08:20:47 1997 From: bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU (benji wald) Date: Fri, 14 Mar 1997 00:20:47 -0800 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe Message-ID: Clyde Winters wrote: >This along with the evidence for a genetic relationship between Dravidian >languages and African languages indicate that the Dravidians did not >originate in the Indus Valley or Iran. and later > The Dravidian traditons, and linguistic evidence indicate that the >Tamilian speakers >migrated from Southeast Asia down into South India. I am not aware that Clyde provided any linguistic information to support these claims. The characterisation "African" languages is too vague to be of linguistic value, and does not indicate impressive knowledge of that field. There are at least four language families indigenous to Africa, which have not been demonstrated to be related to each other, much less to any other language family. If Clyde claims that Dravidian is related to only one of those families, as is least implausible given the time frame, it also remains for him to specify the nature of the relationship, e.g., an independent descendent of Niger-Congo or of some more specific group. In any case, archaeological artifacts alone allow only the possibility not the certainty that language was imported along with certain other aspects of culture. Clyde's statement about the origin of Tamil speakers has nothing to do with his proposed African origin of the Dravidian language, and simply indicates that aspects of Tamil culture (including loan-words, I suppose) were subject to influence from Southeast Asia at some time in the past, perhaps even by assimilation of some Southeast Asians into the Dravidian society of the Tamil area. The linguistic evidence for this should be distinguishable from linguistic evidence for a genetic relation between Dravidian and the un-named African family. Southeast Asia also sounds more like a cultural area than a specific linguistic family. From cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU Fri Mar 14 02:59:58 1997 From: cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU (Clyde A. Winters) Date: Thu, 13 Mar 1997 20:59:58 -0600 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe In-Reply-To: <199703131919.LAA02071@netcom16.netcom.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 13 Mar 1997, Richard M. Alderson III wrote: > Clyde A. Winters writes: > > >This theory is not based on physical affinities, it is based on the > >archaeological and linguistic evidence that point to Africa as the original > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > >home of the Dravidian speakers. > > As has already been pointed out, this is a linguistics mailing list. Please > post citations of the linguistic evidence adduced for such a relationship, with > bibliography if possible. > > Rich Alderson > The citations are as follows: K.P. Aravanan, Physical and cultural similarities between dravidian and African, , No.10, (1976) pp.23-27. U.P. Upadhyaya & S.P. Upadhyaya, les entre Kerala et l'Afrique noire tels qu ils..culturelles et linguistiques', Bulletin de l' Institute fondamental Afrique Noire, 41, no.1, 1979, pp.108-132. U.P. Upadhyaya, Dravidian and negro african, , 3 (1), (1985) pp.1-9. C.A. Winters, "The genetic unity between the Dravidian, Elamite, manding and sumerian languages, (pp.1413-1425). Hong Kong: Asian research service 1985. Vol. 5 C.A. Winters, Tamil, Sumerian, manding and the Genetic Model, , 18 (1), (1989) pp.67-91. C.A. Winters, The Dravidian and african Languages, , 23 (1), (1994) pp.34-52. The first linguist to recognize the genetic relationship between Dravidian and African languages was the french linguist L. Homburger. Homburger explained the close relationship between Dravidian languages and the Bantu and west atlantic group of African languages back in the 1940's and early 1950's. Her research was confirmed by Upadhyaya, and the Senegalese linguist C.T. N'Diaye who proved conclusively the genetic relationship between Dravidian languages and the West atlantic group of African languages. C.A. Winters, has discussed the proto-Indo-African terms for African and Dravidian languages. he has also illustrated the close relationship of the Dravidian group to Manding, Somali and Nubian. Common Indo African Terms English Dravidian Senegalese Manding Mother amma ama ma pregnancy basaru bir bara skin uri guri guru King mannan mansa mansa Grand biru bur ba Saliva tuppal tuudde tu boat kulam gaal kulu cultivate bey mbey be stream kolli kal koli Pronominal Agreement Language 1P SG 2nd P 3rd P Dravidian an, naa,ne i a Somali ani adigu isagu Nubian anni ir tar Bantu ni u a Manding na, n i a Hausa na kin ya Wolof ma ya na This is some of the evidence which supports the African origin of the Dravidians from a linguistic perspective. Please refer to the articles listed above for more information of this most interesting topic. For information on the Dravidian settlement of East Asia and migration into South India from South East Asia please refer to the following article: C.A. Winters, "The Far eastern Origin of the Tamils", , no. 27, (1985) pp.65-92. I hope this information can help you in understanding the African origin of the Dravidian speaking people from a linguistic standpoint. C.A. Winters From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Sat Mar 15 12:56:09 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 12:56:09 +0000 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe In-Reply-To: from "Clyde A. Winters" at Mar 13, 97 08:59:58 pm Message-ID: Right, well, somebody has to say it, so it might as well be me. I am neither a Dravidianist nor any kind of Africanist, but I am a historical linguist, and I have some idea what linguistics looks like, and I don't see any here. C. A. Winters writes as follows in defense of some kind of Dravidian-African link: ************************************************************ > The first linguist to recognize the genetic relationship between > Dravidian and African languages was the french linguist > L. Homburger. Homburger explained the close relationship between > Dravidian languages and the Bantu and west atlantic group of African > languages back in the 1940's and early 1950's. "[C]lose"? Bantu isn't even very closely related to West Atlantic, though at least they *are* related. > Her research was confirmed by Upadhyaya, and the Senegalese linguist > C.T. N'Diaye who proved conclusively the genetic relationship > between Dravidian languages and the West atlantic group of African > languages. *Only* West Atlantic? Nothing else? > C.A. Winters, has discussed the proto-Indo-African terms > for African and Dravidian languages. he has also illustrated the > close relationship of the Dravidian group to Manding, Somali and > Nubian. This is absurd. Whatever "Manding" is, it's presumably Niger-Congo. Somali is Afro-Asiatic. Nubian is a group of languages commonly assigned to Nilo-Saharan. These three families are not known to be related at all. Now Winters is relating Dravidian to *all* of them at once? > Common Indo African Terms > English Dravidian Senegalese Manding > Mother amma ama ma > pregnancy basaru bir bara > skin uri guri guru > King mannan mansa mansa > Grand biru bur ba > Saliva tuppal tuudde tu > boat kulam gaal kulu > cultivate bey mbey be > stream kolli kal koli Dravidian is not a language, but a large family, so where do these words come from? If they're reconstructed Proto-Dravidian (I doubt it), they should have asterisks; if they're from a particular language, this should be identified; if they're from several languages, shame. And what on earth is "Senegalese"? I can find no record of such a language. Are we talking about Wolof, or what? And again I have little idea what "Manding" is supposed to be: is it even a single language? Nursery words like /ama/ `mother' have no business being cited in comparisons: they are worthless as evidence. The same is true of imitative words like /tu-/ for `spit, saliva', which are found all over the planet: Basque, Burushaski, Caucasian, Yeniseian -- you name it. And the rest? A little list of miscellaneous chance resemblances, of the sort that can always be found between arbitrary languages. > Pronominal Agreement > Language 1P SG 2nd P 3rd P > Dravidian an, naa,ne i a > Somali ani adigu isagu > Nubian anni ir tar > Bantu ni u a > Manding na, n i a > Hausa na kin ya > Wolof ma ya na A wild mixture of African languages and sub-families from unrelated families all over the continent. Half the languages cited aren't even identified. Sorry, Mr. Winters. This isn't evidence for anything. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Sat Mar 15 15:54:34 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 10:54:34 EST Subject: No subject Message-ID: ------------------ Original message (ID=2378D9) (79 lines) ---------------- -- Return-Path: Received: from UNIVSCVM (NJE origin SMTP at UNIVSCVM) by VM.SC.EDU (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 1911; Fri, 14 Mar 1997 19:18:46 -0500 Received: from mailhost.pi.net by VM.SC.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R3) with TCP; Fri, 14 Mar 97 19:18:45 EST Received: from mcv (asd45.pi.net [145.220.192.45]) by mailhost.pi.net (8.8.3/8.7.1) with SMTP id BAA20231 for ; Sat, 15 Mar 1997 01:19:01 +0100 (MET) Posted-Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 01:19:01 +0100 (MET) Message-Id: <199703150019.BAA20231 at mailhost.pi.net> Comments: Authenticated sender is From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" To: HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 01:19:09 +0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe Reply-to: mcv at pi.net Priority: normal In-reply-to: References: <199703131919.LAA02071 at netcom16.netcom.com> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v2.52) Clyde Winters wrote: > Common Indo African Terms > > English Dravidian Senegalese Manding There is no such language as "Senegalese". I take it you mean Wolof. > Mother amma ama ma > Saliva tuppal tuudde tu These two are meaningless. I can give dozens of languages with the same "ma" and "tu" words. > pregnancy basaru bir bara > Grand biru bur ba > King mannan mansa mansa What happened with Dravidian -sa- in ? Or with Wolof/Mandingo -sa- in ? > boat kulam gaal kulu > stream kolli kal koli > skin uri guri guru Sound laws? > cultivate bey mbey be Right... > Pronominal Agreement > Language 1P SG 2nd P 3rd P > Dravidian an, naa,ne i a > Somali ani adigu isagu > Nubian anni ir tar > Bantu ni u a > Manding na, n i a > Hausa na kin ya > Wolof ma ya na Are you aware of twentieth-century advances in African linguistics? Somali is a Cushitic language of the Afro-Asiatic phylum. Hausa is a Chadic language, also Afro-Asiatic. And Nubian is a West Sudanic language (Nilo-Saharan). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at pi.net From cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU Tue Mar 18 21:57:23 1997 From: cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU (Clyde A. Winters) Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 15:57:23 -0600 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 15 Mar 1997, Larry Trask wrote: > Right, well, somebody has to say it, so it might as well be me. I am > neither a Dravidianist nor any kind of Africanist, but I am a > historical linguist, and I have some idea what linguistics looks like, > and I don't see any here. > > C. A. Winters writes as follows in defense of some kind of > Dravidian-African link: > > ************************************************************ > > > The first linguist to recognize the genetic relationship between > > Dravidian and African languages was the french linguist > > L. Homburger. Homburger explained the close relationship between > > Dravidian languages and the Bantu and west atlantic group of African > > languages back in the 1940's and early 1950's. > > "[C]lose"? Bantu isn't even very closely related to West Atlantic, > though at least they *are* related. > > > Her research was confirmed by Upadhyaya, and the Senegalese linguist > > C.T. N'Diaye who proved conclusively the genetic relationship > > between Dravidian languages and the West atlantic group of African > > languages. > > *Only* West Atlantic? Nothing else? > > > C.A. Winters, has discussed the proto-Indo-African terms > > for African and Dravidian languages. he has also illustrated the > > close relationship of the Dravidian group to Manding, Somali and > > Nubian. > > This is absurd. Whatever "Manding" is, it's presumably Niger-Congo. > Somali is Afro-Asiatic. Nubian is a group of languages commonly > assigned to Nilo-Saharan. These three families are not known to be > related at all. Now Winters is relating Dravidian to *all* of them at > once? Manding is the term used to refer to the Malinke and Bambara languages. Moreover you have made the distinction that Somali is not related to the Other Black African languages this distinction is not accepted by most linguist of African languages that are of afrrican descent and know and speak the languages every day. The terms used in this discussion are mainly taken from the Tamil Family of Dravidian languages. > > > Common Indo African Terms > > > English Dravidian Senegalese Manding > > Mother amma ama ma > > pregnancy basaru bir bara > > skin uri guri guru > > King mannan mansa mansa > > Grand biru bur ba > > Saliva tuppal tuudde tu > > boat kulam gaal kulu > > cultivate bey mbey be > > stream kolli kal koli > The reason we can find analogy between the Senegambian (Wolof, Fula etc.) and the Manding and Dravidian languages result from their origin in Middle Africa. > Dravidian is not a language, but a large family, so where do these > words come from? If they're reconstructed Proto-Dravidian (I doubt > it), they should have asterisks; if they're from a particular > language, this should be identified; if they're from several > languages, shame. And what on earth is "Senegalese"? I can find no > record of such a language. Are we talking about Wolof, or what? And > again I have little idea what "Manding" is supposed to be: is it even > a single language? > > Nursery words like /ama/ `mother' have no business being cited in > comparisons: they are worthless as evidence. The same is true of > imitative words like /tu-/ for `spit, saliva', which are found all > over the planet: Basque, Burushaski, Caucasian, Yeniseian -- you name > it. > > And the rest? A little list of miscellaneous chance resemblances, of > the sort that can always be found between arbitrary languages. > These resemblances can not be called chance resemblances because of the clear analogy in their construction and meaning. > > Pronominal Agreement > > Language 1P SG 2nd P 3rd P > > Dravidian an, naa,ne i a > > Somali ani adigu isagu > > Nubian anni ir tar > > Bantu ni u a > > Manding na, n i a > > Hausa na kin ya > > Wolof ma ya na This is clear evidence of a close relationship between all of these languages as pointed out by Obenga and other African linguist. C.A. Winters From cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU Tue Mar 18 22:37:28 1997 From: cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU (Clyde A. Winters) Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 16:37:28 -0600 Subject: Tamil, Sumerian and Manding In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In the past debate many comments have been made about Greenberg's division of African languages. Although this view of African languages is accepted by many linguists some African linguists, led By Theophile Obenga disagree with this view of African languages. As a result I have presented a view of African languages which recognizes the languages spoken by most black Africans as one family given the grammatical and lexical affinities present among these languages. As I said earlier the Dravidian speaking people , the Elamites and Sumerians originated in Middle Africa below is some of the partial evidence to support this view. The is alternation of /b/, /f/ and /p/, and /d/ and /t/ in the Manding (Malinke-Bambara), Sumerian and Tamil languages English Sumerian Manding Tamil to heat, roast bil, bir bo to free bur buru to blow bun bu, bo-n porridge baba bulo parai old man baba-a baba town bar furu free bur foro sack, container bar fara ruler bara fara to shine itu du tulanku to recite sid siti to take dug du tekku soul ti dyo ulatu to push,press teg dege,telu tullu copper urudu kuuta uruttiran hole, cavity dul, tul du, tyolo tulai k g work kin ki ceykai [recious,best kal ka aruka arrow kak kala kakam boat kalam kulu kalam mountain kur kuru kunru granary, thrashing floor kur k'ur-k'ur kutir l l road sila sila caalai man lu al water bal al send, transport bala,bal b'la m m woman manus mansa mannan male mu moko makkal n n eye ini, en nya kan image nu n'ya body ni ni 'principal niram of life r r ear bur toro kurai to tear bir piri fori s s to buy se se to recite sid siti seed she se Grammatical Similarities The negative suffix in Manding is na, which is preceeded by ka and nt'i, e.g., kalu mba nt'. In the Sumerian languages the negation of the verb is expressed by the prefixes nu and la, e.g., nu-zu "not to know". The optative mood of the negative in Sumerian is formed by the -na element, na-ma pad "may she not'. This agrees with the Manding use of the -na element to form the negative. Parts of the body English Sumerian Tamil Manding heart, mind ul ul su body ni niram ni flesh uzu uu subu tongue eme naa na bone gir kura kura nose bun muso,mugu nu foot gir karal koro These are just a few of the analogous lexical items from Sumerian, Tamil and the Manding languages which illustrate the genetic relationship between these languages. C. A. Winters From gonzalor at JHU.EDU Wed Mar 19 02:12:28 1997 From: gonzalor at JHU.EDU (Gonzalo Rubio) Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 21:12:28 -0500 Subject: Sumerian, Manding, Somali, and "whatever" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Well, just to keep the record straight and spend some spare time, let's go through Mr. Winters' "Sumerian evidence": - bir does not mean "to heat", but "to scatter, disperse". - there is no "bur" meaning "to free", there are several "bur", but meaning "(stone) bowl", "food offering", and others attested in few texts, and whose meaning is very obscure. - bun doesn't mean "to blow", but "nose" and "breath". - his "baba-a" (actually ba-ba-a), meaning "old man" is a hapax legomenon, attested ONLY in one syllabic vocabulary from Ugarit (AS 16: 36, ba-ba-a = pur-$u-mu). - bar does not mean "town", but "outside, side, back, edge, etc.", and there is other bar meaning "liver", but no town, no town. I could go on, and on, and on for ever ("manus" is munus; he ignores the "numbers" of the signs, so "ruler" is bara2, not "bara"; "eye" is igi in Sumerian --his "ini, en" is obviously Semitic, cf. Akkadian i:nu, e:nu, etc., etc., etc...). Most of the words (almost all) in Mr. Winters' "Sumerian" column happen not to exist, are absolutely wrong, or mean completely different things. I'd like to be very respectful and there is nothing personal in this, but Mr. Winters' list illustrates *nothing* but the fact that he doesn't know Sumerian at all, and his "methodology" is anything but methodology. Moreover, I do not understand his mixing terms concerning ethnicity, race (whatever that is), and language, as in "Black African Languages". Somali is an East Cushitic language (concretely, Lowland East Cushitic), like Oromo, Bayso, Boni, etc. East Cushitic languages belong to the Afroasiatic macro-family. I'm afraid, Mr. Winters is far from being familiar with any scholarship on Cushitic (Ehret, Diakonoff, Dolgopolskij, Gragg, etc.). Furthermore, the way he uses the term "Manding" is misleading, and against all the current stuff about Mande studies (Dwyer, Mukarovsky, Welmers, De Wolf, etc.). I dare suggest he should look at two very basic overviews: D. J. Dwyer. "Mande". In _The Niger-Congo Languages_, ed. J. Bendor-Samuel. Pp. 47-65. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1989. P. P. De Wolf. "Das Niger-Congo (ohne Bantu)". In _Die Sprachen Afrikas_, ed. B. Heine et al. Pp. 45-76. Hamburg: Helmut Buske, 1981. I'm sorry if I sound rude, and I have no intention of hurting Mr. Winters' feelings --I'm sure he is a respectable and decent person. However, it is rather disappointing when someone tries to present that kind of marginal and amateurish stuff as a sort of "scientific truth". ------------------------ Gonzalo Rubio Near Eastern Studies Johns Hopkins University gonzalor at jhu.edu ------------------------ From bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Wed Mar 19 05:46:19 1997 From: bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU (benji wald) Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 21:46:19 -0800 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe Message-ID: Infra dig, but C. A. Winters wrote: >Moreover you have made the distinction that Somali is not related to the >Other Black African languages this distinction is not accepted by most >linguist of African languages that are of afrrican descent and know and >speak the languages every day. This misrepresents what Trask said. He said Mande is a branch of Niger-Congo, while Somali is not. It is a branch of Cushitic, in turn a branch of Afro-Asiatic. What Winter calls "Black Africans" speak Cushitic as well as Niger-Congo languages. Trask never said they didn't. He just said the two types of languages have never been demonstrated to be genetically related, while Clyde's Dravidian-"African" hypothesis presupposes (without argument other than racial, it seems) that they are. Somehow, Clyde seems to want to obscure this point for purposes of asserting the linguists of African descent agree with him and not Trask. No Somali that I know, linguist or not, thinks that Somali is more closely related to Bantu or any other Niger-Congo language than it is to Cushitic, and even to Arabic (which is also Afro-Asiatic). Similarly, no speaker of Mwini (Bantu: Niger-Congo), a language spoken in Somalia closely related to Swahili, thinks that Mwini is related to Somali, and that despite numerous Somali loanwords in Mwini. I doubt that Clyde has any names to back up his assertion who, in fact, speak Somali or any other relevant African language. He seems to be somehow confusedly and racistically arguing that the opinion of some African linguist (and perhaps only one) is worth more than some non-African linguist, regardless of knowledge of relevant languages, linguistic expertise, or, above all, method. His argument, to the extent that it is not totally truncated, is totally absurd. With regard to some resemblances across some Dravidian and "African" languages, Clyde wrote: >These resemblances can not be called chance resemblances because of the >clear analogy in their construction and meaning. This is the extent of Clyde's argument. I suggest that such arguments do not require further response, and that further discussion of Clyde's hypothesis, within his mode of arguing, is a matter of theology, not of linguistics. Linguists can only argue with those who accept linguistic (scientific) forms of argumentation. Linguists cannot argue against matters of unshakable conviction, which is what Clyde's hypothesis is to him. -- Benji From bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Wed Mar 19 05:46:30 1997 From: bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU (benji wald) Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 21:46:30 -0800 Subject: the meaning of "genetic relationship" Message-ID: There is a point about "genetic relationship" that I think is worth considering, because I think both sides on various controversies about it tend to ignore it. To begin with, we can take Ruhlen Merritt's fallacious argument that reconstruction presupposes genetic relationship, which he takes to mean that genetic relationship has already been "established" before comparative reconstruction can begin. For him it is established on the basis of the kinds of Greenbergian mass comparisons which have figured (or been attempted to figure) most recently in this list in the discussion of the relationship between Dravidian and the African families -- and, admittedly, in Greenberg's division of African languages into four genetic families, now generally accepted -- but not without further testing and refinement. Against the mass comparison method, other historical linguists have inevitably argued about the confounding effects of borrowing and chance resemblances. My thought, as follows, is that when we talk about genetic relationships among LANGUAGES, rather than parts of the lexicon, morphology etc etc, both sides obscure something. Thus, first, against Merritt's argument. He's absolutely wrong. Mass comparison gives the basis for a genetic HYPOTHESIS. Comparative reconstruction TESTS that hypothesis. Without it nothing has been proven, not genetic relationship, borrowing or chance resemblance. Next, to the extent that a comparative reconstruction is successful it does NOT demonstrate that the "languages" involved are genetically related, but only that those PARTS of the languages which are reconstructed are genetically related. Of course, it provides confidence that other parts of those languages are also genetically related, but, again, that is only DEMONSTRATED when reliable comparative reconstruction is performed on those other parts. Otherwise, it remains only a possibility. Creoles and mized languages show that genetic relationship of some parts of a set of languages do not always presuppose that other parts of the same languages are necessarily GENETICALLY related. And indeed, it is well-known that all languages borrow as well as genetically inherit. Thus, speaking about genetic relationship among "languages" as "wholes" is loose talk. The internal structure of trees intending to show branching genetic relationships are always a problem because different parts of a set of languages are not always related in the same way. Innovations begin in different areas and have different spreads according to the time of contact and subsequent events. This is well-known from dialect geography, but adds confusion to arguments about genetic relationship. Sometimes, it does little harm, but when we are in the mass comparison stage, it can result in much futile argument. Having said this, I admit that the poor quality of Winter's data and arguments have been worth pointing out. But I see no reason to postpone my thoughts until more competent proposals flare up. -- Benji From mcv at PI.NET Wed Mar 19 06:55:05 1997 From: mcv at PI.NET (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 06:55:05 +0000 Subject: Tamil, Sumerian and Manding In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Clyde Winters wrote: Just some comments on the Sumerian. > English Sumerian Manding Tamil > to heat, roast bil, bir bo bil = "to burn" bir = "to scatter" > to free bur buru bur2 = "to bare, to spread out (a garment), to loosen, to reveal" > to blow bun bu, bo-n This verb is variously given as bug~, bul, bun, actual pronunciation unclear [ may have been something like , ]. > porridge baba bulo parai Word unknown to me. Doesn't really matter, given that the Malinke and Tamil are not very similar at all. [This comment applies to most of the entries in the list, so I won't repeat it after this point]. > old man baba-a baba "old man, father" = ab.ba (probably Semitic loanword). > town bar furu "town" = uru (probably /iri/ or /eri/). > free bur foro Didn't we discuss this one just now? Ah, but the Manding word has changed... > sack, container bar fara bar = "skin" > ruler bara fara bara2.g = "sovereign; shrine" > to shine itu du tulanku itu = "moon" > to recite sid siti s^id = "to count, to recite, to read aloud" > to take dug du tekku can mean a lot of things (dug3="good, sweet; knee", dug4="to say", etc.), but not "to take". What is meant is probably tuku "to have". > soul ti dyo ulatu Yes, "rib, arrow, soul". > to push,press teg dege,telu tullu That's probably "to touch", zag...tag "to push, to put off". > copper urudu kuuta uruttiran Yes, urudu = "copper". I'll add the Tamil word to my collection of wandering metal words. Interesting. > hole, cavity dul, tul du, tyolo tulai Don't know this word. There's a verb "to dig (with a hoe)". > work kin ki ceykai Yes, kin...ak = "to work", where means "to do, make". Not sure what means, though. I've seen it as "sickle". > precious,best kal ka aruka kal = "mighty, strong" > arrow kak kala kakam I've got "arrow" as . () means "(wooden) peg". I've got a compound "arrow", from Hittite texts, but I'm not sure it's really Sumerian. > boat kalam kulu kalam kalam = "land". "boat" is ma2. > mountain kur kuru kunru You're absolutely right: kur (or hur.sag~) is "mountain". > granary, > threshing floor kur k'ur-k'ur kutir That's . > road sila sila caalai Don't know this word (except as a measure, sila2). Road is , I think. > man lu al , yes. > water bal al water = > send, transport bala,bal b'la Probably refers to "to cross, to transfer, to pour off" > woman manus mansa mannan "woman" = munus > male mu moko makkal male = nita(h) > eye ini, en nya kan eye = igi > image nu n'ya Don't know this word. I've got "statue, body", "figure". > body ni ni niram ni2 means "self". For body, I've got ad6 ("trunk") and alam ("statue"). > ear bur toro kurai ear = g~es^tug. Usually, people invent Sumerian words to *look like* the words they're supoposed to match. The above approach is new to me... > to tear bir piri fori bir = "to scatter". To "tear out" = bu.r, bu3.r. > to buy se se sa10 = "to buy, to sell" > to recite sid siti See s^id above. > seed she se s^e = "barley" > Grammatical Similarities > > The negative suffix in Manding is na, which is preceeded by ka and > nt'i, e.g., kalu mba nt'. In the Sumerian languages the negation of the > verb is expressed by the prefixes nu and la, e.g., nu-zu "not to know". > The optative mood of the negative in Sumerian is formed by the -na > element, na-ma pad "may she not'. This agrees with the Manding use of the > -na element to form the negative. The Sumerian prefix can be prohibitive ("do not") or affirmative ("indeed") depending on the aspect of the verb. > Parts of the body > > English Sumerian Tamil Manding > heart, mind ul ul su s^a3.g = "heart" > body ni niram ni see above. > flesh uzu uu subu yes, /utsu/. > tongue eme naa na indeed, with an /m/. > bone gir kura kura I must say I don't know the word for "bone" in Sumerian. > nose bun muso,mugu nu kiri4 = "nose" > foot gir karal koro g~iri3 = "foot" [Sumerian words given to the best of my knowledge, but there may be a few errors here and there. If so, and any experts are reading, I'd like to know about it.] In summary, I'd say there's little reason to continue this discussion. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at pi.net From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Mar 19 12:44:00 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 12:44:00 +0000 Subject: Dravidians from Africa/not Europe In-Reply-To: from "Clyde A. Winters" at Mar 18, 97 03:57:23 pm Message-ID: Clyde Winters writes: > Manding is the term used to refer to the Malinke and Bambara > languages. Moreover you have made the distinction that Somali is > not related to the Other Black African languages this distinction is > not accepted by most linguist of African languages that are of > afrrican descent and know and speak the languages every day. First, `Black African languages' is, at best, a purely geographical label, and a rather unfortunate one, at that: I would suggest `sub-Saharan languages', if a geographical label is required. Nothing whatever can be presumed in advance of investigation as to what connections, if any, might exist among these languages. In fact, considerable investigation has been carried out, resulting in the surprisingly small total of just four groupings for *all* African languages. Of these, Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic appear to be accepted by all specialists as established genetic families. Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan are more controversial, and the genetic unity of each is at present regarded by many specialists as unsubstantiated, though we continue to use these names as convenient geographical labels. Second, Somali belongs to the Cushitic branch of Afro-Asiatic, and its genetic connections therefore lie with languages in northern and eastern Africa and in the Middle East. Of evidence to connect Somali with the majority of sub-Saharan languages there is none. > The terms used in this discussion are mainly taken from the Tamil > Family of Dravidian languages. Fine. But Tamil (normally regarded as a single language) is unquestionably Dravidian, and a good deal of comparative work has been done on Dravidian. It is inappropriate to cite specifically Tamil forms if Proto-Dravidian forms are available. One must always use the earliest forms that are available and secure. > > > Common Indo African Terms > > > English Dravidian Senegalese Manding > > > Mother amma ama ma > > > pregnancy basaru bir bara > > > skin uri guri guru > > > King mannan mansa mansa > > > Grand biru bur ba > > > Saliva tuppal tuudde tu > > > boat kulam gaal kulu > > > cultivate bey mbey be > > > stream kolli kal koli > The reason we can find analogy between the Senegambian (Wolof, > Fula etc.) and the Manding and Dravidian languages result from their > origin in Middle Africa. No. The reason we can find these forms is that *all* languages exhibit miscellaneous chance resemblances. It could not be otherwise, unless languages were exempt from the ordinary laws of probability -- and they are not. Miscellaneous resemblances of this sort can be found between any arbitrary languages whatever. Hardly a week goes by that somebody doesn't produce just such a list of miscellaneous resemblances between some surprising languages: Scots Gaelic and Algonquian, Hungarian and Sumerian, Ainu and Norwegian -- you name it. I've done it myself. Miscellaneous chance resemblances are *always* present, and they are devoid of significance. Do you seriously suppose that, when Tamil-speakers were choosing their word for `boat', they got together to discuss it and made remarks like "Wait a minute -- we can't have that word, because they're already using it in Wolof"? > > Nursery words like /ama/ `mother' have no business being cited in > > comparisons: they are worthless as evidence. The same is true of > > imitative words like /tu-/ for `spit, saliva', which are found all > > over the planet: Basque, Burushaski, Caucasian, Yeniseian -- you name > > it. > > And the rest? A little list of miscellaneous chance resemblances, of > > the sort that can always be found between arbitrary languages. > These resemblances can not be called chance resemblances because of > the clear analogy in their construction and meaning. They *can* be called chance resemblances, because they *are* chance resemblances. Would you like me to demonstrate this? Let's look at you next table. > > > Pronominal Agreement > > > Language 1P SG 2nd P 3rd P > > > Dravidian an, naa,ne i a > > > Somali ani adigu isagu > > > Nubian anni ir tar > > > Bantu ni u a > > > Manding na, n i a > > > Hausa na kin ya > > > Wolof ma ya na > This is clear evidence of a close relationship between all of these > languages as pointed out by Obenga and other African linguist. Nope. Let me draw attention to Basque, which I choose because it's my favorite language. The first-person singular pronoun in Basque is /ni/, which matches your languages very well. The second-person singular pronoun is /i/ (written in the standard orthography, but pronounced /i/ by most Basques). Basque has no true third-person pronouns, and it uses demonstratives for the purpose. There is some regional variation in these demonstratives, but all specialists are agreed that the most conservative form of the third-singular distal demonstrative is the western form -- which is /a/. So, Basque, a language spoken on the Atlantic coast of Europe by a conspicuously non-African and non-Indian population, has /ni/, /i/, /a/, which matches both "Dravidian" and "Manding" better than most of the other languages you cite, and far better than Somali. Moreover, the universal Basque word for `mother' is -- wait for it -- /ama/, which matches both "Senegalese" and "Manding" fantastically well. And what is Basque for `spit, saliva'? Ready? It's /tu/ -- which matches "Manding" perfectly, and matches both "Dravidian" and "Senegalese" better than they match each other. So, what can we conclude? There are two possibilities: (1) All this is a waste of time. (2) Basque is *also* a "Black African" language! I prefer the first. If you, Mr. Winters, want to opt for the second, then please count me out. There is an American journal called Mother Tongue which will doubtless be happy to publish your discovery that Basque is an African language, and that the mysterious Basques are therefore descendants of emigrants from central Africa. You can have a great time conversing with a number of other MT contributors, who are busily proving that Basque is related to Abkhaz, Sumerian, Burushaski, Tibetan, Ket, and Apache (no, I am not making this up). But be aware that there already exists a substantial literature proving that Basque is related to African languages, and to the Mande languages in particular. With this approach, you can prove anything you like. You shouldn't find it difficult to prove that Norwegian or Eskimo is an African language, if that's what you want to do. Of course, you'll find it so much easier if, as Gonzalo Rubio has pointed out, you don't worry too much about whether the forms you cite actually exist or actually have the meanings assigned to them. I think you'll get on very well with the good folks at MT, who take a similarly robust view of their data. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Wed Mar 19 17:42:48 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 12:42:48 EST Subject: African and Dravidian Message-ID: Dear HISTLINGers, I do believe that we've exhausted the topic of African and Dravidian linguistic relationships. Following a prerogative of list moderators, I hereby announce that no more discussion of this topic will take place on the list. However, if any of you feel that this topic has not been explored to your satisfaction, you are certainly free to discuss it off-list. The discussion that has ensued over the past few weeks has been lively and informative and I would hate to see HISTLING go to sleep. Would anyone else like to propose a topic for discussion? Dorothy Disteheft From fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG Sat Mar 22 19:51:52 1997 From: fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG (Steven Schaufele) Date: Sat, 22 Mar 1997 13:51:52 -0600 Subject: solid tradition & winds of fashion In-Reply-To: Message-ID: This is in response to Prof. Rasmussen's recent `manifesto', and i am particularly grateful for the opportunity it provides me to get involved, however tangentially, in this discussion. I am a comparative syntactician and syntactic theorist, and my interest in phonology is pretty much limited to what would generally be expected of a comparative linguist and typologist. In short, i've been very interested in following this discussion of the history of certain details of IE morphophonolgy, without feeling that my own areas of expertise had much to contribute. Prof. Rasmussen closed his posting of the 18th in the Indo-European list with the following paragraph: > 6. This has come to be a major manifesto, so let me end by saying that it > is impressive how strong and solid tradition stands in IE Studies. The > good old phonological (better, phonetic) reconstruction of the stops is > good enough for the protolanguage from which all poststages come, and the > verbal system is indeed the one laid down in Brugmann's Grundriss. A few > laryngeals have been added, details of idiosyncratic histories of > particular lexical items are pouring out, and elucidation of the > prehistory of the protolanguage is in a state of revolution, but the > general descriptive picture of the single most important chronological > node represented by the final stage of the protolanguage stands basically > unshaken. In the field of IE scholars have been able to build continuously > on the results of their predecessors, adding ever new facets to the grand > picture in a straight line going back some 200 years. IE Studies have been > on the right track all along and have not had to "change paradigm" with > the whims of fashion. Ours is a healthy branch of linguistics. In *partial* agreement with the sentiments herein expressed, i will begin by recalling a statement by my Doktorvater, Hans Henrich Hock, who when he received his current job at the University of Illinois was told by (i believe) the then department chair, `Historical linguistics is d'emod'e; you should get more involved in generative syntactic or phonological theory; that's where the action is.' (I paraphrase, of course; this is a 3rd-hand retelling) His answer: `Historical linguistics, along with its research paradigm, has been around for over a century. It has survived every paradigm-shift in linguistic science; it will survive this one too.' As a general rule, what Prof. Rasmussen says is quite correct: Unlike a lot of synchronic (theoretical) linguists, who seem to spend a lot of their time reinventing the wheel (in his collection `The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax' Geoff Pullum has an essay on the history of the `unaccusative hypo- thesis' that offers some rather pithy examples), historical linguists in general and Indo-Europeanists in particular have been able to build solid- ly on the research of previous generations, much of which is regarded today as just as solid as when its validity was first established. (Not that there aren't some fuzzy areas. But that's where current research is going on, as in any science. While investigating those fuzzy areas, we can rely with a fair amount of confidence on a large body of previous research.) This is one of the main reasons I have found historical linguistics, in Indo-European and elsewhere, to be of such value for theoretical research. For one thing, it provides the theorist with a lot more data, including a diachronic dimension all too rarely brought to bear in theo- retical discussion. But more importantly, i find that historical- linguistic scholarship can often provide valuable test cases of theore- tical claims, precisely by bringing in that diachronic dimension that makes it possible for us to text whether correlations predicted or implied by a specific line of theoretical thought are actually attested in the processes of language change. I therefore object very strongly to a tendency I see all too often in academic linguistics to impose a dichotomy between theoretical linguis- tics on the one hand and more `empirical', especially historical linguis- tics on the other. I would not for a moment suggest that Prof. Rasmussen himself is guilty of this dichotomy; but i'm feeling rather sensitive on the issue because i've had recently to deal with some researchers who definitely are, on one side or the other. There is a tendency to assume that theorists and comparativists/typologists/reconstructionists have nothing worthwhile to say to each other. Which is a damn shame; the ongoing series of Diachronic Generative Syntax Conferences, for one, is to my mind evidence of the mutual relevance of historical linguistics and linguistic theory, at least in my own field of syntax, and the energy and fascination of these conferences is further evidence that there's a lot of interesting stuff to investigate in this interface. Not only does the discipline of historical linguistics offer linguistic theorists with a lot of data that is not only, as Prof. Rasmussen notes, methodologically reliable, but also *theoretically interesting*; from the other point of view, the ongoing speculations of theoretical linguists continue to raise interesting questions motivating empirical research into historical data. (This is, of course, a large part of the value of scientific theory, that it raises new research questions that might never have occurred under preceding paradigms. In this respect, different from the sense Prof. Rasmussen had in mind, linguistic theory is also a `very healthy' branch of linguistics.) As a result, each is able to enrich the other. Sincerely, Steven Schaufele --------------------- Dr. Steven Schaufele 712 West Washington Urbana, IL 61801 217-344-8240 fcosws at prairienet.org http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html **** O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum! *** *** Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis! *** From gonzalor at JHU.EDU Thu Mar 20 06:45:47 1997 From: gonzalor at JHU.EDU (Gonzalo Rubio) Date: Thu, 20 Mar 1997 01:45:47 -0500 Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... Message-ID: Changing the topic, I'd like to say something more or less unrelated to the last discussion --as a sort of Agustinian "confessio" (actually, the tone of this note may have more to do with my reading of St. Ignatius back in the Jesuits). In many e-mail lists of historical linguistics, ancient languages, or isolated languages (such as Basque), it is quite common to see messages posted by well-intentioned persons who attempt to prove Basque is an Algonquian language, or Albanian is not an Indo-European language, but a dialect of Kechua. It is nice to see that so many people are interested in languages within their historical context as a result of their amazement at both diversity and resemblance. However, one may wonder why so many of these well-intentioned ladies and gentlemen share their speculations with the scientific community almost *only* in our field(s). Scholars working on Quantum Physics, Psychology, or even History, don't have to deal with this deluge of "proposals" from outsiders or amateurs. If I tell my father I have a new interesting contribution to some surgical procedure (he's a physician), he would look at me with a very ironic smile and say "don't you have anything better to do?". Within this context, one may wonder what is the true epistemological nature of historical linguistics. When a teenager, I was completely in love with the idea that Basque was "the daughter" of Iberian. However, once I did study both Basque and the Iberian inscriptions (as far as we can understand them) in the University, I broke up with that lovely fiction. Now, slightly older and, who knows, perhaps somewhat wiser, I'm an Assyriologist who works especially on Sumerian (so, a Sumerologist). It is quite curious that a person who was (and is) that interested in historical linguistics, has ended up working in one (Sumerian) of the few completely isolated languages (together with Basque and Burushaski). It is natural that people, especially those who don't know a single word on these completely isolated languages, or even on historical linguistics, have some curiosity about them. And that's the beginning of the deluge. Does any of you know how many theories on the linguistic filiation of, for instance, Sumerian have been proposed? Well, just by heart, I can list several: - Dravidian (Aiyar, David, Sathasivam, Koskinen, Quintana) - the Indus Valley inscriptions --which nobody can read, but might be Dravidian, according to Asko Parpola's last book-- (Kinnier Wilson) - different Caucasian languages (Bork, Knobloch) - Indo-European (Autran, Holmer) - Old Persian (Schildmann) - Polynesian and Amerindian languages (Stucken) - "Sino-Caucasian"/"Dene-Caucasian" (Bengston, Blazek, Boisson) - "Uralo-Altaic" (Boisson, Zakar) - Hungarian (Gostony --if you want to have a good laugh, read the reviews of his _Dictionaire d'etymologie sumerienne..._ by Edzard, in _BSOAS 39 [1976], and by Hrushka, in _OLZ_ 74 [1979]) - "Nostratic" (Boisson, Bomhard, Koskinen) Rather than in this "comparative" stuff, I have found many interesting suggestions in those papers devoted to Wanderwoerter, Kulturwoerter, or Arealwoerter --especially those by Boisson, Blazek, and Militarev, three scholars whose stuff on this topic (Wanderwoerter and very early loans) is always a pleasure to read, although one may disagree with some of their points. However, most of the allegedly comparative studies I have just mentioned and have read very carefully in the last years, remind me of the title of the book published by le Chevalier de Paravey in 1885, _Memoire sur l'o?rigin japonais, arabe et basque de la civilisation des peuple du plateau de Bogota_ (yes, it's Bogota, Colombia). My note/"confessio" is not about Sumerian, but about this amazing phenomenon: hundreds of well-intentioned dilettanti devoting their time and energy to the search for the Grail of linguistic filiations. Actually, somehow I admire them. Aren't they "the last Romantics"...? ------------------------ Gonzalo Rubio Near Eastern Studies Johns Hopkins University gonzalor at jhu.edu ------------------------ From alderson at NETCOM.COM Sat Mar 22 23:07:19 1997 From: alderson at NETCOM.COM (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Sat, 22 Mar 1997 15:07:19 -0800 Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... In-Reply-To: (message from Gonzalo Rubio on Thu, 20 Mar 1997 01:45:47 -0500) Message-ID: Gonzalo Rubio wrote: >However, one may wonder why so many of these well-intentioned ladies and >gentlemen share their speculations with the scientific community almost >*only* in our field(s). Scholars working on Quantum Physics, Psychology, >or even History, don't have to deal with this deluge of "proposals" from >outsiders or amateurs. I would like simply to note that this appears not to be true, based on the content of certain Usenet newsgroups. While many people equate "Usenet" with "sex pictures" and "massive cross-posting of unwanted commercials", there are many newsgroups still devoted to serious discussion of topics in physics, history, archaeology, and even psychology. (I have to admit that I have never spent any time in this last newsgroup, so what I have to say does not pertain thereto.) There are equivalent kinds of nonsense posted regarding Velikovskyan astronomy, Atlantean archaeology & history, and faster-than-light/time-travel physics, all greeted with the same incredulity by practitioners of those fields as we greet linguistic nonsense--and there are those who attempt to reason with the posters as well as those who swear that the mainstream is trying to keep the "truth" from the public. I used to do this in the area of historical linguistics; life is simply too short, after a while. So I would say no, there is no field that does not have its equivalent set of amateurs dead set on converting the world to some revealed truth or other. Rich Alderson From bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Sun Mar 23 02:37:42 1997 From: bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU (benji wald) Date: Sat, 22 Mar 1997 18:37:42 -0800 Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... Message-ID: I found the message by Gonzalo Rubio on the subject topic charming and thought-provoking. I particularly appreciated the pride of discipline (and I do mean "discipline") implicit in his passage: >If I tell my father I have a new interesting >contribution to some surgical procedure (he's a physician), he would look >at me with a very ironic smile and say "don't you have anything better to >do?". Within this context, one may wonder what is the true epistemological >nature of historical linguistics. With regard to the last sentence appended to the main thought of this passage, I would like to respond to it in combination with his later comment: >... about this amazing >phenomenon: hundreds of well-intentioned dilettanti devoting their time >and energy to the search for the Grail of linguistic filiations. Actually, >somehow I admire them. Aren't they "the last Romantics"...? Indeed the word "Romantic" is well chosen. It is a tribute to historical linguistics that it has captured the imagination of so many dilletantes that they have devoted so much of their spare time to their pet theories. I assume "spare time", because their naive methodologies suggest that they have not had the privilege (if I can use that word) of studying or appreciating the methodological issues which have evolved out of the original insight of the "genetic hypothesis" over the last 200 years. I say it is a tribute to historical linguistics, because it is the success of its methods that has given the genetic hypothesis its prestige and scientific standing -- considerations which encourage the dilettantes to want to make a contribution, though their lack of training/discipline prevents them from appreciating what is involved. Having said that, I also want to draw attention to the fact that those scholars who developed the methodology to back up the genetic hypothesis, most notably the method of comparative reconstruction, were inspired by the same EXTRA-linguistic impulses that motivate the dilettantes. The developers of Indo-European, most indefatiguably various German-speaking scholars of the 19th c., were inspired in an era which is generally called the "Romantic" era (or movement) in (European) history. They were particularly concerned with establishing the historical roots of their own nations (i.e., cultures) and legitimising their sense of nationalistic identity. As scholars they were driven, actually compelled by scholarly criticism, to go beyond mere assertion to develop the methods which give meaning to the genetic hypothesis and the phenomena underlying it. In this they departed from the dilettantes. They were interested in acquiring knowledge, not simply in egotistically claiming to possess it. This is where they differ from prophets proclaiming revealed truths and kindred myth-propagators. As in all sciences (as Richard M. Alderson III reminds us in his response to Gonzalo's message), a gap develops between those who simply appreciate a problem, and those who seriously develop methods to solve it -- and respond to criticism in so doing (and I don't mean to suggest that scholars resent criticism of their ideas any less than the dilettantes, but that scholars respect the criticism enough to do something about it -- in fact, they respect themselves and their desire for secure knowledge enough to do something about it. Of course, their concern for their standing within the community of scholars also forces them to do something about it. This is an advantage they have over the dilettantes who can be content to make excuses dismissive of criticism, So, scholars, be happy that you are criticised by other scholars.) Thus, it is not "amazing" that there are so many dilettantes interested in residual problems. Historical linguistics grew out of that originally dilettantish interest (which has various, probably even universal, cultural roots in concern with social identity). The difference is that scholarship has passed the dilettantes by. They only dimly understand the reasons for the success of historical linguistics, and are hardly aware of the problems which had to be overcome. Getting back to the motives for development of the genetic hypothesis, I suppose to some extent historical linguists are still driven by extra-linguistic considerations, having to do with a concern about human (cultural) history, and even the more specific challenges of isolated languages contrasting with the numerous successes of the genetic hypothesis and partial historical reconstruction of so many distinct language families. However, this is obviously NOT the guiding motivation for those historical linguists who continue to explore and reformulate the nature of Indo-European and various other language families which have already long been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt. Possibly in the back of their minds is the hope that if they can get these details right, they may have a chance to extend genetic affiliations further. Fine, as long as it stays in the BACK of their minds (until it deserves to come to the fore, which is not yet). Meanwhile, as the methodology of the genetic hypothesis and historical reconstruction developed, other INTRA-linguistic issues emerged which are the SUBSTANCE of historical linguistics but are hardly ever appreciated, much less addressed, by dilettantes, who remain uniquely inspired by the original notion of genetic relationship. These intra-linguistic issues involve the notion of "possible linguistic change" or "constraints on linguistic change". Reconstruction is not possible without this notion, and the genetic hypothesis is not meaningful without reconstruction. At this point, reconstruction no longer becomes an end in itself for the historical linguist, but a means to develop methodology and ideas about possible linguistic changes and constraints on linguistic change. These become of intrinsic interest, rather than just means to an end. Reconstruction becomes more than "recovery" of a proto-language, proto-state, or proto-historical situation, but reconstruction of a PATH of historical evolution from that proto-whatever to the observable present. It seems to me that without this consideration, interest in recovery of proto-whatevers is relatively trivial, an old-fashioned concern originally motivated by establishment of cultural "legitimacy", ancestor-worship, etc., and, in any case, not trust-worthy. Historical linguistics is a journey, not a known destination. It's just like any other science in this respect. It would be nice if we could get this message down to the dilettantes. Then what they do with their spare time might be more interesting and useful, and we would not have to deal with the professional barrier that separates us from them and breeds mistrust on both sides. -- Benji From fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG Sun Mar 23 03:13:33 1997 From: fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG (Steven Schaufele) Date: Sat, 22 Mar 1997 21:13:33 -0600 Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 20 Mar 1997, Gonzalo Rubio wrote: > However, one may wonder why so many of these well-intentioned ladies and > gentlemen share their speculations with the scientific community almost > *only* in our field(s). Scholars working on Quantum Physics, Psychology, > or even History, don't have to deal with this deluge of "proposals" from > outsiders or amateurs. If I tell my father I have a new interesting > contribution to some surgical procedure (he's a physician), he would look > at me with a very ironic smile and say "don't you have anything better to > do?". Within this context, one may wonder what is the true epistemological > nature of historical linguistics. Actually, i think a caveat should be issued here. As i understand it, scholars working in quantum physics, etc., *do* have to deal with something like what Rubio is describing. I seem to remember hearing/ reading a complaint to a science reporter from a major-league, Nobel- prize-winning physicist at some Ivy League university (i can't find the citation at the moment) that a certain amount of his daily office time was taken up with trying to (politely) turn away letters, etc. from cranks claiming to have discovered antigravity, or things like that. I wouldn't be surprised, however, if it were only Nobel prizewinners who have to deal with this; they have the notoriety that invites that kind of garbage. As Geoff Pullum noted in one of his essays in The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, there's no equivalent of the Nobel Prize in our profession. On the other hand, language has a universal fascination that seems to exceed that of mere physics. All intelligent humans seem, at whatever conscious or subconscious cognitive level, to have a sense that language is a fundamental aspect of human nature. So they're avidly curious about it. And relationships intrigue them; partly, of course, because of the fallacious but easy-to-fall-into belief that linguistic relationship is symptomatic of cultural or even biological relationship -- e.g., Hitler's ridiculous conclusion that the English were somehow more `German' than the French because, unlike the French, they were still speaking a Germanic language. So there are lots of people out there who are really fascinated by the subject matter of comparative and historical linguis- tics, a lot more, i daresay, than are fascinated by the mysteries of quantum mechanics, fascinating as those nevertheless are. And i think we need to encourage these people and their fascination. Partly because, as (presumed) voters, they have some indirect control over our research funding. We need to take the time and energy to cultivate their interest in our field, to explain to them why some relationships that seem plausible on the surface really aren't, but in such a way that they aren't discouraged but rather *en*couraged to get a better understanding of the matter scientifically. I'm certainly not saying i've found an unbeatable formula for educating the public about historical and comparative linguistics; i suspect only a crank could make such a claim. But i'm working on it! Wonder if the information superhighway might provide a means ... I'm already doing a series of lectures on syntactic theory over Internet ... Best, Steven --------------------- Dr. Steven Schaufele 712 West Washington Urbana, IL 61801 217-344-8240 fcosws at prairienet.org http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html **** O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum! *** *** Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis! *** From gonzalor at JHU.EDU Sun Mar 23 06:01:17 1997 From: gonzalor at JHU.EDU (Gonzalo Rubio) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 1997 01:01:17 -0500 Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The interesting replies from Benji Wald and Steven Schaufele are well taken, and I thank them for their kindness. However, I'd like to insist on the aspect of "dilettantism". Benji Wald makes an interesting point when he says that somehow most pioneers of historical linguistics were dilettanti. I guess, when Sir William Jones became a judge of the Bengal Supreme Court in 1783, there was no chair of historical linguistics. Figures such as Schlegel, W. von Humboldt, Rasmus Rask, Franz Bopp, Jacob Grimm, and Renan, had exceptional backgrounds in many languages, not only as scholars, but also as travelers --one of the few ways they had access to some of the languages they mastered. Before them, the first rather intuitive approaches to historical linguistics were made by people (Hervas, Adelung, Young, etc.) that got the best linguistic education one was able to get during the Enlightment. Obviously, someone working on a field before this field becomes a common discipline, could be called dilettante, in some way. However, I'd rather reserve this label for people attempting to address issues of disciplines already constituted as such, but who happen not to have a true (if any) background in them. When Jones started, there was no way to "learn" historical linguistics, there was no "theoretical framework" to work within. Nowadays, the situation is quite different. The difference between being a Romantic during the Romanticism (Humboldt, etc) and being a Romantic now, is painfully striking, I'm afraid. Anyways, thanks a lot for your very interesting comments. ------------------------ Gonzalo Rubio Near Eastern Studies Johns Hopkins University gonzalor at jhu.edu ------------------------ From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Sun Mar 23 15:25:38 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 1997 15:25:38 +0000 Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... In-Reply-To: from "Gonzalo Rubio" at Mar 20, 97 01:45:47 am Message-ID: Oh, I don't really think that HL necessarily attracts more dilettantes, cranks, and basket cases than other disciplines. But I *do* suspect that these misguided souls may find it somewhat easier to get their stuff published, at least in book form, when they've chosen to rave about language, rather than, say, about physics. I don't think linguistics has yet succeeded in imposing itself upon the public consciousness as a fully respectable scholarly discipline, an understanding of which requires years of painstaking study. Whereas physics, I suspect, is widely perceived as a priesthood whose mysteries are closed to outsiders, *everybody* is entitled to an opinion about language. Among other consequences of this difference, I suspect that a crank manuscript on physics is more likely to be passed to a physicist for scrutiny and shredding than a crank book on language is to be passed to a linguist for comparable treatment. Nevertheless, crank work on physics *does* get published. A splendid recent example is a book entitled _Has Hawking Erred?_, which is not about Hawking at all, but about Einstein's special and general theories of relativity, and which consists of about 350 pages devoted to saying "I don't understand any of this. How can it be right?" An even more wonderful example, whose title escapes me, is a book arguing that the earth is only a few thousand years old. I made a point of reading a few pages of this thing every time I was in the bookshop, because it made me laugh out loud every time. Among other gems, the author announced that he had *carbon-dated the atmosphere* and found it only a few thousand years old! (If you know anything about carbon-dating, you'll appreciate how wonderfully lunatic this idea is.) Another of my favorites is the helium problem. Helium is constantly seeping out of the earth, and the author calculated that there was far too little helium in the atmosphere to be consistent with the great age commonly assigned to the earth. Apparently he's never seen a helium balloon, or wondered why it does what it does. Both these books were published in the guise of serious science, and both were placed on the science shelves of the bookshop, instead of where they belonged, in that distressingly large section labeled "New Age", but more accurately to be labeled "Brain-dead Garbage". That said, I agree that it is worrying to see just how much linguistic garbage gets published and promulgated. Even the new coffee-table atlas of the world's languages, nominally edited by Bernard Comrie, no less, shows a distressing tendency to treat with great seriousness not only the more forgettable vaporings of Greenberg, Ruhlen, and company, but even Ruhlen's "Proto-World etymologies". I suspect that Bernard didn't really have that much to do with the content of the book, but I intend to have a word with him anyway when I see him. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH England larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From gd116 at CUS.CAM.AC.UK Sun Mar 23 19:15:11 1997 From: gd116 at CUS.CAM.AC.UK (Guy Deutscher) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 1997 19:15:11 +0000 Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Behind all the merriment that Gonzalo Rubio's posting has helped create, I think there lies a serious point concerning isolates . It is unquestionable that the romantic attraction of finding linguistic/cultural relatives among exotic peoples is one of the main reasons for the obsession of amateurs with isolate languages. But wouldn't it be fair to say that this attraction is strongly encouraged by the relative rarity of such languages, and so by the conception that an isolate language is abnormal, something strange which needs to be explained away? (And what better explanation than: it is not an isolate after all...) But why are isolate languages actually so rare? Why e.g. are there only a handful of 'Basque's 'Sumerian's or 'Etruscan's in Europe/Western Asia, rather than dozens of unrelated languages? Of course the question can be explained ad hoc each time by the peculiar historical circumstances of any given language, if we know what they are. But wouldn t it be helpful if linguists discussed in general terms what the conditions are for the survival of isolates , and why these conditions are (relatively) so rarely met? Guy Deutscher. ======================================= Guy Deutscher Trinity College Cambridge CB2 1TQ E-mail: gd116 at cam.ac.uk England Tel: 01223- 365994 From Bomhard at AOL.COM Sun Mar 23 22:11:19 1997 From: Bomhard at AOL.COM (Allan Bomhard) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 1997 17:11:19 -0500 Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... Message-ID: I would like to make an observation about Gonzalo Rubio's statements about cranks, cooks, crazies, etc. Linguistics is indeed not the only discipline plagued by dilettantes and amateurs, as has been pointed out by others who have posted to this list. However, ever so often, along comes the likes of Hermann Grassmann, Charles Ives, Thomas Alva Edison, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and many others -- amateurs all. They are rare, but ever so often, gifted individuals do appear from the ranks of amateurs. From mcv at PI.NET Sun Mar 23 23:49:16 1997 From: mcv at PI.NET (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 1997 23:49:16 GMT Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... In-Reply-To: <970323171118_-1906484504@emout06.mail.aol.com> Message-ID: Alan Bomhard wrote: >I would like to make an observation about Gonzalo Rubio's statements about >cranks, cooks, crazies, etc. Linguistics is indeed not the only discipline >plagued by dilettantes and amateurs, as has been pointed out by others who >have posted to this list. However, ever so often, along comes the likes of >Hermann Grassmann, Charles Ives, Thomas Alva Edison, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and >many others -- amateurs all. They are rare, but ever so often, gifted >individuals do appear from the ranks of amateurs. Let's not forget Michael Ventris. == Miguel Carrasquer Vidal ~ ~ Amsterdam _____________ ~ ~ mcv at pi.net |_____________||| ========================== Ce .sig n'est pas une .cig From gonzalor at JHU.EDU Mon Mar 24 01:16:20 1997 From: gonzalor at JHU.EDU (Gonzalo Rubio) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 1997 20:16:20 -0500 Subject: on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics... In-Reply-To: <970323171118_-1906484504@emout06.mail.aol.com> Message-ID: I keep thinking there is a big difference between the scenario of our field(s) more than a century ago and now. Grassmann taught Mathematics in a Gymnasium, and he was an excellent scholar in IE linguistics. How could he? First of all, he did have an excellent background in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. Secondly, at that time the discipline was still in its initial stages, so one was able to master most of the published material. And even more important, teachers in the 19th century German Gymnasien were, for instance, the editors of most volumes of the Teubner series, and not all of them were professors of Greek or Latin. Nowadays, even among professional scholars who do learn the languages they talk about, there is no Noeldeke (one of the last Semitic scholars who produced excellent works on Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, etc.). Nobody can really master all the ancient and modern IE or Semitic languages we know now. When Grassmann wrote his _Woerterbuch zum Rig-Veda_ (1873, ?), the amount of secondary literature published by scholars and the number of original texts available in Western countries, were far smaller than what we have now. Of course, there exists the possibility of having an amateur producing an excellent idea or a masterpiece. However, day by day this possibility is less and less likely, just because of the growing amount of bibliography and materials one has to deal with. And, in this situation, dilettanti have a much harder time. Sometimes, I dare think Ventris' decipherment of Linear B was a sort of "disaster"... since it encouraged hundreds of individuals to "try" to do the same. Unfortunately, most of these persons (even if, for some strange reason, their crazy books get published by Brill) have more to do with Athanasius Kircher than with Ventris... Most (if not all) of the proposals concerning Sumerian and other languages I have read, present a very basic problem: the authors happen not to know Sumerian at all, and rely on very all (and frequently unreliable) secondary sources. Thus, one can see a verb "be" or "bi" meaning "to say" in some of those lists. However, that verb does not exist at all, although one can find it in some old books (Deimel's and so on). It is a case of incorrect analysis of forms like mu-na-be. The verb dug4 (or du11 --du-eleven), "to say", is a "complementary verb", whose sg. and pl. maru^ and pl. hamTu forms (hamTu and maru^ are the names given by Akkadian speaking scribes to the two Sumerian tenses/aspects, but that's a different topic) are e, just e and not be. In 1997, absolutely no Sumerologist would talk about a verb "be", but these well-intentioned amateurs keep including in their lists of look-alikes --and, the funniest thing is that, if you point this fact to some of them, they call you "ignoramus", "arrogant boy", etc. Weird. The list of "unreal presences" (paraphrasing Steiner) would be neverending. Somehow those dilettanti are a sort of unreal presence too. Isolated languages are there, we don't know why there are so few (historical and geographical reasons could be mentioned) and probably, centuries ago, they did have "sister" languages, nowadays dead or lost (as seems to be the case of Basque). I'm the only child my parents had, so I can undersdant linguistic isolation. ------------------------ Gonzalo Rubio Near Eastern Studies Johns Hopkins University gonzalor at jhu.edu ------------------------ From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Mon Mar 24 01:21:22 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 1997 20:21:22 EST Subject: dilettentes and amateurs Message-ID: In the discussion so far of dilettentes and amateurs, there seems to be something missing. The cases of the illustrious amateurs mentioned so far are people who were trained in linguistics/philology (e.g. Grassmann, Whorf) or in other sciences and who, for various reasons, did not pursue careers in the university. I also don't see lack of formal training -- either in the nineteenth or in the twentiety century -- as necessarily being a weakness: look at the huge number of us who are professional practitioners in areas outside of those in which The above cases are very different from the language (and science) dilettents who are neither formally nor self-trained. As was just pointed out by Gonzolo Rubio, they pick and choose among various bits and pieces of information scattered over the decades, and they put it together to fit whatever whim they're currently practicing. This lack of dedication to rigor clearly takes them out of the amateur class, which I interpret in its etymological meaning, and plants them firmly in the nut and crank class. Those of you who were on the list last year will remember HISTLING's Proto-World phase, which finally dissolved into a spate of etymological electronic umbrage being slung around the globe. This, you will also remember, was the motivation for turning HISTLING into a moderated list. And as moderator of this list, I received lots of private correspondence from these characters saying that I was acting to repress future Galileos -- I guess this made me a member of the Inquisition! Anyway, most of those dilletents signed off immediately, presumably looking for other lists on which on which they could plunder and pillage. The point of this rambling? That we can make another generalization about many who belong in the dilletent category: in addition to their lack of education about the facts of the field, they also haven't been educated as to style and standards of scholarly discourse. (Of course, some of you out there will immediately come up with a list of ill-mannered people who are/were also professional linguists, but those types have been marked as [+nasty] by their own colleagues.) Dorothy Disterheft you (usually silent) moderator From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Mon Mar 24 17:49:31 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 17:49:31 +0000 Subject: isolates In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19970323191511.006926e0@pop.cus.cam.ac.uk> from "Guy Deutscher" at Mar 23, 97 07:15:11 pm Message-ID: Guy Deutscher writes: > Behind all the merriment that Gonzalo Rubio's posting has helped > create, I think there lies a serious point concerning isolates . > It is unquestionable that the romantic attraction of finding > linguistic/cultural relatives among exotic peoples is one of the > main reasons for the obsession of amateurs with isolate > languages. But wouldn't it be fair to say that this attraction is > strongly encouraged by the relative rarity of such languages, and so > by the conception that an isolate language is abnormal, something > strange which needs to be explained away? (And what better > explanation than: it is not an isolate after all...) > But why are isolate languages actually so rare? Why e.g. are there > only a handful of 'Basque's 'Sumerian's or 'Etruscan's in > Europe/Western Asia, rather than dozens of unrelated languages? Of > course the question can be explained ad hoc each time by the > peculiar historical circumstances of any given language, if we know > what they are. But wouldn t it be helpful if linguists discussed in > general terms what the conditions are for the survival of isolates , > and why these conditions are (relatively) so rarely met? These questions have been at least briefly addressed by Johanna Nichols in some of her papers. If I remember correctly, she too expresses some surprise at the comparative rarity of isolates, on the ground that the typical number of daughters produced by a mother language is only around 1.6, which ought to give us more isolates than we see. (Hope I'm recalling this correctly.) In fact, there are perhaps more isolates around than we sometimes suppose, especially if we are cautious about accepting some of the remote proposals involving isolates. Among living languages, we have only Basque in Europe, but Asia gives us (at least) Burushaski, Nihali, Gilyak, Ainu, Korean, Japanese, Yukaghir, and Ket, the last two being languages which had known relatives that died out only recently. (Here I ignore several remote proposals which have not won general acceptance, as well as the Uralic-Yukaghir hypothesis, which seems better supported but perhaps not yet generally accepted.) In Africa, all of Songhai, Sandawe, and Hadza are assigned to various families perhaps more for bookkeeping reasons than because of hard evidence. There are several apparent isolates in New Guinea, including Porome, and perhaps quite a few more in North America, including Yuchi, Kutenai, and Haida, if the Na-Dene hypothesis for this last is not accepted. South America is messy, but may have more. Still, this is not an overly impressive total. But, rather than ask "What circumstances favor isolates?", I'd prefer to ask "Why are there so few isolates?" Or, perhaps I should put it "Why do so many isolates get blatted?" Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Mon Mar 24 15:17:13 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 15:17:13 +0000 Subject: Q: dictionary of HL Message-ID: I have just been commissioned to write a dictionary of historical and comparative linguistics. The (strict) word limit is 150,000 words, which I estimate at about 380 standard-sized pages, or maybe 400. And I am seeking advice as to what to include. Naturally, the top priority is the terms which are found in standard textbooks. But I expect to have space to include a fair number of further terms, and my question is this: which additional terms would it be most helpful to include. There are very many other terms that might be considered. Here are some examples. (1) More-or-less obsolete terms found in the older literature (`proethnic', `tenues', `Kreislauf'). (2) Technical terms from the study of IE (`hysterodynamic inflection', `vrddhi'). (3) Technical terms from the study of other languages (`rendaku', `Meeussen's Law'). (4) German terms sometimes used in English even when English equivalents are in use (`Wanderwort', `Ausnahmslosungkeit'). (5) Names of dead languages (`Iberian', `Lepontic'). (6) Names of significant ancient texts and inscriptions (`Appendix Probi', `Orkhon inscriptions'). (7) Names of scripts and writing systems (`Linear B', `cuneiform'). (8) Terms introduced by sociolinguists studying language change (`Bill Peters effect', `near-merger') (this group is very large, but arguably central). (9) The simply enormous number of terms coined (or borrowed from other fields) by individual authors in recent years, some (but not all) of which will undoubtedly become established (`metatypy', `residual zone', `exaptation', `gram', `apomorphy'). (10) Names of recently proposed principles (`Aoristic Drift Principle', `Upper Exit Principle'). (11) Anything else you can think of. It is intended that the book should be useful to students who have some background in linguistics but who are approaching the study of HL for the first time, but we also want it, within the limits of the space available, to be as useful as possible to advanced students and even professional practitioners. So: what terms would you *most* like to see in the dictionary? Please bear in mind that space is limited, and there is no possibility of including even 10% of all the terms that might conceivably be included. Please reply to me personally, and I'll publish a summary to HISTLING. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH England larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From vovin at HAWAII.EDU Tue Mar 25 03:59:08 1997 From: vovin at HAWAII.EDU (Alexander Vovin) Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 17:59:08 -1000 Subject: isolates In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I would like to offer some corrections for the following passage in Larry Trask's posting, as some of the claims regarding the certain Asian languages as isolates are out of date, I am afraid. First, there is a general consensus nowadays among all linguists working in historical Korean and Japanese that Korean and Japanese are related. Their link to the rest of Altaic remains more disputable, but even here majority of the scholars lean toward the acceptance of genetic relationship between Japanese, Korean, and Tungusic. In addition, none of these proposals are long-range, in the sense of long-range proposals concerning genetic affiliation of Basque or Nihali. Besides, both "Japanese" and "Korean" are to a great extent sociolinguistic terms: under "Japanese" we have a number of mutually unintelligible languages or "dialects", as they are usually called, with the depth comparable to that of Germanic. The same is true of "Korean": there are at least three Korean languages, again normally called "dialects", mutually unintelligible and with the depth comparable to that of Slavic. Thus, even if they were not related (but they are), each of them would represent a mini-family, and not a true isolate. Second, over last seven years there has been presented quite a chunk of evidence allowing us tentatively to link Ainu with Austronesian and Austroasiatic. There is a consensus between anyone who ever tried to venture in this field (late Murayama S., L. Reid, J. Bengtson, P. Sidwell, I.Pejros, Yanagizaki Y. , and myself) that Austric connection is the likeliest for Ainu. Although, none has yet come up with a proof beyond the reasonable doubt, this is the only connection among proposed for Ainu that cannot be easily disproved (contrary to the case, e.g., with Ainu and Altaic). Thus, this is situation remarkably different from Basque situation, where majority of specialists reject any remote proposals. Third, since both Ket and Yukaghir did have relatives in the recent past, this very fact seems to work against Larry Trask point that there are more isolates among us than we suppose. As a matter of fact, it shows us how isolates come into being: by extinction of the other family members. Thus, there are probably less true isolates than we suppose. In particular, as I intended to demonstrate above, Larry Trask's Asia list can be safely reduced to Gilyak, Nihali, and Burushaski. Among those remaining three, Gilyak looks like a Nostratic language (although it has yet to be proven), and I even will not be very surprised if ultimately it turns out to be a very abberant member of Altaic family: after all, scholars so far applied only internal reconstruction to Gilyak, but we should not overlook the fact that what we call Gilyak actually consists of three or four mutually untelligible and pretty much divergent languages, the fact that allows comparative reconstruction that is yet to be done. On Mon, 24 Mar 1997, Larry Trask wrote: > > In fact, there are perhaps more isolates around than we sometimes > suppose, especially if we are cautious about accepting some of the > remote proposals involving isolates. Among living languages, we have > only Basque in Europe, but Asia gives us (at least) Burushaski, > Nihali, Gilyak, Ainu, Korean, Japanese, Yukaghir, and Ket, the last > two being languages which had known relatives that died out only > recently. (Here I ignore several remote proposals which have not won > general acceptance, as well as the Uralic-Yukaghir hypothesis, which > seems better supported but perhaps not yet generally accepted.) > > Larry Trask > COGS > University of Sussex > Brighton BN1 9QH > UK > > larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk > From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Tue Mar 25 18:05:54 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 13:05:54 EST Subject: HISTLING membership list Message-ID: Dear HISTLINGers, >From time to time I post an updated membership list for those of you who don't feel like looking up the appropriate commands on your list of HISTLING instructions. Here's the latest list. -DD * HISTLING -- Historical Linguistics Mailing List dasher at NETCOM.COM alers at SPANPORT.UMASS.EDU abraham at LET.RUG.NL Werner Abraham Ahlqvist at UCG.IE Anders Ahlqvist jean.aitchison at WORCESTER.OXFORD.AC.UK Jean Aitchison alderson at NETCOM.COM Rich Alderson cindy.allen at ANU.EDU.AU Cynthia Allen SLALLEN at UGA.CC.UGA.EDU Sherry Allen eraLO at HAMP.HAMPSHIRE.EDU Emily Alling andersen at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Henning Andersen alotz at AIMNET.COM Deborah Anderson FinnSwede at AOL.COM Eric Anderson J.Arends at LET.UVA.NL Jacques Arends aristar at TAM2000.TAMU.EDU Anthony Aristar AARSEN41 at PORTLAND.CAPS.MAINE.EDU Angela Arsenault C.J.ARTHUR at UEL.AC.UK Catherine Arthur jayling at CUP.CAM.AC.UK Judith Ayling cbaez at UVIGO.ES Inmaculada C. 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Gary Miller minaka at AFFRC.GO.JP Nobuhiro Minaka minkova at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Donka Minkova mithun at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU Marianne Mithun N270053 at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Michael Montgomery birchm at HUMANITIES1.COHUMS.OHIO-STATE.EDU Birch Moonwomon-Baird mott at LINGUA.FIL.UB.ES Brian Mott rwmurray at ACS.UCALGARY.CA Robert Murray katrin.mutz at UNI-KONSTANZ.DE Katrin Mutz mylne at LINGUA.CLTR.UQ.OZ.AU Tom Mylne nagle at COASTAL.EDU Steve Nagle soichiro at CYBORG.OR.JP Soichiro Nakade venkn at GIASBM01.VSNL.NET.IN Venkatesh Narayanan anaro at OMEGA.LNCC.BR Anthony Naro dgn612 at ANU.EDU.AU David Nash geoffn at SIU.EDU Geoff Nathan nee1 at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU Barbara Need bn at PSYC.NOTT.AC.UK Brigitte Nerlich newmanp at UCS.INDIANA.EDU Paul Newman s_nickn at EDUSERV.ITS.UNIMELB.EDU.AU Nick Nicholas johanna at UCLINK.BERKELEY.EDU Johanna Nichols nishimur at ICLUNA.KOBE-U.AC.JP Hideo Nishimura muriel.norde at LET.UVA.NL Muriel Norde dnurse at MORGAN.UCS.MUN.CA Derek Nurse manyman at CC.HELSINKI.FI Martti Nyman OGIER at ACC.ROANOKE.EDU Jim Ogier nostler at CHIBCHA.DEMON.CO.UK Nicholas Ostler Aethelred at WORLDNET.ATT.NET Harold Overton bd988 at SCN.ORG Mike Owen brp3 at PSU.EDU Richard Page johnp at UTAFLL.UTA.EDU John Paolillo slpargma at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU Sheri Pargman MJPARINS at UALR.EDU Marylyn Parins parkvall at LING.SU.SE Mikael Parkvall PARODI at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Claudia Parodi kjp1003 at HERMES.CAM.AC.UK Kimberley Parsons npasch at IX.NETCOM.COM Joan Pasch Sylvain.Patri at UNIV-LYON2.FR Sylvain Patri Bert.Peeters at MODLANG.UTAS.EDU.AU Bert Peeters japena at NS.INTER.EDU Juan Pena R.J.Penny at QMW.AC.UK Ralph Penny wpentlan at U.ARIZONA.EDU Walter Pentland paul at BENJAMINS.COM Paul Peranteau Harry.Perridon at LET.UVA.NL Harry Perridon mpeter4165 at AOL.COM Melanie Peterson ejphill at ROOT.INDSTATE.EDU Betty S. Phillips h.pinkster at LET.UVA.NL Harm Pinkster sp20 at UNIX.YORK.AC.UK Susan Pintzuk Christer.Platzack at NORDLUND.LU.SE Christer Platzack annette.pohlke at P-NET.DE Annette Pohlke cjp16 at CUS.CAM.AC.UK Chris Pountain payet at SKYWALKER.UDG.ES Isabel Pujol-Payet cquinn at MAGNUS.ACS.OHIO-STATE.EDU Charles Quinn 070edith at MUSE.ARTS.WITS.AC.ZA Edith Raidt annaram at IPV36.UNIPV.IT Anna Giacalone Ramat amr at CS.WAYNE.EDU Alexis Manaster Ramer mratlif at CMS.CC.WAYNE.EDU Martha Ratliff pongsak at GARNET.BERKELEY.EDU Pongsak Rattanawong raumolinbrun at CC.HELSINKI.FI Helena Raumolin-Brunberg rebuschi at EXT.JUSSIEU.FR Georges Rebuschi Bob_Reed at SIL.ORG Robert Reed ptvr at LET.VU.NL Pieter van Reenen karl.reinhardt at BBS.HAL-PC.ORG Karl Reinhardt 100104.1055 at COMPUSERVE.COM Joseph Reisdoerfer reiss at ALCOR.CONCORDIA.CA Charles Reiss lang_mcr at CENTUM.UTULSA.EDU Mel Resnick reusch at UCLINK4.BERKELEY.EDU Beatrice Reusch milan.rezac at UTORONTO.CA Milan Rezac rice at EPAS.UTORONTO.CA Keren Rice jr6b at UVA.PCMAIL.VIRGINIA.EDU Joel Rini Nikolaus.Ritt at UNIVIE.AC.AT Nikolaus Ritt Anne.K.Ro at HIA.NO Anne K. Ro ptr at EMAIL.UNC.EDU Paul Roberge robertsg at GUSUN.ACC.GEORGETOWN.EDU Greg Roberts eirikur at RHI.HI.IS Eirikur Rognvaldsson romaine at VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK Suzanne Romaine ronkinm at GUSUN.ACC.GEORGETOWN.EDU Maggie Ronkin Malcolm.Ross at ANU.EDU.AU Malcolm Ross gonzalor at JHUNIX.HCF.JHU.EDU Jose Gonzalo Rubio-Pardo RRRummler at AOL.COM Rosemary Rummler RUNDBL_G at ENGELSKA.SU.SE Gabriella Rundblad ProtoLang at MSN.COM Pat Ryan (Protol at Aol.Com) protol9 at MAIL.IDT.NET Patrick Ryan garris at POP.CONVEY.RU Anastassia Ryko ks2240 at MXR.MESHNET.OR.JP Kazuma Sakamoto tasalmin at CC.HELSINKI.FI Tapani Salminen jsalmons at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU Joseph Salmons saltarel at VM.USC.EDU Mario Saltarelli carlos at FILINF.UAB.ES Carlos Sanchez-Lancis helge.sandoy at NOR.UIB.NO Helge Sandoy Brent_Scarcliff at CCH.COM Brent Scarcliff escatton at CNSVAX.ALBANY.EDU Ernest Scatton fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG Steven Schaufele schemman at PHIL-FAK.UNI-DUESSELDORF.DE Ulrike Schemman schiller at SAPIR.UCHICAGO.EDU Eric Schiller lene at DOU.DK Lene Schosler Richard.Schrodt at UNIVIE.AC.AT Richard Schrodt schwen at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Scott Schwenter gseiler at DS.UNIZH.CH Guido Seiler JOCYSEY at WVNVM.WVNET.EDU Johan Seynnaeve msharpe at METZ.UNE.EDU.AU Margaret Sharpe kshields at MARAUDER.MILLERSV.EDU Ken Shields shimizu at LET.KUMAMOTO-U.AC.JP Kiyoshi Shimizu hbzs22 at VM.TAU.AC.IL Hava Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot csilva at MIZAR.USC.EDU Carmen Silva-Corvalan Horst=Simon at RZ.HU-BERLIN.DE Horst Simon slobin at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Dan Slobin j.c.smith at MANCHESTER.AC.UK John Charles Smith nigel.smith at NENTYDD.DEMON.CO.UK Nigel Smith m.southern at MAIL.UTEXAS.EDU Mark Southern aspiegel at MIDWEST.NET Alicia Spiegel brian at MEC.SAS.UPENN.EDU Brian Spooner sprott at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Richard Sprott 3lfyuji at CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU Bill Spruiell SPRUIELL at WCUVAX1.WCU.EDU William Spruiell stampe at HAWAII.EDU David Stampe jstasino at MAGNUS.ACS.OHIO-STATE.EDU John Stasinopoulos csteele at HAWAII.EDU Caroline Steele dieter.stein at UNI-DUESSELDORF.DE Dieter Stein cstephen at VOICENET.COM Chris Stephens gsmhg at NTX.CITY.UNISA.EDU.AU Mia Stephens STEVENS at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Christopher Stevens tstewart at LING.OHIO-STATE.EDU Tom Stewart stockwel at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Robert Stockwell nost at LING.HUM.AAU.DK Norbert Strade ENG101 at UKCC.UKY.EDU Gregory Stump ysuzuki at UIUC.EDU Yasuko Suzuki john at LING.SU.SE John Swedenmark sweetser at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Eve Sweetser whitney at PSYCH.ROCHESTER.EDU Whitney Tabor takahasi at MSV.CC.IWATE-U.AC.JP Yukio Takahashi rt214 at CUS.CAM.AC.UK Reiko Takeda toshiyat at RC.KYUSHU-U.AC.JP Toshiya Tanaka jtauber at TARTARUS.UWA.EDU.AU James K. Tauber thibalt at CC.UMANITOBA.CA Sylvie Thibault sally at ISP.PITT.EDU Sarah G. Thomason toivonen at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Ida Toivonen larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Larry Trask traugott at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Elizabeth Traugott tsuchida at TOOYOO.L.U-TOKYO.AC.JP Shigeru TSUCHIDA tuitekj at ERE.UMONTREAL.CA Kevin Tuite bill at HIVNET.UBC.CA Bill Turkel iris at U.WASHINGTON.EDU Siri G. Tuttle glen at METRO.NET Glen Uber KHC00344 at NIFTYSERVE.OR.JP Shinji Uchioke histling at COLI.UNI-SB.DE CoLi UdS usami at HAWAII.EDU Fumio Usami bvance at UCS.INDIANA.EDU Barbara Vance tvn at CIS.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE Theo Vennemann verda at LINGUA.FIL.UB.ES Isabel Verdaguer n.b.vincent at MAN.AC.UK Nigel Vincent VOTRUBA at VMS.CIS.PITT.EDU Martin Votruba vovin at HAWAII.EDU Alexander Vovin Orgetorix at INFOAVE.NET Matt Wagers bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Benji Wald dcwalker at ACS.UCALGARY.CA Douglas Walker tandy at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Tandy Warnow warrenb at ENGELSKA.SU.SE Beatrice Warren warvik at UTU.FI Brita Warvik D.J.L.Watt at NEWCASTLE.AC.UK Dominic Watt swatts at TCD.IE Sheila Watts LWEBSTER at FAC1.CSS.EDU Lee Webster LEEUWVW at RULLET.LEIDENUNIV.NL Andrea de Leeuw van Weenen david_weiss at GBINC.COM David Weiss Paula.West at MERTON.OXFORD.AC.UK Paula West cwharry at MAILCLERK.ECOK.EDU Cheryl Wharry maxw at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Max Wheeler jhwhite at TRUCOM.COM Jim White maw at ANNAP.INFI.NET Mark A. Wilson cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU Clyde Winters mew1 at SIU.EDU Margaret Winters cfwoolhiser at MAIL.UTEXAS.EDU Curt Woolhiser vdwouden at LET.RUG.NL Ton van der Wouden gwright at SNAP.ORG George Wright lcw21 at CUS.CAM.AC.UK Laura Wright l.wright at HERTS.AC.UK Laura Wright rhpwri at LIVERPOOL.AC.UK Roger Wright sw29 at CUS.CAM.AC.UK Susan Wright wurzel at FAS.AG-BERLIN.MPG.DE W.U. Wurzel JXING at POLYGLOT.UVM.EDU Janet Xing haruki at MSV.CC.IWATE-U.AC.JP Haruki Yamaguchi MZELLJADT at SMITH.SMITH.EDU Margaret S. Zelljadt Petr.Zemanek at FF.CUNI.CZ Petr Zemanek n-zide at UCHICAGO.EDU Norman Zide From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Tue Mar 25 15:59:22 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 15:59:22 +0000 Subject: isolates In-Reply-To: from "Alexander Vovin" at Mar 24, 97 05:59:08 pm Message-ID: Alexander Vovin writes: > I would like to offer some corrections for the following passage in > Larry Trask's posting, as some of the claims regarding the certain > Asian languages as isolates are out of date, I am afraid. Well, I am happy to be corrected, but I have my doubts about some of what follows. > First, there is a general consensus nowadays among all linguists > working in historical Korean and Japanese that Korean and Japanese > are related. "All"? I doubt it. I know that this idea has been gathering support, but it's news to me that *all* specialists now accept it as established. Anyway, I can name one specialist who certainly doesn't accept this "consensus": Masayoshi Shibatani, who has repreatedly characterized the proposed Japanese-Korean link as unsubstantiated. And Shibatani also repeatedly points out that views on the possible affiliations of Japanese are numerous, varied, and much debated. > Their link to the rest of Altaic remains more disputable, but even > here majority of the scholars lean toward the acceptance of genetic > relationship between Japanese, Korean, and Tungusic. Well, even if this is true, "leaning toward the acceptance" of a hypothesis is hardly the same thing as seeing it established to general satisfaction. As far as I know, Japanese has not been demonstrated to be securely related to anything else at all, and it remains an isolate, as does Korean. > In addition, none of these proposals are long-range, in > the sense of long-range proposals concerning genetic affiliation of > Basque or Nihali. Besides, both "Japanese" and "Korean" are to a > great extent sociolinguistic terms: under "Japanese" we have a > number of mutually unintelligible languages or "dialects", as they > are usually called, with the depth comparable to that of > Germanic. The same is true of "Korean": there are at least three > Korean languages, again normally called "dialects", mutually > unintelligible and with the depth comparable to that of > Slavic. Thus, even if they were not related (but they are), each of > them would represent a mini-family, and not a true isolate. This is news to me, and I am skeptical. No reference source available to me even so much as mentions the possibility that either Japanese or Korean might plausibly be regarded as a family of three or more languages. The most I have seen is a suggestion that the highly divergent Ryukyuan varieties of Japanese might be regarded as a distinct language, but even this appears to be a minority view today (though it was formerly more prominent). > Second, over last seven years there has been presented quite a > chunk of evidence allowing us tentatively to link Ainu with > Austronesian and Austroasiatic. > There is a consensus between anyone who ever tried to venture in > this field (late Murayama S., L. Reid, J. Bengtson, P. Sidwell, > I.Pejros, Yanagizaki Y. , and myself) that Austric connection is the > likeliest for Ainu. Although, none has yet come up with a proof > beyond the reasonable doubt, this is the only connection among > proposed for Ainu that cannot be easily disproved (contrary to the > case, e.g., with Ainu and Altaic). Thus, this is situation > remarkably different from Basque situation, where majority of > specialists reject any remote proposals. But no relationship has been established between Ainu and anything else at all, and it remains an isolate. Having a favorite conjecture is a far cry from having a persuasive case. Anyway, even Austric itself is not generally accepted as a valid construct. > Third, since both Ket and Yukaghir did have relatives in the > recent past, this very fact seems to work against Larry Trask point > that there are more isolates among us than we suppose. As a matter > of fact, it shows us how isolates come into being: by extinction of > the other family members. Thus, there are probably less true > isolates than we suppose. I don't follow this at all. If we can watch isolates come into existence before our eyes in historical times, then why is that an argument against the existence of numerous isolates which lost any relatives they may have had ages ago? > In particular, as I intended to demonstrate above, Larry Trask's > Asia list can be safely reduced to Gilyak, Nihali, and Burushaski. "Safely"? I don't think so. > Among those remaining three, Gilyak looks like a Nostratic language > (although it has yet to be proven), Er, um...but *Nostratic* is still very far from being established. > and I even will not be very surprised if ultimately it turns out to > be a very abberant member of Altaic family: after all, scholars so > far applied only internal reconstruction to Gilyak, but we should > not overlook the fact that what we call Gilyak actually consists of > three or four mutually untelligible and pretty much divergent > languages, the fact that allows comparative reconstruction that is > yet to be done. Interesting, certainly, but Gilyak is still an isolate. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From sally at ISP.PITT.EDU Tue Mar 25 14:22:58 1997 From: sally at ISP.PITT.EDU (Sarah G. Thomason) Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 09:22:58 -0500 Subject: isolates In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 24 Mar 1997 17:59:08 -1000." Message-ID: Alexander Vovin's confidence that some of the isolates listed by Larry Trask have been de-isolated by general consensus among specialists is probably too sanguine. A recent review in LANGUAGE, for instance, expressed doubts about the evidence for connecting Japanese with anything else (I don't remember the details of the reviewer's arguments; the review appeared three or four years ago; it's possible that the reviewer's focus was on Japanese + Austronesian rather than on Japanese + Korean). And I have my own concerns about evidence linking Ainu with anything else, to the extent that the evidence relies on the reconstructions in Vovin's book on Ainu (which contains proposals like Proto-Ainu *hd- for a large correspondence set in which most dialects have w- and the others have segments which could easily be reflexes of *w-; Vovin declines to reconstruct *w- here because there are few words with this correspondence set, whereas both *h and *d are reconstructible). Vovin's reasoning about when an isolate is not an isolate seems odd: if a language has no relatives, it is an isolate, regardless of whether it once had relatives. More importantly, from a methodological viewpoint, Vovin asserts that cases like Ket and Yukaghir show us "how isolates come into being". But what evidence have we, for any language that we all agree is an isolate and that has no attested former relatives, that it used to have some relatives? It's easy enough to imagine a situation in which no split will occur, ever: just situate your hypothetical language in a remote mountain valley (say), in a small area that only supports a small cohesive population -- a single speech community in which (roughly) everyone talks to everyone else -- and leave everyone there permanently. No split. A belief that there are no real-life cases of this general sort (it doesn't have to be a mountain valley, etc.) is a matter of faith, not science. Vovin is right, of course, in saying that Japanese is not an isolate even if it has no demonstrable relatives, if it is really a small family of very close-related languages. But then Proto-Japanese (still on the hypothesis that it has no established relatives) would be/have been an isolate, so it would still go into the total. -- Sally Thomason sally at isp.pitt.edu From Ralf.Georg at BONN.NETSURF.DE Wed Mar 26 09:00:06 1997 From: Ralf.Georg at BONN.NETSURF.DE (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 10:00:06 +0100 Subject: isolates Message-ID: Please add to the list of isolates mentioned so far the (recently extinct) Kusunda (Ban Raja) language of Western Nepal. It has been subsumed under Dene-Caucasian, however ( a fate not at all unlikely for *any* language isolate). Most general reference books put it into Tibeto-Burman, which is certainly not correct. A few months ago, I posted on NOSTRATIC-L a brief summary of what is known about the language together with an (almost exhaustive) bibliography. I'm still willing to send this to every one interested. Somewhat hesitantly, I feel compelled to mention yet another potential isolate: Itel'men. Yes, I *do* know that it is commonly counted as Chukchi-Kamchatkan, and it is *more than likely* that it does. But the best connoisseur of that language, A.P. Volodin, is now of the opinion that all the similarities (systematic correspondences among them) between Itel'men and, say, Koryak, are due to areal convergence rather than genetic inheritence. I had some fights with Aleksandr Pavlovich on that issue, since the languages share something which I regard as the most important thing for a realationship: morphology. While it is true that only part of the morphology is truely shared and the verbal morphology of Itelmen shows whole subsets which find no matches whatsoever in the Chukchi-Koryak languages (roughly it can be said that the *shared* morphology is that of prefixes, whereas suffixal verbal morphology in Itelmen seems to be largely independent - *roughly* I said, please don't count the affixes now !). The other thing: the lexicon seems to basically non-Chukchi-Koryak at all. Non-cognate (at least not *demonstrably* cognate, possibly an important caveat) lexical items by far outnumber those with visible Chukchi-Koryak connections (yes, I do know that the majority doesn't count as such, cf. Armenian). Now, I'm still inclined to see Itelmen as being related to Chukchi-Koryak (and those of you subscribing ALTAINET will know that I'm a hell of a splitter ! [just kidding, Sasha!]) *somehow*, but the simple dictum, as can be found in all the major handbooks on language-classification, that "Itel'men is Chukchi-Kamchatkan" (and period) is certainly an oversimplification. There *are* degrees of language relationship (certainly there are degrees of *discernability* of language relationship), relationship is simply not always a binary +/- thing. The recent discussion on mixed languages (CIA, Mbugu, perhaps Mogholi) is likely to reshape our views on relationship during the time to come. In the grammar of Itel'men I'm currently coauthoring with A.P. Volodin we will have to say something about the genetic position of that language (although there are *much more * interesting things about Itelmen than that !). I think we will be working towards some compromise wording on the matter, and after the book we will have some single-authored papers on the matter, fighting again, but one thing I'd like to say now: if asked, what language family belongs Itel'men in ?, I'd say at the moment: *I don't know*. And I'm actually working on that language .... (maybe if I weren't, things would be much easier ... ). Working on a language is perhaps the best antedote against the morbus classificationis praecocis, which seems to be plagueing some people in the field. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel/Fax +49-228-691332+ From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Wed Mar 26 12:45:05 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 07:45:05 EST Subject: HISTLING archives Message-ID: Dear Colleagues, A while ago, one of our members mentioned that she'd deleted a HISTLING posting that she now wished that she could refer to. HISTLING is archived, so there's no need to worry about keeping a file of your favorite postings. You can access the archives by sending the following messages to listserv at vm.sc.edu: index histling: first send this command in the body of the message to have a weekly index of all postings automatically sent to your address. get histling logXXXXX: next, send this command to get any specific week's postings, where the XXXXX refer to the date of the file you wish to retrieve, which is listed in the weekly index. If you wish to do a database search for a specific topic, send the message: search XXXXXX in histling where XXXXXX is the string you want to search. So, for example, if you want to search for the term Nostratic, send the message search nostratic in histling If you'd like to search for more than one term, for instance, Nostratic and Indo-European, just add the second term after the first: search nostratic indo-european in histling From delancey at DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU Wed Mar 26 17:36:59 1997 From: delancey at DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU (Scott DeLancey) Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 09:36:59 -0800 Subject: isolates Message-ID: On Tue, 25 Mar 1997, Sarah G. Thomason wrote: > But what evidence > have we, for any language that we all agree is an isolate and that > has no attested former relatives, that it used to have some > relatives? It's easy enough to imagine a situation in which no > split will occur, ever: just situate your hypothetical language in > a remote mountain valley (say), in a small area that only supports > a small cohesive population -- a single speech community in which (roughly) > everyone talks to everyone else -- and leave everyone there permanently. > No split. A belief that there are no real-life cases of this general > sort (it doesn't have to be a mountain valley, etc.) is a matter of > faith, not science. But this population must have arrived in its mountain valley from somewhere else (H. Sapiens didn't evolve in mountain valleys), and unless you believe that some isolated populations of H. Sap reinvented language ex nihilo, the language spoken by this population had relatives somewhere else. Those may have died out, leaving an isolate, but unless this population created a new language rather than bringing one with them, the language didn't start out as an isolate. To take a concrete example: Burushashki now has no demonstrable relatives. But it *can not possibly* have always been an isolate, unless you want to believe that it has developed separately and independently since the beginnings of human language (which, for even this to be a conceivable scenario, must have been efflorescently polygenetic). Scott DeLancey Department of Linguistics University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403, USA delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html From mcv at PI.NET Wed Mar 26 22:20:11 1997 From: mcv at PI.NET (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 22:20:11 GMT Subject: Ainu and Gilyak In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Alexander Vovin wrote: >Gilyak looks like a Nostratic language (although it has >yet to be proven), and I even will not be very surprised if ultimately it >turns out to be a very abberant member of Altaic family: after all, >scholars so far applied only internal reconstruction to Gilyak, but we >should not overlook the fact that what we call Gilyak actually consists of >three or four mutually untelligible and pretty much divergent languages, >the fact that allows comparative reconstruction that is yet to be done. One thing that caught my attention in the linguistic database from Johanna Nichols' "Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time" was the typological near-identity of Gilyak and Ainu. Of all the typological features listed, Ainu and Gilyak only differ in that Gilyak has numerical classifiers (26 of them). Is there any other evidence for contacts between Gilyak and Ainu? == Miguel Carrasquer Vidal ~ ~ Amsterdam _____________ ~ ~ mcv at pi.net |_____________||| ========================== Ce .sig n'est pas une .cig From bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Thu Mar 27 04:04:42 1997 From: bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU (benji wald) Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 20:04:42 -0800 Subject: on the epistemological nature of HL & isolates Message-ID: I was stimulated by many of the messages of the last few days, and would like to make some comments on them. First, I was a little surprised by Gonzalo Rubio's comments a few days ago to my last message: >Benji Wald makes an interesting point when he says that somehow most >pioneers of historical linguistics were dilettanti. ....Obviously, someone >working on a >field before this field becomes a common discipline, could >be called dilettante, in some >way. It did not occur to me that somebody might take my comments in that way. My major intention was simply to say that originally, and to some extent still, both dilettantes, whoever they may be, and the immediate originators of the discipline of historical linguistics were driven by the same concerns, in particular, recovering past history in order to make deductions about relatedness of peoples (actually the cultures of known groups of people). My point was also that this was/is basically an EXTRA-linguistic concern, a social concern. I wanted to emphasise this because I also wanted to point out that as methods for this endeavor were developed, various INTRA-linguistic concerns (esp about "possible linguistic change") developed. Then I pointed out that "dilettantes" rarely appreciate the INTRA-linguistic concerns, but remain focussed on the EXTRA-linguistic concerns, with dileterious effects on their methods of demonstration, which now seem naive and amateurish (in the "bad" sense) to us. Gonzalo interpreted me right only to the extent that I could be taken as implying that originally there was no basis, either in terms of disciplinary field or methodology, to distinguish "scholars" and "dilettantes" with respect to the driving issue characterised above. (At one point some "scholars" assumed that Hebrew as the mother of all languages, at a later point that Sanskrit was the mother of the Indo-European group, etc. All cultures seem to have a myth that their language is the "pure" or, more commonly, the "impure" form of some older language, and that there are other pure or impure forms of the same language -- the historical sense is there. That their language has relatively recently been "corrupted" one way or another is a very common cross-cultural belief.) On the same topic, Dorothy Disterheft wrote a separate message, addressed to distinguishing terms like "dilettante" and "amateur". With regard to terminology, I had decided in my last message to accept Gozalo's terms. But I did not take them all that seriously with respect to motives and methods. Instead I decided not to obscure the points I wanted to make by adding in that message that I considered the terms I was using somewhat "strawmen". I thought it would just be a distraction to bring up this additional point. In fact, I think that even some scholars (who should know better) get impatient with the lack of progress/agreement in uniting some isolates and "proto-isolates" (e.g., Proto-Indo-European, etc.) with something else, Like the dilettantes, they would like to be in future history books as (one of) "the first" to have "recognised" (or "claimed") the relationship between (Proto-)X and (Proto-)Y. They forget to bear in mind that a good future history of linguistics may add that they made the identification on the basis of shabby methods, though it was later (in the future) confirmed on the basis of sound methods, through no fault of the visionaries (except to the extent that we can honor, say, Kircher, as having correctly though accidentally guessed that Egyptian hieroglyphics reflected an old form of Coptic). Such impatiently glory-seeking scholars are not alone to blame, since current and past HL books do mention older scholars who made identifications later confirmed, but do not add that their reasoning and methods were faulty. (EG. maybe, that Egyptian is related to Hebrew, not because Hebrew is the mother of all languages, but because both descend from Proto-Afro-Asiatic, or whatever.) To mention writers of books on HL, Larry Trask wrote: I don't think linguistics has yet succeeded in imposing itself upon the public consciousness as a fully respectable scholarly discipline, an understanding of which requires years of painstaking study. Whereas physics, I suspect, is widely perceived as a priesthood whose mysteries are closed to outsiders, *everybody* is entitled to an opinion about language. What Larry wrote is quite true, I think. However, we must also consider that "physics" as such is not public property, whereas as a *social* phenomenon language is. It is not only the case that "everybody" is *entitled* to have an opinion about language, but that they are socially *required* to. I may just be critical of the generality of Larry's wording here, since if "language" were mystified for the public the same way "physics" is (mainly by the media ), the public (reporters, makers of educational documentaries, etc.) would defer to us, the experts. I must add, though, that I have my doubts that linguists are ripe for such a position, since language is an extremely important "public" property, and I'm not even sure that linguists know enough about the relation between language and society to take over in the public mind as the ultimate experts. It goes without saying, nevertheless, that the public believes a lot that we linguists know is false. What we don't always appreciate are the reasons that the "public" has the false beliefs it does, and how they function in the society. Until we understand that, and can replace those functions, we won't be able to replace those beliefs. The linguistic (but not social) pointlessness of the recent "Ebonics" controversy is a case in point (among many). That is relevant to HL to the extent that it was narrowed to the issue of whether the language of many black Americans is a descendent of "English" or not. The answer is one that "genetic" HL is not equipped to address, but a "genetic" answer was insisted upon by the disseminators of information to the society at large. Next, with regard to the discussion of isolates. We've already had some terminological quibbles. Clearly there were more "isolates" in the past than there are now. The assumption is simply that they are related to other languages (dead and/or still living) at a time depth that stymies us (temporarily, we hope). Guy Deutscher wrote: >But why are isolate languages actually so rare? ...wouldn t it be helpful >if linguists >discussed in general terms what the conditions are for the >survival of isolates , and >why these conditions are (relatively) so >rarely met? This is essentially the same issue as the current concern with the death of so many languages, and ultimately with the death of ANY "language". It has been cast by some, say, in reference to Johanna Nichols' ideas, as the death of language *families*, but, essentially that is the same as the death of ANY language. The question that really emerges which has a historical twist to it is: how long has the reduction of language families been going on in human history? Are the processes of destruction we see today essentially different from what has been going on for a tremendously long period in human history? There is a questionable assumption in this question that relates to Scott Delacey's point on isolates. He wrote: >unless this population created a new language rather >than bringing one with them, the language didn't start out as an >isolate. By extension, heshould assume that all languages are related *genetically*. Otherwise, various languages and/or current language families descended from independent isolates. The question then reaches back to the origin of language, and we will not know the answer until we have figured out how "language" arose and attained its current shape (universal/language-independent? shape, whatever that turns out to be). One possibility, which contradicts the assumption that there were NOT originally a number of language isolates, is that the diversification began before language reached its current "universal" form. It is dangerous to make that assumption, of course, because it invites all kinds of crackpots to keep presenting "survivals" of "pre-language" in selected current languages. But it is also dangerous to dismiss it out of hand since that allows the reverse crackpot-ism that ALL languages are "genetically" related in a fully formed "proto-world" language. (Of course, the way things are going that doesn't preclude that the lucky proto-world was only one of various pre-language isolates that managed to survive for non-linguistic reasons.) Both ideas (and more, perhaps) should be borne in mind as checks on each other, as both scholars and "dilettantes" continue on their quest. -- Benji From vovin at HAWAII.EDU Thu Mar 27 05:01:34 1997 From: vovin at HAWAII.EDU (Alexander Vovin) Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 19:01:34 -1000 Subject: isolates In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Reply follows. On Tue, 25 Mar 1997, Larry Trask wrote: > Alexander Vovin writes: > > > I would like to offer some corrections for the following passage in > > Larry Trask's posting, as some of the claims regarding the certain > > Asian languages as isolates are out of date, I am afraid. > > Well, I am happy to be corrected, but I have my doubts about some of > what follows. > > > First, there is a general consensus nowadays among all linguists > > working in historical Korean and Japanese that Korean and Japanese > > are related. > > "All"? I doubt it. I know that this idea has been gathering support, > but it's news to me that *all* specialists now accept it as > established. Anyway, I can name one specialist who certainly doesn't > accept this "consensus": Masayoshi Shibatani, who has repreatedly > characterized the proposed Japanese-Korean link as unsubstantiated. > And Shibatani also repeatedly points out that views on the possible > affiliations of Japanese are numerous, varied, and much debated. Shibatani is a syntactician, not a historical linguist. His most significant contribution to the historical Japanese linguistics is a chapter in his "Languages of Japan", which I believe, is the weakest part of the otherwise excellent book (I often use it as a textbook in my classes): it discusses indiscriminately various hypotheses of Japanese origins (without any reference to comparative method), and is seriously flawed and/or outdated in other respects. There are a number of "hypotheses" flourishing in Japan about the genetic origins of Japanese (probably no less than about Basque), but the general level of comparative linguistics in Japan remains very low (with several important exceptions, such as Hattori, Murayama, Osada etc.), as it is not based on comparative method, but on kokugogaku (national linguistics) methods undistingushable from folk etymology. Shibatani mentions several of them, but try to find any substantial discussion of any -- you won't. The center of research on Korean-Japanese relationship is now in the States, and it is one of the main cointributions of the scholars who belong to S. Martin's school. Anyway, let me refer you to the J. Whitman's dissertation: "Phonological Basis for the Comparison of Japanese and Korean", Harvard 1985, which together with a couple of articles published recently by S. Martin in Baldi's volume and in "Sprung from some common source" should persuade you that the two languages are related (I can provide you with some further reading, if you wish so). Well, even ground-breaking Martin's 1966 article is still valid at 75% percent, but you have to disregard the reconstructions proposed there. Well, anyway, among the people who are actively engaged in research on Japanese and Korean (and Shibatani is not one of them) it is accepted that two languages are related. > > > Their link to the rest of Altaic remains more disputable, but even > > here majority of the scholars lean toward the acceptance of genetic > > relationship between Japanese, Korean, and Tungusic. > > Well, even if this is true, "leaning toward the acceptance" of a > hypothesis is hardly the same thing as seeing it established to > general satisfaction. As far as I know, Japanese has not been > demonstrated to be securely related to anything else at all, and it > remains an isolate, as does Korean. Well, please see above. Japanese and Korean have been demonstrated to be related. That's enough for them not to be isolates. > > > In addition, none of these proposals are long-range, in > > the sense of long-range proposals concerning genetic affiliation of > > Basque or Nihali. Besides, both "Japanese" and "Korean" are to a > > great extent sociolinguistic terms: under "Japanese" we have a > > number of mutually unintelligible languages or "dialects", as they > > are usually called, with the depth comparable to that of > > Germanic. The same is true of "Korean": there are at least three > > Korean languages, again normally called "dialects", mutually > > unintelligible and with the depth comparable to that of > > Slavic. Thus, even if they were not related (but they are), each of > > them would represent a mini-family, and not a true isolate. > > This is news to me, and I am skeptical. No reference source available > to me even so much as mentions the possibility that either Japanese or > Korean might plausibly be regarded as a family of three or more > languages. The most I have seen is a suggestion that the highly > divergent Ryukyuan varieties of Japanese might be regarded as a > distinct language, but even this appears to be a minority view today > (though it was formerly more prominent). I can only say that you rely on sociolinguistically oriented sources. It is a matter of national policy in both Japan and Korea that everyone is "Japanese" and "Korean" and there is a "great national unity". This is not true as long as language divergence is concerned, and the break-off is not just bewtween Ryukyuan and Japanese. There are at least 5 branches within Ryukyuan: Okinawan proper, Northern Okinawan-Amami, Miyako, Hateruma, Yonaguni. None of them is mutually comprehensible, and they are all very divergent. The same is true about mainisland Japanese: a person from Tokyo will not understand a person from Toohoku )north-east), and will barely understand a person from Kyuushuu. A close situation exists in Korea: while most dialects spoken on the Korean mainland are mutually intelligible (Korean proper), a dialect spoken on the island of Ceycwuto (Chechudo, Quelpart) is too divergent to be understood by a person from Seoul. THe same is applicable to the Northeastern Hamkyeng dialect, spoken also in adjacent regions of China and in Russia, on which I myself have done a fieldwork. The mutual comprehension is almost out of question, and the languages have diverged to the point where they have almost different verbal suffixation. Hope this helps to dissolve your doubts. > > > Second, over last seven years there has been presented quite a > > chunk of evidence allowing us tentatively to link Ainu with > > Austronesian and Austroasiatic. > > > There is a consensus between anyone who ever tried to venture in > > this field (late Murayama S., L. Reid, J. Bengtson, P. Sidwell, > > I.Pejros, Yanagizaki Y. , and myself) that Austric connection is the > > likeliest for Ainu. Although, none has yet come up with a proof > > beyond the reasonable doubt, this is the only connection among > > proposed for Ainu that cannot be easily disproved (contrary to the > > case, e.g., with Ainu and Altaic). Thus, this is situation > > remarkably different from Basque situation, where majority of > > specialists reject any remote proposals. > > But no relationship has been established between Ainu and anything > else at all, and it remains an isolate. Having a favorite conjecture > is a far cry from having a persuasive case. Anyway, even Austric > itself is not generally accepted as a valid construct. It has been established that Ainu is UNLIKELY to be an isolate: for me it is enough to take off the list of definite isolates, if we want to be completely honest with ourselves. Let's place it into intermediate group. Austric (as consisting of Austronesian and Austroasiatic, but not including Kadai) is accepted nowadays by all known to me leading scholars in both Austroneasian and Austroasiatic. It is even accepted by R. Blust, who is one of the most carteful historical linguists known to me. > > > Third, since both Ket and Yukaghir did have relatives in the > > recent past, this very fact seems to work against Larry Trask point > > that there are more isolates among us than we suppose. As a matter > > of fact, it shows us how isolates come into being: by extinction of > > the other family members. Thus, there are probably less true > > isolates than we suppose. > > I don't follow this at all. If we can watch isolates come into > existence before our eyes in historical times, then why is that an > argument against the existence of numerous isolates which lost any > relatives they may have had ages ago? > Nope, it is an argument against your point that there are more isolates around us than we tend to think. About modern status of Ket and Yukaghir, please see my reply to Thomason. > > In particular, as I intended to demonstrate above, Larry Trask's > > Asia list can be safely reduced to Gilyak, Nihali, and Burushaski. > > "Safely"? I don't think so. As I always say, let us discuss the evidence. I remove Japanese and Korean from your list, and since it is accepted by virtually everyone who works in the historical and comparative Japanese field (using of course, comparative method, and not folk etymology), I believe that the burden of proof that Korean and Japanese are not related rests on your shoulders. Please present us with the evidence that the two languages in question are not related, using exactly the same technique as you apply for Basque: that is, showing that we have faulty etymologies etc. Then I will be happy to present counterevidence, showing, e.g. why such highly divergent words as Tokyo Japanese isi and Seoul Korean tol "stone" are in fact cognates. > > > Among those remaining three, Gilyak looks like a Nostratic language > > (although it has yet to be proven), > > Er, um...but *Nostratic* is still very far from being established. I don't know anything about the Southern branches of Nostratic: Kartvelian, Afrasian, and Dravidian (and I have grave doubts about Nostratic validity of the latter), but there are very few doubts in my mind that IE, Uralic and Altaic are related -- I have an article in a forthcoming volume on Nostratic from John Benjamins. Anyway, I believe Nostratic is not yet finally established, but I wouldn't call it "very far". > > > and I even will not be very surprised if ultimately it turns out to > > be a very abberant member of Altaic family: after all, scholars so > > far applied only internal reconstruction to Gilyak, but we should > > not overlook the fact that what we call Gilyak actually consists of > > three or four mutually untelligible and pretty much divergent > > languages, the fact that allows comparative reconstruction that is > > yet to be done. > > Interesting, certainly, but Gilyak is still an isolate. Rather, we should call it a small family with no apparent relatives. But it is not a single isolate -- the same as about Ket and Yukaghir. Alexander Vovin > > Larry Trask > COGS > University of Sussex > Brighton BN1 9QH > UK > > larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk > > From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Mar 27 10:20:00 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 10:20:00 +0000 Subject: isolates In-Reply-To: from "Alexander Vovin" at Mar 26, 97 07:01:34 pm Message-ID: Alexander Vovin writes: [To keep this posting down to a manageable length, I have snipped the remarks made by me and quoted by Vovin; hope that doesn't obscure the discussion. I have also snipped a few of Vovin's remarks on which I have nothing to say.] [snip Vovin on Shibatani] > The center of research on Korean-Japanese relationship is now in the > States, and it is one of the main cointributions of the scholars who > belong to S. Martin's school. Anyway, let me refer you to the > J. Whitman's dissertation: "Phonological Basis for the Comparison of > Japanese and Korean", Harvard 1985, which together with a couple of > articles published recently by S. Martin in Baldi's volume and in > "Sprung from some common source" should persuade you that the two > languages are related (I can provide you with some further reading, > if you wish so). Well, even ground-breaking Martin's 1966 article is > still valid at 75% percent, but you have to disregard the > reconstructions proposed there. Well, anyway, among the people who > are actively engaged in research on Japanese and Korean (and > Shibatani is not one of them) it is accepted that two languages are > related. [snip Trask] > Well, please see above. Japanese and Korean have been demonstrated > to be related. That's enough for them not to be isolates. Well, I am happy to be persuaded that Shibatani's views are not representative, and that some progress has been made in linking Japanese and Korean. However, I still entertain doubts about your flat assertion that the two languages "have been demonstrated to be related". Even Samuel Martin does not maintain that. In his article in the Lamb and Mitchell volume, he most emphatically does not assert that J and K are related beyond reasonable doubt, or anything close to this. Instead, he is exceedingly cautious. He opens with the words "There is no general agreement on the genetic relationships of either Japanese or Korean." He continues later with "I believe the majority view today would hold that Japanese and Korean are *more likely* to be related to each other than to any other language..." [emphasis added]. And that's about it. The only further remarks he offers are suggestions that his own work and the work of others are perhaps lifting the comparison of J and K above the level of mere speculation, but he acknowledges difficulties and uncertainties. This does not strike me as a ringing endorsement of your very confident assertion. Of course, Martin's private views may be rather different from what he is prepared to say in public, but I can only go by the latter. And Martin is not prepared to assert that Japanese and Korean are related. [snip Trask on languages versus dialects] > I can only say that you rely on sociolinguistically oriented > sources. It is a matter of national policy in both Japan and Korea > that everyone is "Japanese" and "Korean" and there is a "great > national unity". This is not true as long as language divergence is > concerned, and the break-off is not just bewtween Ryukyuan and > Japanese. There are at least 5 branches within Ryukyuan: Okinawan > proper, Northern Okinawan-Amami, Miyako, Hateruma, Yonaguni. None of > them is mutually comprehensible, and they are all very > divergent. The same is true about mainisland Japanese: a person from > Tokyo will not understand a person from Toohoku )north-east), and > will barely understand a person from Kyuushuu. A close situation > exists in Korea: while most dialects spoken on the Korean mainland > are mutually intelligible (Korean proper), a dialect spoken on the > island of Ceycwuto (Chechudo, Quelpart) is too divergent to be > understood by a person from Seoul. THe same is applicable to the > Northeastern Hamkyeng dialect, spoken also in adjacent regions of > China and in Russia, on which I myself have done a fieldwork. The > mutual comprehension is almost out of question, and the languages > have diverged to the point where they have almost different verbal > suffixation. Hope this helps to dissolve your doubts. What you're raising here is the old question of how we distinguish languages from dialects, and of course we can't. Yes, I'm aware of the mutual incomprehensibility of the several varieties of Japanese (though I didn't know about the similar case for Korean). But mutual comprehensibility is only one possible criterion for recognizing language boundaries, and it's not even the one we mainly rely on. Instead, political and social factors, where these exist, are more usually regarded as overriding comprehensibility. Hell, I can't understand the English of Tyneside in England, but nobody wants to see that as a distinct language. And I certainly can't understand the speech of large chunks of Scotland, but hardly anybody, apart from a few Scottish nationalists, wants to see Scots as a distinct language from English. [snip Vovin and Trask on Ainu] > It has been established that Ainu is UNLIKELY to be an isolate: for > me it is enough to take off the list of definite isolates, if we > want to be completely honest with ourselves. Let's place it into > intermediate group. Austric (as consisting of Austronesian and > Austroasiatic, but not including Kadai) is accepted nowadays by all > known to me leading scholars in both Austroneasian and > Austroasiatic. It is even accepted by R. Blust, who is one of the > most carteful historical linguists known to me. I'm sorry, but I simply cannot understand this. You are telling me that Ainu is "unlikely" to be an isolate, even though no relationship has been demonstrated between Ainu and anything else at all. I find this position incomprehensible. [snip] [snip Vovin and Trask on Asian isolates] > As I always say, let us discuss the evidence. I remove Japanese > and Korean from your list, and since it is accepted by virtually > everyone who works in the historical and comparative Japanese field > (using of course, comparative method, and not folk etymology), I > believe that the burden of proof that Korean and Japanese are not > related rests on your shoulders. Please present us with the evidence > that the two languages in question are not related, using exactly > the same technique as you apply for Basque: that is, showing that we > have faulty etymologies etc. Then I will be happy to present > counterevidence, showing, e.g. why such highly divergent words as > Tokyo Japanese isi and Seoul Korean tol "stone" are in fact > cognates. You are joking. It is not on my shoulders to demonstrate that any languages are not related; this is a logical impossibility. If you can demonstrate that J and K are related beyond reasonable doubt, I'll be delighted, since I prefer positive results to negative ones. [snip on Nostratic] > I don't know anything about the Southern branches of Nostratic: > Kartvelian, Afrasian, and Dravidian (and I have grave doubts about > Nostratic validity of the latter), but there are very few doubts in > my mind that IE, Uralic and Altaic are related -- I have an article > in a forthcoming volume on Nostratic from John Benjamins. Anyway, I > believe Nostratic is not yet finally established, but I wouldn't > call it "very far". You may be right, but my optimism on this point is a little more tempered than yours. [on the putative isolated status of Gilyak] > Rather, we should call it a small family with no apparent > relatives. But it is not a single isolate -- the same as about Ket > and Yukaghir. We are merely quibbling over words here. A small family of one language with no apparent relatives is my idea of an isolate. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From hale1 at ALCOR.CONCORDIA.CA Thu Mar 27 12:40:52 1997 From: hale1 at ALCOR.CONCORDIA.CA (Mark Hale) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 07:40:52 -0500 Subject: isoltes Message-ID: Alexander Vovin writes: > Austric (as consisting of Austronesian and > Austroasiatic, but not including Kadai) is accepted nowadays by all > known to me leading scholars in both Austroneasian and > Austroasiatic. No, it isn't. Or rather, maybe it is, but this only indicates that you don't know very many Austronesianists. An assertion that any such family (Austric) has been demonstrated to exist by the normal canons of the comparative method is absurd, given the published material on the subject. Indeed, the reconstruction of Austroasiatic itself is still very tentative -- if indeed it existed, which I personally seriously doubt. [I.e., I doubt there is any family which has the makeup of the currently declared makeup of Austroasiatic, though doubtless many of the languages within that putative group are related to one another.] Can someone tell me why the question of "isolates" is of any linguistic interest whatsoever? If we all accept, as I assume we must, that the definition of "language" is a socio-political one, then the question reduces to "why do we sometimes find groups of speakers, sociopolitically defined to be speakers of 'one language', who can't be demonstrated, given the limited nature of our evidence, the small number of scholars who have invested a small amount of time (seen from a human history perspective) working on them, and the extremely limited number of plausibly reconstructed language families which we could possibly relate them to, to be related to another language?" The answer is then, of course, contained in the question. We don't have the right kind of evidence (yet), for the reasons I've inserted into the question, and we may never have the evidence. Without such evidence, the languages will count as 'isolates'. But it isn't a property of the language -- it's a property of the evidentiary record. Sometimes it's good and allows reconstruction of an ancestor, sometimes it isn't and doesn't. Is this surprising or interesting in any way? Mark From MFCEPRH at FS1.ART.MAN.AC.UK Thu Mar 27 12:32:19 1997 From: MFCEPRH at FS1.ART.MAN.AC.UK (Richard Hogg) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 12:32:19 GMT0BST Subject: isolates and Scots Message-ID: On 27 Mar 97 at 10:20, Larry Trask wrote: > And I certainly can't understand the > speech of large chunks of Scotland, but hardly anybody, apart from a > few Scottish nationalists, wants to see Scots as a distinct language > from English. > Some of us, who are not "Scottish nationalists" [sic] will be coming to get Larry and carry him off to the Highlands. Richard ******************************************************************************** ********************** Richard M. Hogg Tel: +44(0)161 275 3164 Department of English Fax: +44(0)161 275 3256 and American Studies e-mail: r.m.hogg at man.ac.uk University of Manchester web: http://www.art.man.ac.uk/english/staff/rmh/home.htm Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL ******************************************************************************** ********************** From Ralf.Georg at BONN.NETSURF.DE Thu Mar 27 13:41:17 1997 From: Ralf.Georg at BONN.NETSURF.DE (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 14:41:17 +0100 Subject: Vovin on Nostratic and other things Message-ID: Alexander Vovin wrote: >I don't know anything about the Southern branches of Nostratic: >Kartvelian, Afrasian, and Dravidian (and I have grave doubts about >Nostratic validity of the latter), but there are very few doubts in my >mind that IE, Uralic and Altaic are related -- I have an article in a >forthcoming volume on Nostratic from John Benjamins. Anyway, I believe >Nostratic is not yet finally established, but I wouldn't call it "very >far". Well, Sasha, please let's not get into another soap-opera over this, but maybe you will wish to rephrase your first sentence. How is it possible that you "don't know anything" about Kartvelian, Afrasian and Dravidian, yet feel entitled to voice doubts about the proper classification of the latter (and not on the former two). Come on ... Did I ever tell you, btw, why I'm not a Nostraticist ? Because I lack the first-hand knowledge of Dravidian, that's why (sounds elitist, I know, but that's the way I've been educated here). And, just to join in with what Larry Trask said earlier this day: there is *absolutely no reason whatsoever* why the burden of proof should rest on the shoulders of people doubting a proposed relationship. Absolutely no. Never. The major reason being of course that this is, as Larry Trask pointed out before, logically impossible (and you wouldn't expect anybody to do a logically impossible thing, would you?). The burden of proof is always, only, and exclusively on those who *assert* something. Seems hard to swallow, but such is life. And another bitter pill: those who assert something cannot at the same time define the criteria by which skeptics are to judge those assertions. If it were so, you could just wave away *any* criticism by merely saying "That's irrelevant". Irrelevant to you maybe, but not necessarily to others. There is no such thing as a "universally applicable criterion for truth" or sth. like that (not only in linguistics, btw, I prefer the constructivist outlook on things, anyway). Especially in our trade, where argumentations cannot be totally kept free from hermeneutic procedures (however hard we try to, and I'm nothing less than an adherent of hermeneutics, to be sure !), where we cannot trust on experiments as falsifying instances etc., you can *never* expect to persuade everybody in the field that a - let's call it non-trivial - relationship really holds. You will, however, be successful to persuade those collegues in the field, to whom you can show that your assumptions are actually *useful* for their independent purposes, e.g. if you can show me that the assumption that, say, Mongolian is ultimately related to - among other languages - Japanese (in a meaningful way, i.e. allowing reconstructions) actually allows me to *understand* certain facts of Mongolian better (or *at all*) than it would be possible working with Mongolian data alone, you'll have won me over *in that very moment* into the pro-Altaic trenches (provided I find nothing to mouth about your data ;-) ...). That's - in short - the success story of Indo-European linguistics. There is an *awful* lot of things I begin to understand about, say, Slavic or Greek Morphology only after I start looking at other I.E. languages or at the Proto. Whether Altaic (Micro- or Macro) will look like that in - say - twenty years, remains to be seen, but I remain, as you will expect - skeptical. In order to say something irenic (sic!, not "ironic") on the eve of the (Western) Easter holidays, I'd like to add that I myself - without being a specialist in neither Japanese nor Korean - find the progress which has been made recently in the comparison of those two languages quite impressive and I'd like to see the efforts at reconstructing the underlying proto prolongued. And I *am* sympathetic to the idea of that Proto being related to Proto-Tungusic - for the simple reason that there - provided the Japanese and Korean reconstruction I've seen are correct, which I am in no position to assert - seem to be some systematic correspondences in morphology between them, so we may expect something interesting from this side in the future. My opinion on Turkic and Mongolian as members of that same "Altaic" language family is known to you (skeptical, what else ?). Serdechnyj privet, Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel/Fax +49-228-691332+ From johanna at UCLINK.BERKELEY.EDU Thu Mar 27 01:43:10 1997 From: johanna at UCLINK.BERKELEY.EDU (Johanna Nichols) Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 17:43:10 -0800 Subject: Ainu & Gilyak, Japanese & Korean Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > >One thing that caught my attention in the linguistic database from >Johanna Nichols' "Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time" was the >typological near-identity of Gilyak and Ainu. Of all the typological >features listed, Ainu and Gilyak only differ in that Gilyak has >numerical classifiers (26 of them). Is there any other evidence for >contacts between Gilyak and Ainu? > CAUTION -- That database should be used as a pointer to the descriptive publications, not as a full typological description in itself. If Gilyak and Ainu exhibit typological near-identity, that just goes to show you how impoverished a typological description is compared to the real thing, because those two languages are very different. (More generally, Gilyak is very different from any other language on earth.) Since the question of Japanese and Korean has come up on the list, I have a question for Alexander Vovin and/or others who have worked on these languages: what, in a nutshell, is the evidence that Japanese and Korean are related? I've read as much of the relevant literature as I could find, and the only support offered seems to be that if you assume they are related you can find sound correspondences and apply the comparative method. But what is the evidence for assuming relatedness in the first place? Thanks for any help anyone can give me. Johanna Nichols Slavic Languages, UC Berkeley From mcv at PI.NET Thu Mar 27 18:33:54 1997 From: mcv at PI.NET (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 18:33:54 GMT Subject: isoltes In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19970327074050.009ce6d0@alcor.concordia.ca> Message-ID: Mark Hale wrote: >Can someone tell me why the question of "isolates" is of any >linguistic interest whatsoever? If we all accept, as I assume we >must, that the definition of "language" is a socio-political one, >then the question reduces to "why do we sometimes find groups of >speakers, sociopolitically defined to be speakers of 'one >language', who can't be demonstrated, given the limited nature >of our evidence, the small number of scholars who have invested >a small amount of time (seen from a human history perspective) >working on them, and the extremely limited number of plausibly >reconstructed language families which we could possibly relate >them to, to be related to another language?" You are confusing "relatedness" with "reconstruction", something which Merritt Ruhlen just loves to denounce. You don't need a reconstructed proto-language to know whether two languages are related or not. A case in point is Afro-Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic), considered a valid grouping for over a century, where only now we are seeing serious attempts at reconstruction (and they differ enough among themselves to cast doubts on whether they are all equally "plausible"). The reconstruction of PIE has not changed the membership of the family one bit [although it has shown for instance that Armenian is in fact not an Iranian language], which was obvious from the start [Hittite and Tocharian were discovered later]. What reconstruction *can* do, is to show relationships that were not quite so obvious previously, and, most importantly, it can show that relationships which were thought possible (but not obvious) previously are in fact false. I would imagine, for instance, that the work done on reconstructing Old Chinese has been crucial in dismissing any close genetic relationship between Chinese and Thai or Vietnamese. == Miguel Carrasquer Vidal ~ ~ Amsterdam _____________ ~ ~ mcv at pi.net |_____________||| ========================== Ce .sig n'est pas une .cig From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Fri Mar 28 00:33:29 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 19:33:29 EST Subject: No subject Message-ID: Return-Path: Received: from UNIVSCVM (NJE origin SMTP at UNIVSCVM) by VM.SC.EDU (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 5477; Thu, 27 Mar 1997 18:26:28 -0500 Received: from relay1.Hawaii.Edu by VM.SC.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R3) with TCP; Thu, 27 Mar 97 18:26:21 EST Received: from uhunix2.its.hawaii.edu ([128.171.44.7]) by relay1.Hawaii.Edu with SMTP id <587007(4)>; Thu, 27 Mar 1997 13:21:33 -1000 Received: from localhost by uhunix2.its.Hawaii.Edu with SMTP id <148527(8)>; Thu, 27 Mar 1997 13:26:25 -1000 Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 13:26:23 -1000 From: Alexander Vovin X-Sender: vovin at uhunix2 To: Dorothy Disterheft Subject: Re: your posting to HISTLING In-Reply-To: <97Mar27.013543hwt.370800(8)@relay2.Hawaii.Edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII > I believe that that I again have make some corrections... > > On Tue, 25 Mar 1997, Sarah G. Thomason wrote: > > > S.T.: > > > Alexander Vovin's confidence that some of the isolates > listed > by Larry Trask have been de-isolated by general consensus among > > specialists is probably too sanguine. A recent review in LANGUAGE, > > for instance, expressed doubts about the evidence for connecting > > Japanese with anything else (I don't remember the details of the > > reviewer's arguments; the review appeared three or four years ago; > > it's possible that the reviewer's focus was on Japanese + Austronesian > > rather than on Japanese + Korean). > A,V.: [NOTE: this passage has been modified from an original version by order of our moderator. Since this is the only way to get my reply through, I had to comply] > Well, I believe that this is not the way how the refutation of a genetic > claim has to be presented. Prof. Thomason cites some review in "Language", which in my opinion cannot be used as a "proof" that Japanese and Korean are not related, especially in the light of the fact that there are many other works on the subject with which Prof. Thomason does not seem to be familiar with. (I suspect that the review in question is that by B.Comrie of Starostin 1991 -- published in Language 69.4 (1993) -- that as far as I remember does not state that Japanese is an isolate, but dicusses the claim that Japanese is Altaic). > S.T.: > > > > And I have my own concerns about evidence linking Ainu with > > anything else, to the extent that the evidence relies on the > > reconstructions in Vovin's book on Ainu (which contains proposals > > like Proto-Ainu *hd- for a large correspondence set in which most > > dialects have w- and the others have segments which could easily be > > reflexes of *w-; Vovin declines to reconstruct *w- here because > > there are few words with this correspondence set, whereas both *h and > > *d are reconstructible). > > A.V.: > Sorry, but this is a gross misrepresentation of my work. First, PA *hd is > not a proposal for a large correspondence set, and my TENTATIVE hypothesis > that Ainu IS LIKELY to be genetically related to Austroasiatic is not > build on this correspondence alone. It is true that reconstruction *hd > might explain nicely such cases as Ainu wakka < *hdakka "water" and PAA > *?dAk "id". It is also true that majority of Ainu dialects have either w- > or G- or h- in this case. But it is not comparative evidence that warrants > a reconstruction of some kind of cluster there. *hd was again a tentative > solution, but if Prof. Thomason have a better explanation for the > morphonological alternation between w- and s- (which I believe may reflect > interdental voiced D (as in English "the", denoted in my book as /d/), I > will gladly listen to the proposal. NOTE: since that time I have given up > on reconstructing *hd in the word "water", now I believe that w- in this > word is rather prothetic, as some of the earliest materials on Ainu have > just AKKA or AK. > > A.V.: > What's important in my humble opinion that HISTORICALLY these languages > are not isolates. Today they became isolates: so how can it prove that we > have more isolates than we tend to think? > > S.T.: > But what evidence > > have we, for any language that we all agree is an isolate and that > > has no attested former relatives, that it used to have some > > relatives? It's easy enough to imagine a situation in which no > > split will occur, ever: just situate your hypothetical language in > > a remote mountain valley (say), in a small area that only supports > > a small cohesive population -- a single speech community in which (roughly) > > everyone talks to everyone else -- and leave everyone there permanently. > > No split. A belief that there are no real-life cases of this general > > sort (it doesn't have to be a mountain valley, etc.) is a matter of > > faith, not science. > > A.V.: > None, of course. But note that we do not discuss such hypothetical cases > as you propose. We do discuss real-life situations, where of course > neither Ket nor Yukaghir are isolates from the historical perspective. > I'll tell more: they are not isolates even from the synchronic > perspective: 1) Ket is represented by two "dialects", Sym and Imbat, that > are more like two separate languages, and they are not mutually > intelligible; 2) Yukaghir's "dialects", Tundra Yukaghir and Kolyma > Yukaghir are again independent languages, highly divergent, and not > miutually intelligible. So off the list they go. Regarding your > hypothetical language in a small valley, I would very much like to see an > example (no splits, completely homegeneous, and no outside relations > whatsoever -- so an example like Batsbi won't work). I am unaware of such > cases -- and until I see one I won't be able to agree that belief in such > cases is more scientific than the other way around. S.T.: > > Vovin is right, of course, in saying that Japanese is not an isolate > > even if it has no demonstrable relatives, if it is really a small > > family of very close-related languages. But then Proto-Japanese (still > > on the hypothesis that it has no established relatives) would be/have > > been an isolate, so it would still go into the total. > > > A.V.: > Unfortunately, this hypothesis is wrong. It has been demonstrated that > Japanese is related to Korean beyond a reasonable doubt. There are many > works on this subject by S.Martin, Murayama S., Lee Ki-moon, R.Miller, > J. Whitman, L. Serafim, B.Mathias, and myself written in English and > German, leaving aside a vast literature in more exotic Japanese, Korean, > and Russian. Let us discuss the evidence presented in these works rather > than to reach verdict on the basis of a single close-to-anonymous review > in "Language". > From vovin at HAWAII.EDU Thu Mar 27 23:46:25 1997 From: vovin at HAWAII.EDU (Alexander Vovin) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 13:46:25 -1000 Subject: isoltes In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19970327074050.009ce6d0@alcor.concordia.ca> Message-ID: On Thu, 27 Mar 1997, Mark Hale wrote: > Alexander Vovin writes: > > > Austric (as consisting of Austronesian and > > Austroasiatic, but not including Kadai) is accepted nowadays by all > > known to me leading scholars in both Austroneasian and > > Austroasiatic. > > No, it isn't. Or rather, maybe it is, but this only indicates that > you don't know very many Austronesianists. I can only return the compliment: if my memory is correct you were not present at CAMAC 1993, where Diffloth, Blust, Reid, Starosta and others were present, and where the issue was discussed at length in connection with Reid's presentation, published in the last issue of Oceanic Linguistics for 1994 (?#32). Of course, Benedict who was there too, denies the PAN-PAA connection, but I believe the consensus reached was that AA-AN is the only fruitful link to follow. An assertion that any such > family (Austric) has been demonstrated to exist by the normal canons > of the comparative method is absurd, given the published material > on the subject. Is not as absurd as you think. PAN and PAA share very striking common morphological markers -- please see Reid's article I mentioned above. It is rather quantitative than qualitative difficulty that gets in the way: there are very few cognates discovered so far. But the few that are there are quite impressive. Of course it is a long way before Austric reaches the stage of elaboration of IE, but this is no reason to throw it in a junk basket now and to condemn all research in this area. Indeed, the reconstruction of Austroasiatic itself > is still very tentative -- if indeed it existed, which I personally > seriously doubt. [I.e., I doubt there is any family which has the > makeup of the currently declared makeup of Austroasiatic, though > doubtless many of the languages within that putative group are > related to one another.] You are of course right in one aspect: there is no comprehensive AA reconstruction yet. However, I believe that in the rest you are going too far. It is true that some scholars doubt the relationship of Munda with the rest of the family. But are you seriously suggesting e.g. that Vietnamese is not related to Mon, and none of them is related to Nikobarese or Aslian? > > Can someone tell me why the question of "isolates" is of any > linguistic interest whatsoever? If we all accept, as I assume we > must, that the definition of "language" is a socio-political one, > then the question reduces to "why do we sometimes find groups of > speakers, sociopolitically defined to be speakers of 'one > language', who can't be demonstrated, given the limited nature > of our evidence, the small number of scholars who have invested > a small amount of time (seen from a human history perspective) > working on them, and the extremely limited number of plausibly > reconstructed language families which we could possibly relate > them to, to be related to another language?" The answer is then, > of course, contained in the question. We don't have the right > kind of evidence (yet), for the reasons I've inserted into the > question, and we may never have the evidence. Without such evidence, > the languages will count as 'isolates'. But it isn't a property > of the language -- it's a property of the evidentiary record. > Sometimes it's good and allows reconstruction of an ancestor, > sometimes it isn't and doesn't. Is this surprising or interesting > in any way? It remains unclear to me why we all must accept language as "socio-political" in the first place. From sally at ISP.PITT.EDU Thu Mar 27 18:41:24 1997 From: sally at ISP.PITT.EDU (Sarah G. Thomason) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 13:41:24 -0500 Subject: isolates Message-ID: In discussing the hypothesis of Japanese-Korean relationship, Alexander Vovin says, rightly, that I shouldn't have referred to a review without checking the exact reference. So I have now checked: the reviewer was David Solnit, the review was of Paul Benedict's JAPANESE/AUSTRO-TAI (Ann Arbor: Karoma), and the review appeared in LANGUAGE 68:188-96 (1992). Solnit concludes his review as follows: "Finally, the correspondences with Austronesian and with Altaic, to the extent that both are valid, need to be evaluated and placed in relation to each other, whether that entails choosing one as inherited and the other as borrowed, or whether Japanese is one of those rare cases having in its past a break in normal genetic transmission." Larry Trask has already made it clear in his own response to A.V.'s posting that not all specialists agree that a relationship between Japanese and Korean has been established. A.V. goes on to say that I have grossly misrepresented his own work, in my reference to his reconstruction of *hd- for a correspondence set consisting mainly of w's. My methodological point was that a claim of genetic relationship that rests in part on such reconstructions is not one that I, at least, would place very much confidence in. He asks if I can offer a better reconstruction for the correspondence set in question. I do believe that I can: I propose *w. The fact that *w would, on the evidence of the dialects, be a rare Proto-Ainu phoneme doesn't bother me nearly as much as A.V.'s own proposal. Here is the relevant material from his book A RECONSTRUCTION OF PROTO-AINU (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993): 1. The correspondence set (which I call large because it ranges over a large number of dialects): w : w : w : w : w : w : w : w : w : w : u-/w- : -G- : v : v : -gu- 2. A.V.'s rationale for reconstructing *hd-: He does not reconstruct *w because "[w] is extremely rare in common Ainu. It occurs initially in five words, one of which is doubtful, and in medial position in three words....the distribution of [w] is quite peculiar -- it occurs mostly before [a], once before [e], and once before [o]...." He also considers, and rejects, reconstructing *hw- or *gw-, saying that "the existence of such a cluster seems quite unnatural in a system which lacks [w] itself." Therefore, he continues, "we have to look for some sound which existed in PA and could produce the [w] sound in the process of development." He likes *h for the first segment because it "can be easily reconstructed on the basis of [two particular dialects, the ones with -G- and -gu-]"; and he likes *d for the second segment in the cluster because "it could undergo spirantisation *d > [eth, sorry no voiced interdental fricative on my computer], and the shift * > w is rather probable." The consonant system that A.V. reconstructs for Proto-Ainu is /p t k q d g m n s y h r/ (where q = glottal stop). I no longer have the book at hand, but I don't recall any elaborate C clusters at all, much less something as weird as hd-, in any of the dialects. The sound changes A.V. posits from this very strange C cluster are themselves not compelling. Since we are talking about dialects of the same language, there also isn't much time for the weird cluster to undergo all these INDEPENDENT changes in every single dialect....changes that just happen to lead to the very same rather surprising result in ten dialects, for instance. I leave it to other HISTLINGers to judge the plausibility of this reconstruction (and others in the book). -- Sally Thomason sally at isp.pitt.edu P.S. The point I made in the same message about isolates in remote mountain valleys was a methodological one, not a claim either about polygenesis of human language or about the existence of such cases ...though Basque comes close. I made no reference to complete homogeneity of my hypothetical speech community, as A.V. suggests in his reply. From fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG Fri Mar 28 00:22:25 1997 From: fcosws at PRAIRIENET.ORG (Steven Schaufele) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 18:22:25 -0600 Subject: isoltes In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19970327074050.009ce6d0@alcor.concordia.ca> Message-ID: Mark Hale writes, > Can someone tell me why the question of "isolates" is of any > linguistic interest whatsoever? If we all accept, as I assume we > must, that the definition of "language" is a socio-political one, > then the question reduces to "why do we sometimes find groups of > speakers, sociopolitically defined to be speakers of 'one > language', who can't be demonstrated, given the limited nature > of our evidence, the small number of scholars who have invested > a small amount of time (seen from a human history perspective) > working on them, and the extremely limited number of plausibly > reconstructed language families which we could possibly relate > them to, to be related to another language?" The answer is then, > of course, contained in the question. We don't have the right > kind of evidence (yet), for the reasons I've inserted into the > question, and we may never have the evidence. Without such evidence, > the languages will count as 'isolates'. But it isn't a property > of the language -- it's a property of the evidentiary record. > Sometimes it's good and allows reconstruction of an ancestor, > sometimes it isn't and doesn't. Is this surprising or interesting > in any way? Frankly, i would say the question of `isolates' is of interest primarily to researchers who find motivation in the label. As Mark points out, to call a language an isolate is to confess that we don't *yet* have any good evidence of its affiliation with any (other) known language or language family. The label thus constitutes an invitation for further research. I suspect in most cases the invitation falls on deaf ears; most of us frankly can't get too excited about the possible affiliation of, say, a certain language of Northern Australia with certain languages of New Guinea. But for those of us whose areas of interest and/or expertise happen to include one or both of these areas, the suggestion is a spur to possibly fruitful work. So i guess what i'm saying is that `isolate', as a technical term in linguistics, is of peculiarly `in-house' value. It doesn't mean much to tell the general public `Basque/Burushaski/whatever is a "linguistic isolate"', but saying the same thing to a competent linguist may spur hann on to some good serious work that may or may not establish a previously unknown affiliation and, whether it does or not, may along the way provide us with some very useful/interesting real information. In any case, Mark is quite right when he says that the label really tells us more about the current state of scholarship on a particular language than about the language itself. Best, Steven --------------------- Dr. Steven Schaufele 712 West Washington Urbana, IL 61801 217-344-8240 fcosws at prairienet.org http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html **** O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum! *** *** Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis! *** From delancey at DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU Fri Mar 28 01:02:44 1997 From: delancey at DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU (Scott DeLancey) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 17:02:44 -0800 Subject: Chinese and Tai (was: isoltes) In-Reply-To: <3367bd90.100160075@mailhost.pi.net> Message-ID: On Thu, 27 Mar 1997, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > and Tocharian were discovered later]. What reconstruction *can* do, > is to show relationships that were not quite so obvious previously, > and, most importantly, it can show that relationships which were > thought possible (but not obvious) previously are in fact false. I > would imagine, for instance, that the work done on reconstructing Old > Chinese has been crucial in dismissing any close genetic relationship > between Chinese and Thai or Vietnamese. Well, no, as a matter of fact. Reconstruction of Old Chinese does a lot to strengthen the case for Sino-Tibetan, i.e. the relationship between Chinese and Tibeto-Burman, as reconstructed OC looks a lot more like TB than later stages do. I think, though I'm not up-to- date on the literature, that recent work on comparative Tai-Kadai reconstructs a proto-language which is phonologically less similar to Chinese than modern Tai languages are, and thus bolsters the case against Sino-Tai. But none of this is "crucial"; the case against the relationship of Chinese, Tai, and Vietnamese is pretty clear without any reconstruction of anything. The original basis for the notion of Sino-Tai was resemblances in phonological structure (tones, monosyllabicity, similarities of syllable structure) and a large body of shared vocabulary, with nice, tolerably regular, correspondences and everything. The original splitting suggestion (Paul Benedict's, published in 1942) was based on the observation that this common vocabulary is virtually all the sorts of thing that we know are easily borrowed (technological items, metallurgy, trade goods, conspicuous animals originally characteristic of only one language area ('elephant', 'horse'), terms referring to markets, etc.). None of the basic vocabulary (pronouns, kin terms, natural phenomena, geographical features, body parts) is shared. This makes a pretty good case that all this is borrowed (the borrowing went in both directions, it turns out), and thus not evidence for relationship. The splitting case is strengthened when we look at Sino-Tibetan. It turns out that very little of this shared vocabulary turns up in Tibeto-Burman--but the vocabulary common to Chinese and T-B contains all kinds of items, including pronouns and other pretty basic stuff. So Sino-Tibetan is pretty secure. But there's no way to construct a family tree linking Chinese to both T-B and Tai, when the sets of vocabulary that it shares with each are essentially disjunct. (So, by the way, while as others have noted, it is impossible in principle to demonstrate that two languages are absolutely not related at all, it *is* possible to demonstrate that they are not related at some particular level--e.g. that, regardless of whether English and French are related at some level, French is clearly not Germanic, or that, even if Chinese and Tai might be remotely related, Tai is definitely not Sino-Tibetan). Scott DeLancey Department of Linguistics University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403, USA delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Fri Mar 28 01:14:02 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 20:14:02 EST Subject: ICHL workshop Message-ID: ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS ================================ Typological change: Causes and course Workshop at 13th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Duesseldorf, Friday August 15 1997 Research in recent years has increased our knowledge of the possible causes of typological change. Internal motivation, such as the operation of Wackernagel's Law or the promotion of topicalised word-order to canonical word-order, is now seen to have played a distinct role in the development of well-known cases such as English and German. Less mainstream language groups such as Celtic have gone through a shift to an unusual type in a relatively short time which could imply the impact of external forces, i.e. contact with substrates which imposed their native word order. These are standard issues in typology but the field is taken to cover more than this and to touch on other aspects of language structure in a cross-linguistic context. The intention of the proposed workshop is to bring together colleagues working in the broad area of typology and to present material and discuss issues concerning both how typological change could have been triggered and what course a change takes once established. We hope that these matters can also be illuminated by colleagues who are working outside the context of Indo-European to provide additional perspectives for the workshop. The focus is expected to be syntactic, but hopefully in a broad sense which would encompass such aspects as grammatical relations and hierarchies, iconicity, conceptual distance, notions of prototypes and markedness, competing motivation and alternative strategies in sentence structure. The unifying factor is the relevance to typological change and development and colleagues interested in this field are cordially invited to register. The workshop is planned for Friday August 15 1997. There will be approximately 6 hours for papers and discussion, assuming that it starts at 9 in the morning and continues until mid-afternoon with a short break for lunch (the finishing time will be between 3 and 4 as the ICHL business meeting is scheduled for late afternoon). This time could be divided into 10 slots of 30 mins each (20 mins presentation, 10 mins discussion) with a concluding discussion. This arrangement is at present a suggestion and depends on the number of colleagues who might be interested in participating. For a maximum degree of effectiveness we suggest that participants first register and then, on confirmation, send us a pre-version of their paper in which their standpoint, hypotheses, tentative conclusions, etc. are outlined succinctly. This material can be disseminated to other participants in the workshop to ensure that everyone is appropriately informed about the subject matter of each contribution. The first step, however, is to get into contact with either Columbia or Essen by 31st March 1997 so that the arrangements for time slots and the workshop programme can be made in April and material disseminated quickly. Raymond Hickey Dorothy Disterheft English Linguistics Linguistics Program Essen University University of South Carolina Germany Columbia, SC 29208 email: r.hickey at uni-essen.de email: disterh at univscvm.csd.scarolina.edu From vovin at HAWAII.EDU Fri Mar 28 01:41:41 1997 From: vovin at HAWAII.EDU (Alexander Vovin) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 15:41:41 -1000 Subject: Ainu & Gilyak, Japanese & Korean In-Reply-To: Message-ID: First, I would like to voice my support in favor of Johanna Nichols statement that Ainu and Gilyak are very different. Indeed, on the surface they might look alike, and they even share some bizarre morphological markers, like object prefix i-/e-, but the more you look inside the history of these languages, the more fundamentally different they appear. There have been contacts between Ainu and Gilyak for centuries, and, of course, they influenced one another to a considerable extent. Late Prof.R. Austerlitz have done a formidable research on Ainu-Gilyak contacts, but unfortunately not everything from his scholarly heritage on the subject has been published. Second, I would like to answer Johanna Nichols question of what constitutes a nutshell evidence for the genetic relationship of Japanese and Korean -- a quite right question to ask in the light of the present discussion. Of course, the main evidence are the regular correspondences, that can be established on the basis of lexical and morphological comparisons, as this would be the only evidence acceptable for any other language family as well. The lists of these correspondences are published elsewhere, cf. e.g. Vovin 1994 in Diachronica XI.1:98, so I'll save myself the labor of repeating them. I will divide the nutshell into two parts, first dealing with morphological evidence (to please Stefan, of course, :-), as morphological evidence is not readily available except some part of it in S. Martin's articles that I mentioned in one of the previous postings, which might be difficult to digest for a person not familiar with the history of both languages. As I mentioned earlier, I believe that both Japanese and Korean are related to Tungusic, and more distantly to Mongolic and Turkic (but still on the family, and not macrofamily level). Here, however, I will discipline myself, and will exclude Turkic and Mongolic from further discussion, but will add Tungusic, as I believe that Tungusic's relationship to both Korean and Japanese is equidistant to that of Japanese and Korean. Much remains to be done in this area, especially in the domain of vowel correspondences and in reconstruction of consonant clusters in medial position. Yet, the following, I believe can be interpreted only in the way of genetic relationship. I will center on the evidence from Old Japanese language (OJ)(8th. century) and Middle Korean (MK) (15th century), occasionally referring to reconstructions of the corresponding Proto-Languages. As the earliest known Tungusic language, Manchu is known only from the 17th century (still earlier Jurchen materials are poorly deciphered and provide very little data on morphology), I will also appeal to Prto-Tungusic and to various other Tungusic languages, since Manchu does not always contain all necessary data. Finally, the place where I access e-mail is away from my research library, so quite a bit of what I'm going to provide is based on my memory and I won't be able to provide chapter and verse for all data. NOTE 1: important addition to correspondences is provided in Vovin 1997 (forthcoming in Japanese/Korean linguistics v. 6): Proto-Japanese voiced and voiceless opposition does not reflect voiceless and voiced of PA, rather PA initial voiced are reflected as PJ words with low register and PA initial voiceless (both aspirated and non-aspirated) as PJ words with high register). NOTE 2: Both OJ and MK are given in Yale romanization, with the exception of OJ otsu-rui /o/ that it typed as o2, as underlining is not possible in my e-mail. PART 1: MORPHOLOGY VERBAL MORPHOLOGY Both OJ and MK have very complex systems of verbal morphology, but a huge chunk of it is of considerably later origin. Among the primary morphological markers the following parallels can be suggested: Old Japanese Middle Korean Tungusic -an- < *ana an(h) *ana, Manchu akU <*an-ku negative negative negative accent class 2.5 -m --- on some deverbal deverbal noun nouns, reflecting earlier *-m -ey < *(a)Ci< *(a)gi -Gi, ki, hi etc. -gi causative relic, cf. transitivity flipper transitivity flipper e.g. Manchu al-gi- "let know" -uru -(V)l? Manchu -ra/-ro/-re participle irrealis participle imperfect. participle -u < *-wi < *-bi OK -ta-wi <* -bi -bi, Manchu, Nanai etc.-bi final predicate marker id id -yi <*-i -e/-a ---- coordinative gerund id -myi < *-mi -mye -me gerund of quality verbs gerund gerund (Manchu -me, -kyi < *-ki MK -e/-a ?< *Ga/Ge Manchu xa/xe/xo < *kV retrospective perfective perfective -te- < *-ta-Ci- -te-/ta- ---- perfective perfective -(i)n- -(V)n ----- perfective realis participle -ama- ----- -Vme tentative tentative-volitive -na- -no- ----- assertive "present tense" -yi < *-i -i ----- nominalizer nominalizer This is the nutshell for verbal system. Of course, the above chart represents my views, and I alone can be held responsible for it (in particular, I do not accept Unger's views on all OJ consonantal verbs as ending in -a). I am sure that every scholar in the J/K field may want to add something to the chart above, or take out a couple things off it, but overall I believe it represents the nutshell. NOMINAL MORPHOLOGY AND PARTICLES ARE TO FOLLOW Sincerely, A.Vovin On Wed, 26 Mar 1997, Johanna Nichols wrote: > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > > > >One thing that caught my attention in the linguistic database from > >Johanna Nichols' "Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time" was the > >typological near-identity of Gilyak and Ainu. Of all the typological > >features listed, Ainu and Gilyak only differ in that Gilyak has > >numerical classifiers (26 of them). Is there any other evidence for > >contacts between Gilyak and Ainu? > > > > CAUTION -- That database should be used as a pointer to the descriptive > publications, not as a full typological description in itself. If Gilyak > and Ainu exhibit typological near-identity, that just goes to show you how > impoverished a typological description is compared to the real thing, > because those two languages are very different. (More generally, Gilyak is > very different from any other language on earth.) > > Since the question of Japanese and Korean has come up on the list, I have a > question for Alexander Vovin and/or others who have worked on these > languages: what, in a nutshell, is the evidence that Japanese and Korean > are related? I've read as much of the relevant literature as I could find, > and the only support offered seems to be that if you assume they are > related you can find sound correspondences and apply the comparative > method. But what is the evidence for assuming relatedness in the first > place? Thanks for any help anyone can give me. > > Johanna Nichols > Slavic Languages, UC Berkeley > From alderson at NETCOM.COM Fri Mar 28 01:42:01 1997 From: alderson at NETCOM.COM (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 17:42:01 -0800 Subject: Ainu & Gilyak, Japanese & Korean In-Reply-To: (message from Johanna Nichols on Wed, 26 Mar 1997 17:43:10 -0800) Message-ID: Johanna Nichols writes: >what, in a nutshell, is the evidence that Japanese and Korean are related? >I've read as much of the relevant literature as I could find, and the only >support offered seems to be that if you assume they are related you can find >sound correspondences and apply the comparative method. But what is the >evidence for assuming relatedness in the first place? I'm a little confused by the question. The assumption of relatedness is the hypothesis tested by the application of the comparative method; what evidence is needed to form such an hypothesis? As historical linguists we may decide heuristically that some such hypotheses are too difficult to pursue based on the number of cognate sets we may expect to find, but there is never (_pace_ the Greenberg/Ruhlen camp) a requirement for any particular sort of evidence of relationship prior to starting the comparison. Put another way, hypotheses of relationship, like hypotheses in any scientific discipline, are made first by the imagination of the researcher, and then put to rigourous test. The researcher's experience and training in the field, any field at all, provides a first-cut filter on hypotheses in that field--which the researcher is free to ignore if a particular insight seems to call for it. What have I misunderstood? Rich Alderson From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Fri Mar 28 19:04:35 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU) Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 14:04:35 EST Subject: posting format Message-ID: Dear HISTLINGers, The question of my requesting revisions to contributions was mentioned in a posting yesterday, so this might be a good time for me to make the following requests of people who contribute to our conversations: (1) Make you contribution as short as possible; i.e., when you copy someone else's posting within your own text, please copy only the relevant portions. (2) Make your contribution as econominal as possible, i.e., edit for redundancy, long-winded arguements, etc. While this type of forum is very informal, its readers are professionals who do not have unlimited time to sort through their mailboxes. (3) Be sure that your contribution has historical linguistics content: I have returned a few postings because they have not fulfilled this requirement. And yes, I should have returned Richard Hogg's cute remark to Larry Trask yesterday and I apologize for this slip-up. However my eyes were crossed from dealing with a deluge of mail. (4) Address your comments to others' work in a polite, professional tone, even if you might think that they should be committed to an insane asylum for their views. I tell my graduate students that, in their criticism of published work, they should compose their remarks as if the person they're criticizing were in their presence. Besides, they may meet that person face to face someday or even have to work with them. Any contri- butions which do not follow the Golden Rule in their reference to colleagues will be returned for editing. Thanks for your attention, Dorothy Disterheft From kruskal at RESEARCH.BELL-LABS.COM Fri Mar 28 19:36:00 1997 From: kruskal at RESEARCH.BELL-LABS.COM (kruskal at RESEARCH.BELL-LABS.COM) Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 14:36:00 EST Subject: No subject Message-ID: To: Historical Linguistics List, Prof Dorothy Disterheft Dear Professor Disterheft, Prof Johanna Nichols suggested that I send the announcement below for distribution on the Historical Linguistics List. Sincerely, Joseph B Kruskal <>----------------<>----------------<>----------------<>-----------------<> Joseph B Kruskal, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies Room 2C-281, Murray Hill, NJ 07974 EMAIL kruskal at research.bell-labs.com PHONE 908-582-3853 FAX 908-582-3340 HOMEPAGE http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/departments/sia/kruskal/index.html Sent on Mar 28 14:30 EST 1997 <>----------------<>----------------<>----------------<>-----------------<> Paul Black and I wish to announce that the Comparative Indoeuropean Data Corpus, collected by Isidore Dyen with contributions by Black and me, is now available from two sources. It includes --200-item lexicostatistical lists for 95 Indoeuropean speech varieties, --cognation judgments between the lists, --lexicostatistical percentages, --individual replacement rates for 200 meanings, and --time separations based on these rates. It also includes an annotated bibliography of lexicostatistics by Paul Black. For those of you who have seen parts of this before, the form has been improved, so it is much easier to use than before, and contains full and careful explanations of many aspects of the data. One source is the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) in the United States, http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/ where it is currently located at http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/ldc/service/comp-ie/HEADPAGE.html We thank Mark Liberman for permitting us to put this in LDC, and Sarah Parnum for her efforts in actually entering it. The other source is the Northern Territory University, Australia, where it is at http://www.ntu.edu.au/education/langs/ielex/HEADPAGE.html These data have provided the basis for several publications, including this monograph: Isidore Dyen, Joseph B. Kruskal & Paul Black. 1992. "An Indoeuropean classification: A lexicostatistical experiment" (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society Vol. 82, Part 5) American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Sent to: Phipps Arabie, Luca Cavalli-Sforza, James Corter, Osamu Fujimura, John Gower, Richard Harshman, Donald Hindle, Leanne Hinton, Eric Holman, Robert Hsu, Arthur Kendall, Henk Kiers, Peter Kroonenberg, Mitchell Marcus, Jim Mayberry, Jacqueline Meulman, Eric Minch, Johanna Nichols, P A Piazza, William Poser, Donld Ringe, James Rohlf, Pascale Rousseau, David Sankoff, Gillian Sankoff, Margaret Sharpe, Robert Sokal, William S-Y Wang, Joe Ward, Tandy Warnow Copies to: Paul Black, Mark Liberman, Sarah Parnum From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Sun Mar 30 15:12:40 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Sun, 30 Mar 1997 10:12:40 EST Subject: No subject Message-ID: > Return-Path: > Received: from UNIVSCVM (NJE origin SMTP at UNIVSCVM) by VM.SC.EDU (LMail > V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 3180; Thu, 27 Mar 1997 21:21:29 -0500 > Received: from relay1.Hawaii.Edu by VM.SC.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R3) with TCP; > Thu, 27 Mar 97 21:21:28 EST > Received: from uhunix2.its.hawaii.edu ([128.171.44.7]) by relay1.Hawaii.Edu with > SMTP id <587056(3)>; Thu, 27 Mar 1997 16:16:42 -1000 > Received: from localhost by uhunix2.its.Hawaii.Edu with SMTP id <148529(4)>; > Thu, 27 Mar 1997 16:21:36 -1000 > Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 16:21:30 -1000 > From: Alexander Vovin > X-Sender: vovin at uhunix2 > To: Larry Trask > cc: HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU > Subject: Re: isolates > In-Reply-To: > Message-ID: > MIME-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII > [in reply to L. Trask on Japanese and Korean] > Well, I hope that the "Japanese-Korean in a nutshell" that I have started > to post will further help to dissolve your doubts. As for S. Martin's > cautious position, he is always cautious in his statements, but please > read a little bit further into the article, and you will see that he > treats two languages as cognate, that is he discusses parallels between J and K as cognates, and not as chance resemblances, or a result of borrowing. And after all, he has done more work demonstrating that Japanese and Korean are related than any other > linguist, and I trust that it is presented evidence that counts more than > a general statement. > Besides, if you start to treat every signle family in the world where > a lot of work remains to be done (as is with case of Japanese and Korean, > nobody denies that) and which is not yet done as elaborately as IE, you'll > end up having thousands of isolates that "sprung from some different sources" > instead of having certain quite persuasive theories which need to be > further elaborated. Nikolai Marr would be really proud of such a picture. > In sum, it is misleading to place Japanese and Korean in the same > company as Burushaski and Nihali: we have no clue about the external > relationships of the latter, but we do know quite a lot about Japanese and > Korean so that to treat them as cognate, although keeping in mind that > further considerable polishing needs to be done. Ainu will fall in the > middle of the two, that does not make him a 'classical" isolate either. > From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Sun Mar 30 15:14:12 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Sun, 30 Mar 1997 10:14:12 EST Subject: No subject Message-ID: > Return-Path: > Received: from UNIVSCVM (NJE origin SMTP at UNIVSCVM) by VM.SC.EDU (LMail > V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 4172; Fri, 28 Mar 1997 04:08:37 -0500 > Received: from relay1.Hawaii.Edu by VM.SC.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R3) with TCP; > Fri, 28 Mar 97 04:08:36 EST > Received: from uhunix2.its.hawaii.edu ([128.171.44.7]) by relay1.Hawaii.Edu with > SMTP id <586881(6)>; Thu, 27 Mar 1997 23:03:51 -1000 > Received: from localhost by uhunix2.its.Hawaii.Edu with SMTP id <148527(4)>; > Thu, 27 Mar 1997 23:08:46 -1000 > Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 23:08:45 -1000 > From: Alexander Vovin > X-Sender: vovin at uhunix2 > To: Larry Trask > cc: HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU > Subject: Re: isolates > In-Reply-To: > Message-ID: > MIME-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII > > Whoops, I forgot to answer the following points. > > On Thu, 27 Mar 1997, Larry Trask wrote: > > > > > What you're raising here is the old question of how we distinguish > > languages from dialects, and of course we can't. Yes, I'm aware of > > the mutual incomprehensibility of the several varieties of Japanese > > (though I didn't know about the similar case for Korean). But mutual > > comprehensibility is only one possible criterion for recognizing > > language boundaries, and it's not even the one we mainly rely on. > > A.V.: > You of course are right that languages are not to be defined solely on the > mutual intelligibility. Being a native speaker of Russian, I can > understand Ukranian and Belourussian without any effort at all, and with > more strain even good chunks of Polish and Bulgarian, which are all, of > course, different languages. Here I used mutual intellgbility solely to > demonstrate that there is considerable linguistic diversity in both Japan > and Korea, which you seemed to doubt in your previous posting. I can > easily demonstrate that we deal with various languages, not dialects by > other means: showing that they have divergent morphology and lexicon. I > can do it if you are still in doubt. > > L.T.: > > > > I'm sorry, but I simply cannot understand this. You are telling me > > that Ainu is "unlikely" to be an isolate, even though no relationship > > has been demonstrated between Ainu and anything else at all. I find > > this position incomprehensible. > > A.V.: > Should I repeat again that there have been established a number of > Ainu-Austric parallels which do satisfy the principle of > regularity of phonetic correspondences. The regularity of many correspondences has been demonstrated, but there is still many things > left. Nevertheless, most of the proposed etymologies withstood the scrutiny of the specialists. Did we hear anyone who specializes in Austric and/or Ainu saying otherwise? Don't you think that this is a different situation from your Basque? > > > L.T.: > > > > You are joking. It is not on my shoulders to demonstrate that any > > languages are not related; this is a logical impossibility. If you > > can demonstrate that J and K are related beyond reasonable doubt, I'll > > be delighted, since I prefer positive results to negative ones. > > A.V.: > > If you maintain the point of view that it is impossible to demonstrate > that two or more languages are not related, then you obviously cannot > demonstrate that Basque is unrelated to North Caucasian or whatever. > Meanwhile, this is exactly the opposite what you did over the last year: > showing your > audience the impossibility of the connection. What is true for Basque, > should be > true for other languages. Demonstrate that Japanese-Korean etymologies are > either faulty, because they are build on erroneous reconstructions, or > that there are no regular correspondences, or even better both -- exactly > like you do with Basque. This is in my opinion a quite logical way to > disprove a genetic relationship. > > > A.V.: > > [on the fact that there are two living Yukaghir and two living Ket languages] > > L.T.: > > > > We are merely quibbling over words here. A small family of one > > language with no apparent relatives is my idea of an isolate. > > A.V.: > Again, neither Yukaghir, nor Ket are in fact a single language: there are > two living languages in each case and more extinct ones. If you are going > to call a family consisting of more than one language an isolate, then > where is going to be the line? From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Sun Mar 30 15:16:04 1997 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Sun, 30 Mar 1997 10:16:04 EST Subject: No subject Message-ID: >> > Return-Path: > Received: from UNIVSCVM (NJE origin SMTP at UNIVSCVM) by VM.SC.EDU (LMail > V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 4623; Fri, 28 Mar 1997 05:10:12 -0500 > Received: from relay1.Hawaii.Edu by VM.SC.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R3) with TCP; > Fri, 28 Mar 97 05:10:11 EST > Received: from uhunix2.its.hawaii.edu ([128.171.44.7]) by relay1.Hawaii.Edu with > SMTP id <586789(6)>; Fri, 28 Mar 1997 00:05:24 -1000 > Received: from localhost by uhunix2.its.Hawaii.Edu with SMTP id <148523(2)>; > Fri, 28 Mar 1997 00:10:13 -1000 > Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 00:10:08 -1000 > From: Alexander Vovin > X-Sender: vovin at uhunix2 > To: "Sarah G. Thomason" > cc: HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU > Subject: Re: isolates > In-Reply-To: <9222.859488084 at pogo> > Message-ID: > MIME-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII > > The response follows... > > On Thu, 27 Mar 1997, Sarah G. Thomason wrote: > > > In discussing the hypothesis of Japanese-Korean relationship, > > Alexander Vovin says, rightly, that I shouldn't have referred > > to a review without checking the exact reference. So I have now > > checked: the reviewer was David Solnit, the review was of Paul > > Benedict's JAPANESE/AUSTRO-TAI (Ann Arbor: Karoma), and the review > > appeared in LANGUAGE 68:188-96 (1992). Solnit concludes his review > > as follows: "Finally, the correspondences with Austronesian and with > > Altaic, to the extent that both are valid, need to be evaluated and > > placed in relation to each other, whether that entails choosing one as > > inherited and the other as borrowed, or whether Japanese is one of > > those rare cases having in its past a break in normal genetic > > transmission." > > A.V.: > Several things needed to be mentioned. First, David Solnit is an > excellent specialist in Thai and Karen, but not a Japanologist, therefore > he can hardly evaluate Japanese side of things. Moreover, since we were > once both in the U of Michigan, I recollect directing him to some of the > materials on Japanese-Altaic, but I believe that he could not fully > utilize Starostin 1991 book, as he does not have a command of Russian. I > have wrote myself a longer review of the same book by Benedict, in > Diachronica XI.1 and a longer analysis of Japanese-Austronesian > "hypotheses"(sic) by Benedict and Kawamoto (they do not agree between > themselves reagarding almost a single etymology, since plural) in Oceanic > linguistics in 1994. In both cases I have demonstrated that both Benedict > and Kawamoto completely disregard Japanese language history, misanalyze > morphemic structure of Japanese words, etc., etc. I have also demonstrated > in these two publications that there is no regularity in Benedict > Austro-Japanese correspondences (Kawamoto does not bother about > correspondences at all, at least not in the sense like it is done by those > of us who work within comparative method). There are also alternative > Altaic etymologies cum phonetic correspondences. In sum, > Japanese-Austronesian fares no better than Japanese-Dravidian or > Japanese-Sumerian, or Japanese-Basque. HISTLINGers can judge for > themselves. > > > S.T.: > > > > A.V. goes on to say that I have grossly misrepresented his own work, > > in my reference to his reconstruction of *hd- for a correspondence set > > consisting mainly of w's. My methodological point was that a claim of > > genetic relationship that rests in part on such reconstructions is not > > one that I, at least, would place very much confidence in. > > A.V.: > I have to repeat once again, that Ainu-Austroasiatic hypothesis does not > stand on this particular reconstruction: there are only two etymologies > where *hd is involved among 50+. > > S.T.: > He asks if > > I can offer a better reconstruction for the correspondence set in > > question. I do believe that I can: I propose *w. > > a.V.: > > I thought about this solution, but *w does not explain why there is an > alternation between /w/ and /s/: > > cf.: wan '10', tu-pe-san '8' (lit.: two-thing-ten), sine-pe-san '9' > (one-thing-ten). > > S.T.: > > The fact that *w would, > > on the evidence of the dialects, be a rare Proto-Ainu phoneme doesn't bother > > me nearly as much as A.V.'s own proposal. Here is the relevant material > > from his book A RECONSTRUCTION OF PROTO-AINU (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993): > > > > 1. The correspondence set (which I call large because it ranges over a > > large number of dialects): > > > > w : w : w : w : w : w : w : w : w : w : u-/w- : -G- : v : v : -gu- > > > > > > 2. A.V.'s rationale for reconstructing *hd-: He does not reconstruct *w > > because "[w] is extremely rare in common Ainu. It occurs initially in > > five words, one of which is doubtful, and in medial position in three > > words....the distribution of [w] is quite peculiar -- it occurs mostly > > before [a], once before [e], and once before [o]...." He also considers, > > and rejects, reconstructing *hw- or *gw-, saying that "the existence of > > such a cluster seems quite unnatural in a system which lacks [w] itself." > > Therefore, he continues, "we have to look for some sound which existed in > > PA and could produce the [w] sound in the process of development." He > > likes *h for the first segment because it "can be easily reconstructed on > > the basis of [two particular dialects, the ones with -G- and -gu-]"; and > > he likes *d for the second segment in the cluster because "it could undergo > > spirantisation *d > [eth, sorry no voiced interdental fricative on > > my computer], and the shift * > w is rather probable." > > A.V.: > > Prof. Thomason omits the part where I say about w/s alternation > from my reasoning (see above). If I relied exclusively on comparative data > and disregarded internal reconstruction, I'd reconstruct *hw or *gw. > However, it cannot be disregarded. If anyone knows of examples where *w > > s, I will gladly accept Prof. Thomason proposal > > S.T.: > > > I no longer have the > > book at hand, but I don't recall any elaborate C clusters at all, much > > less something as weird as hd-, in any of the dialects. > > A.V.: > I am afraid that this is again incorrect. I reconstruct a number of > consonantal clusters for PA, and cluster tr- is attested for Sakhalin and > Kuril dialects. Besides, lack of clusters in modern dialects cannot be > hardly used as a proof against existence of clusters not only in the > protolanguage but even in the recent past. Modern Vietnamese does not have > any clusters, but there is plenty of them in Proto-Vietic, and even de > Rhodes dictionary reflecting 17th century Vietnamese has a lot of words > with clusters. > > > S.T.: > The sound changes > > A.V. posits from this very strange C cluster are themselves not compelling. > > Since we are talking about dialects of the same language, there also isn't > > much time for the weird cluster to undergo all these INDEPENDENT changes > > in every single dialect....changes that just happen to lead to the very > > same rather surprising result in ten dialects, for instance. > > > > I leave it to other HISTLINGers to judge the plausibility of this > > reconstruction (and others in the book). > > > > A.V.: > Well, I would prefer to have uncompelling sound changes in dialects > rather than unexplained morphonological alternation, and I believe that a > reconstruction *w does not explain it -- it rather sweeps things under the > rug. > > S.T.: > > > > P.S. The point I made in the same message about isolates in remote > > mountain valleys was a methodological one, not a claim either about > > polygenesis of human language or about the existence of such cases > > ...though Basque comes close. I made no reference to complete > > homogeneity of my hypothetical speech community, as A.V. suggests in > > his reply. > > > A.V.: > I believe that "no splits" suggests homogeneity in this particular case. > > > From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Fri Mar 28 12:13:18 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 12:13:18 +0000 Subject: isolates In-Reply-To: from "Alexander Vovin" at Mar 27, 97 11:08:45 pm Message-ID: Alexander Vovin writes: > You of course are right that languages are not to be defined solely > on the mutual intelligibility. Being a native speaker of Russian, I > can understand Ukranian and Belourussian without any effort at all, > and with more strain even good chunks of Polish and Bulgarian, which > are all, of course, different languages. Here I used mutual > intellgbility solely to demonstrate that there is considerable > linguistic diversity in both Japan and Korea, which you seemed to > doubt in your previous posting. I can easily demonstrate that we > deal with various languages, not dialects by other means: showing > that they have divergent morphology and lexicon. I can do it if you > are still in doubt. To be honest, I see little point in pursuing this. If you prefer to see Japanese and Korean as small families rather than as single languages, fine. > L.T.: > > I'm sorry, but I simply cannot understand this. You are telling me > > that Ainu is "unlikely" to be an isolate, even though no relationship > > has been demonstrated between Ainu and anything else at all. I find > > this position incomprehensible. > A.V.: > Should I repeat again that there have been established a number of > Ainu-Austric parallels which do satisfy the principle of phonetic > regularity? If under these circumstances you still maintain that "no > relationship has been demonstrated between Ainu and anything else at > all", I just give up. It has been demonstrated, but there is still > many things left. Don't you think that this is a different situation > from your Basque? We are going in circles. It is already clear from other postings that the validity of Austric is not generally accepted, in which case no Ainu-Austric link can possibly be generally accepted. Moreover, I think there are grounds for doubting your assertion that Ainu has been shown, to general satisfaction, to be related to *something*. > L.T.: > > You are joking. It is not on my shoulders to demonstrate that any > > languages are not related; this is a logical impossibility. If you > > can demonstrate that J and K are related beyond reasonable doubt, I'll > > be delighted, since I prefer positive results to negative ones. > A.V.: > If you maintain the point of view that it is impossible to > demonstrate that two or more languages are not related, then you > obviously cannot demonstrate that Basque is unrelated to North > Caucasian or whatever. Yes, of course. > Meanwhile, this is exactly the opposite what you did over the last > year: showing your audience the impossibility of the connection. Absolutely not: this is a fundamental misunderstanding. I neither provided nor even attempted any such demonstration. What I did was quite different. Bengtson and his colleagues had put forth what they regarded as evidence for a Basque-Caucasian genetic link. What I did was merely to demonstrate, to my own satisfaction at least, that the evidence on offer *did not stand up to scrutiny*, and hence that their case could not be accepted. And that is a very different thing from proving the absence of a relation. So, Bengtson's case fails. There remain at least three logical possibilities: (1) Basque and Caucasian really are discoverably related, but no one has yet uncovered the available evidence. I can't scrutinize a case that has never been made. (2) Basque and Caucasian are indeed very remotely related, but the evidence for that relationship has long since disappeared and cannot be recovered. There is no earthly way I could disprove this possibility. (3) Basque and Caucasian are not related at any level. Again, there is no earthly way I could prove this. > What is true for Basque, should be true for other languages. Yes, of course, but I've never maintained otherwise. > Demonstrate that Japanese-Korean etymologies are either faulty, > because they are build on erroneous reconstructions, or that there > are no regular correspondences, or even better both -- exactly like > you do with Basque. This is in my opinion a quite logical way to > disprove a genetic relationship. It is a very reasonable procedure, and indeed the only possible way of disposing of a proposed comparison. But it is most emphatically *not* a way of disproving a genetic relationship. The evaluation of your case will have to await the scrutiny of specialists in the relevant languages. If your case withstands that scrutiny, you win; if it doesn't, you lose. That's the way it is in this business. > A.V.: > Again, neither Yukaghir, nor Ket are in fact a single language: > there are two living languages in each case and more extinct > ones. If you are going to call a family consisting of more than one > language an isolate, then where is going to be the line? > Again, we are merely quibbling about words. Being an isolate is not an intrinsic property of a language; it's merely, as others have pointed out, a property we project onto a language as a result of our investigations to date. It's purely a matter of taste whether we want to apply the term to a living language with no known living relatives but with known extinct relatives. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From Ralf.Georg at BONN.NETSURF.DE Fri Mar 28 22:24:50 1997 From: Ralf.Georg at BONN.NETSURF.DE (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 23:24:50 +0100 Subject: Japanese/Korean/Tungus Message-ID: Since I have been addressed in Sasha Vovin's posting, let me throw in a few remarks. Basically, Sasha, this time, I'm on your side, I have no quarrel with the notion that Japanese and Korean are related (and there might be a relationship with Tungus after all). Your Diachronica paper helped much to form my opinion on this, since there you managed to show morphological evidence, just the thing which - as you correctly observe - I want to see. (A note of caution though: I'm not an expert on neither Korean nor Japanese, so my readiness to accept their relationship *might* have something to do with that very fact ;-) ...). No, your list is impressive, but some points, I think, will have to be clarified before you can win over most of the skeptics: For Japanese you list such forms as (I believe the unasterisked forms represent attested Old Japanese): -ey < *(a)Ci< *(a)gi (to be compared with Korean -Gi etc.)[in Diachronica XI you give it without the bracketed initial *a, what does that mean ?] -u < *-wi < *-bi (to be compared with Korean * -bi, Tungus *-bi etc.), and some minor cases where the actually compared form on the Japanese side is a reconstruct. Could you please help to clarify for us non-Japanologists, how the proto-Japanese reconstructs are arrived at ? In all possible brevity, of course, i.e. are there divergent dialects (old or new) which prompt them, has Ryukyuan something to do with them, are there compelling structural reasons which make them inevitable or what is it ? Of course it will be difficult for us to form an opinion about those forms, without knowing the reasons for those reconstructs. What I'm especially after is, of course, the question: Would they look exactly like that in a - hypothetical - world, where we would know nothing about Korean or Tungus ? Please, Sasha, note that I'm not doubting that exactly this is the case, I know that you share my views on keeping internal and external evidence strictly apart (in other words: that you are no Ruhlenist !), I'd just like to be sure, that's all. While I'm at it, let me add a few observations on the Tungus in your list. First, I think you were a little bit too pessimistic on Jurchen, since at least some of the markers in your list can indeed be found in Jurchen texts (the -me converb and the -ha verbal noun at least). I'm not so happy with *-gi "causative relic" and your Manchu example. Why don't you cite straightforwardly Evenki -gi: (with a long vowel, which is probably of proto-Tung. status) 'transitivizer' ? It does the job much better, since the Manchu verb algi- you give doesn't mean "let know" at all, but rather "to become or be known, famous", rather an intransitive/anticausative formation to the root found in ala- "to report, say". The proto-Tungus negative marker (an independent particle in all probability) is given in Diachronica XI, by you as *aana (a:na, with a long vowel), I think that reconstruction is the one which should be preferred, since Evenki a:chin 'not, yok' seems not to leave another choice. Btw., do you have any idea about those obscure elements as Manchu -kU or Evenki (and other Tungus lgs.) -chi(n) here ? In the same Diachronica paper you give the MK (Middle Korean ?) equivalent as /ani/, here as an(h); which is correct ? On the correspondence pattern: -kyi < *-ki MK -e/-a ?< *Ga/Ge Manchu xa/xe/xo < *kV retrospective perfective perfective you give in Diachronica XI (*if* this is the same cognate set, I may of course be totally wrong here), as equivalent to Manchu -ha/-he/-ho < -*kV a Japanese "past marker" *-iki : is this the same thing as "retrospective -kyi < *-ki"? In the same list you give as MK (unasterisked, therefore attested ?) -ke-, here -e/-a ?< *Ga/Ge, could you please clarify what is actually attested, what is reconstructed and on what reasons ? On the cognate set -te- < *-ta-Ci- -te-/ta- ---- perfective perfective we read in Diachronica XI: Jap. *-ita-Ci-, MK -te- (and Tungus *-taa-, which I don't know well, there seem to be several dental suffixes you could have in mind, would you mind giving an example ?). Again, which is the state-of-the-art ? Furthermore, is the MK "realis participle" -(V)n the same thing as the *-na- suffix from Diachronica XI, which is there compared with Jap. *-in- "perfective" ? The "tentative/volitive" suffix from your posting (Jap. -ama-, Tung. -Vme-) looks in your paper again a little bit differently: Jap. *-am- (OK, I think, the latter is the reconstruct, whereas the former the attested form, or ???) and Tung. *-m-. I'm not too familiar with that latter suffix, so one or two examples might help a bit. OK, this has become a long wish-list, most questions answer themselves for any specialist, I'm pretty sure. But, Sasha, you have been asked to present the nutshell evidence for the relationship, which has been doubted on this list. Since Japanese and Korean are two major literary languages of this planet, which *all* we non-specialists would like to know more about, I think my questions are justified, for, if I'm going to answer the questions of students about the genetic situation in North-East Asia I'd like to know exactly what I'm talking about. Just imagine, if I tell a student, who actually *knows* Japanese and Korean (synchronically): "related, and demonstrably so !" and then begin to write "evidence" on the blackboard which mixes attested and reconstructed forms and stuff like that, the damage done to comparative Japanese-Korean studies might be bigger than if I just said "isolates" or (which would in my case of course the most appropriate thing to say) "don't know". Hope, I'm not asking you too much (you may have indeed better things to do than answering silly questions like these !), maybe the issues are of interest not only to me alone, best wishes, i - kak vsegda - vsego luchshego, Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel/Fax +49-228-691332+ From vovin at HAWAII.EDU Sat Mar 29 03:49:29 1997 From: vovin at HAWAII.EDU (Alexander Vovin) Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 17:49:29 -1000 Subject: Ainu & Gilyak, Japanese & Korean In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Continuing on the nutshell evidence for the relationship of Japanese, Korean, and Tungusic. ADDENDUM FOR VERBAL MARKERS Old Japanese Middle Korean Tungusic ---- -W- < *bV Manchu -bu-, Evk. -w- relic causative causative/passive MK solW- "inform", alwoy- 'let know' cf. sol- say', al- 'know' -(a)ku -key, -kuy Manchu -ge in -ngge deverbal noun gerund (nominalizer) (action verbs), gerund (quality verbs) -as- -osi-, -usi- -------- politeness marker politness marker I believe it might be useful to provide a list of primary verbal suffixes in all three languages, for which at the present no external parallels can be suggested: Old Japanese: iterative -ap-, causative -sase-, passive -raye- Middle Korean: gerund -kwo, deverbal noun -ti, 'emphatic' -wo/wu-, emotive -two- Manchu: conditional -ci, optative -ki It is quite clear that most primary verbal markers in any language have external parallels in other two. NOMINAL MORPHOLOGY CASE MARKING Old Japanese Middle Korean Tungusic -i -i ------- active ergative -no2 -~n *-~n (can be recon- structed only) genitive genitive genitive -wo < *-bo OK G"il < *bV-l Manchu -be, Evenki -wa absolutive/accusative "accusative" accusative -tu ----- -du (manchu -de) genitive-locative dative/locative -ra Old Korean -la -laa (not in Manchu) locative locative locative -ywo <*duCa,-yu<*du ----------- -duk (not in Manchu) ablative ablative ------------ *-li (like in ili) -lii lative prolative PLURAL MARKERS OLd Japanese Middle Korean Tungusic -tati -tolh ? Manchu -ta polite pl. plural marker relic plural marker -ra ---- -l PRONOUNS PERSONAL PRONOUNS Old Japanese Middle Korean Tungusic wa- < *ba(n) "I, we" wuli < *(b)uli (see note) bi 'I', Manchu be, Evenki bu 'we' si, so2- 'thou' ------- si 'thou' na 'thou', 'you' ne 'thou', ne-huy 'you' ------ NOTE: correspondence of MK zero to OJ w- and Tungusic b- is irregular, p- would be expected. However, there are two other good examples supporting this irregular correspondence: Old Japanese Middle Korean Tungusic wi- < bi- "is", "exists" is- 'id' bi-, bisi- 'id.' The fact that Korean once had p- there is supported by the negative form of the same verb: eps- < *e-pis- "is not, does not exist' pi 'ice' :el- < *elV- 'freeze' bu-kse el-um 'ice' 'ice' OJ word is a good match: it has an initial LOW register, reflecting original *b- (see the note in the beginning of the previous posting). DEMONSTRATIVE PRONOUNS Old Japanese Middle Korean Tungusic ko2- 'this' ku 'that' ------ --------- i 'this' e- 'this' -------- tye 'that over there' te- 'that' NUMERALS Old Japanese Middle Korean Tungusic ------- Early MK twubul(h) 2 juwe 2 myi- < mi- 3 MK seyh, -~ne 3 *(~n)"ila-n 3 < *~ne yo2- < *do2- 4 neyh < *de- 4 Manchu duin,Evk diGin 4 itu- 5 ta-sos 5 Manchu sunja, Evk tung~na 5 mu- 6 ----- Manchu ninngun,Evk.~nungu-n 6 nana- 7 ----- nada-n 7 ya- < *da- 8 ---- *ja(b) 8 ko2ko2no2- 9 ---- *xeg"u-n 9 to2wo < *to2bo 10 ---- juwa-n 10 mwomwo 100 ------- Evk. ~nama NOTE: there is an untrivial correspondence of OJ m- to Tungusic ~n- in this chart. Also, in J dentals and palatals merged as dentals. PARTICLES Old Japanese Middle Korean Tungusic -do2 Message-ID: On Fri, 28 Mar 1997, Larry Trask wrote: > Alexander Vovin writes: > >L.T.: > We are going in circles. It is already clear from other postings that > the validity of Austric is not generally accepted, in which case no > Ainu-Austric link can possibly be generally accepted. Moreover, I > think there are grounds for doubting your assertion that Ainu has been > shown, to general satisfaction, to be related to *something*. A.V.: I'm sorry but may be you can enlighten me and the rest of us what is "general acceptance" and "general satisfaction"? Is it a matter of the vote? More people accept IE than Austric, but you of course can find more people who had some experience with IE than with Austric. And of course Austric cannot be as developped as IE: the very idea of Austric is younger than a century. I agree that neither Austric nor Ainu-Austric are finally proven, but it is accepted as the only perspective direction of research by people who work in this particular field, and I named several. However, neither you nor Mark Hale gave a specific reference to anyone who outright refutes Austric. Instead, we see references to "general acceptance". It seems to me that you a priori throw away all cases under construction, whether it is Austric or Nostratic. Baby can be gone with the water (:-). L.T.: [snip] > What I did > was merely to demonstrate, to my own satisfaction at least, that the > evidence on offer *did not stand up to scrutiny*, and hence that their > case could not be accepted. And that is a very different thing from > proving the absence of a relation. A.V.: Using the formal logic, you are right, but as a matter of fact the impossibility to prove the relationship means that there is no possibility to prove the relationship, therefore it should not concern us as long as we are doing science and not entertaining the speculations. Therefore the relationship is non-existent for analysis, not in GENERAL, of course. L.T.: > > So, Bengtson's case fails. There remain at least three logical > possibilities: > > (1) Basque and Caucasian really are discoverably related, but no one > has yet uncovered the available evidence. > > I can't scrutinize a case that has never been made. > > (2) Basque and Caucasian are indeed very remotely related, but the > evidence for that relationship has long since disappeared and cannot > be recovered. > > There is no earthly way I could disprove this possibility. > > (3) Basque and Caucasian are not related at any level. > > Again, there is no earthly way I could prove this. A.V.: Of course, since all three are speculative solutions. L.T.:> > The evaluation of your case will have to await the scrutiny of > specialists in the relevant languages. If your case withstands that > scrutiny, you win; if it doesn't, you lose. That's the way it is in > this business. A.V.: I agree with this point, but please note that evaluation by the specialists in the relevant languages is very different from "general acceptance" which you used as a criterion before. Therefore I'd like to suggest to you asking a poll opinion of SPECIALISTS in historical Japanese and Korean (not only me, of course) or in Austronesian and Austroasiatic before you pronounce them isolates (J and K) or unrelated (AN and AA). > > > A.V.: > > > Again, neither Yukaghir, nor Ket are in fact a single language: > > there are two living languages in each case and more extinct > > ones. If you are going to call a family consisting of more than one > > language an isolate, then where is going to be the line? > L.T.: > > Again, we are merely quibbling about words. Being an isolate is not > an intrinsic property of a language; it's merely, as others have > pointed out, a property we project onto a language as a result of our > investigations to date. It's purely a matter of taste whether we want > to apply the term to a living language with no known living relatives > but with known extinct relatives. A.V.: Hopefully for the last time. Even leaving aside extinct relatives there are in fact TWO (2) Yukaghir and TWO (2) Ket languages. May be checking out the standard descriptions of Yukaghir and Ket such as Kreinovich 1957, 1968 and Dul'zon 1968 will finally persuade you that there is more than ONE (1) LIVING LANGUAGE and that I am not making that up. Therefore none of this cases is similar to Nihali that is much more homogeneous, and can be called a real isolate. From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Sat Mar 29 17:04:05 1997 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 17:04:05 +0000 Subject: isolates once more In-Reply-To: from "Alexander Vovin" at Mar 28, 97 06:53:47 pm Message-ID: For more reasons than one, I suspect this may be my final contribution to this debate. Alexander Vovin writes: [on my assertion that Austric is not generally accepted] > I'm sorry but may be you can enlighten me and the rest of us > what is "general acceptance" and "general satisfaction"? Is it a > matter of the vote? More people accept IE than Austric, *Everybody* accepts IE. The status of IE, including elaborate reconstructions of phonology, lexis and grammar, has long since reached the point at which anybody who rejected IE would be regarded, rightly or wrongly, as a lunatic. It is perfectly clear that Austric is nowhere near that state. > but you of course can find more people who had some experience with > IE than with Austric. And of course Austric cannot be as developped > as IE: the very idea of Austric is younger than a century. > I agree that neither Austric nor Ainu-Austric are finally proven, And that is the point I was making. End of discussion? > but it is accepted as the only perspective direction of research by > people who work in this particular field, and I named several. Hardly the same thing, is it? A medical scientist who satisfies himself that there is only one prospective direction for tackling AIDS is not a medical scientist who has conquered AIDS. > However, neither you nor Mark Hale gave a specific reference to > anyone who outright refutes Austric. Instead, we see references to > "general acceptance". It seems to me that you a priori throw away > all cases under construction, whether it is Austric or Nostratic. > Baby can be gone with the water (:-). I have thrown away nothing, a priori or otherwise. It is impossible to find a reference work anywhere on the planet which declines to accept IE, or Afro-Asiatic, or Algonquian, or Austronesian, or Dravidian, or... well, you get the picture. It is also impossible to find a reference work which accepts even Austric, let alone Ainu-Austric, as beyond dispute. If the specialists have decided that Austric is real, then either they're keeping mighty quiet about it, or there's a monstrous conspiracy to gag them. And you've already admitted that neither of these engaging scenarios is the case. Instead, the specialists simply have not concluded that Austric is real, and there is no more to be said at present. > L.T.: > > What I did was merely to demonstrate, to my own satisfaction at > > least, that the evidence on offer *did not stand up to scrutiny*, > > and hence that their case could not be accepted. And that is a > > very different thing from proving the absence of a relation. > A.V.: > Using the formal logic, you are right, Is there some useful way of proceeding which is *not* logical? ;-) > but as a matter of fact the impossibility to prove the relationship > means that there is no possibility to prove the relationship, > therefore it should not concern us as long as we are doing science > and not entertaining the speculations. Therefore the relationship is > non-existent for analysis, not in GENERAL, of course. Sorry; again I don't follow this at all. When I speak of two languages as being "related", I mean "discoverably related", and I am often (but not always) careful to say so. I see no point in pondering the possibility that certain languages are related at some impossibly remote time depth but that we can never discover the fact. [Here I've snipped a bit I didn't understand, but it didn't seem that you were disagreeing with me.] [on my point that a genetic proposal must be evaluated] > I agree with this point, but please note that evaluation by the > specialists in the relevant languages is very different from > "general acceptance" which you used as a criterion before. I meant "general acceptance" by the relevant specialists. I don't think a specialist in Algonquian or Bantu is well placed to evaluate a case for Austric. > Therefore I'd like to suggest to you asking a poll opinion of > SPECIALISTS in historical Japanese and Korean (not only me, of > course) or in Austronesian and Austroasiatic before you pronounce > them isolates (J and K) or unrelated (AN and AA). Alexander, I have better things to do than to organize opinion polls. If any of the several genetic links you endorse comes to be accepted by specialists, tomorrow or a hundred years from now, as established beyond reasonable dispute, then I will no doubt hear about it, if I'm still around. So far I have heard nothing of the sort, and Samuel Martin's very guarded remarks do not lead me to believe that things are likely to change soon. [I have nothing further to say on Yukaghir and Ket.] Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From vovin at HAWAII.EDU Sun Mar 30 05:00:26 1997 From: vovin at HAWAII.EDU (Alexander Vovin) Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 19:00:26 -1000 Subject: Ainu and Gilyak In-Reply-To: <3347a119.27326520@mailhost.pi.net> Message-ID: Actually, there are classifiers in both Ainu and Gilyak, although the Ainu system is very limited: the two most frequently used are -p (from pe 'thing') for unanimate objects and -n (after vowel stems) or -iw (after consonant stems) (<*niw "person') for human beings. All languages in Southern part of North East Asia have classifiers: Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Manchu, Ainu, Gilyak. It is often viewed as Sinitic influence, but it has never been proven. Oldest Japanese texts, for example, which are almost free of any Chinese influence, already exhibit some classifiers, although the system is not as elaborate as in the modern language. There are numerous examples of Gilyal loanwords in Ainu and vice versa. Thus, e,g. the second classifier *niw for 'person' does look like a Gilyak word for 'person' (nivx, niGvng etc., depending on 'dialect', hence Nivx -- the name of the language as it is used in Russia today). However, I am unaware of any Gilyak word which could be a source for the first classifier. You can find some information on Ainu-Gilyak contacts in the following works by late Prof. R. Austerlitz, one of the best connoisseurs of Gilyak, and undoubtedly one of the greatest linguists of our time: "Shaman.", Ural-Altaische Jahrb"ucher 58: 143-144 (1986) "Native seal nomenclatures in South-Sakhalin". Papers of the CIC Far Eastern Institute, 1967. pp. 133-141 "L'appelation du renne en japonais, ai"nou et surtout en ghilyak", Tractata Altaica, Otto Harrassowitz 1976 pp. 45-49 There is also a big article by him in Russian, "O nivxsko-ainskom simbioze na ostrove Sakhalin", to appear in "Ainskaia problema". St.Petersbourg, 199? There is also a short list of plausible loanwords in my 1993 book "A reconstruction of Proto-Ainu", Leiden: E.j> Brill. Sincerely, Alexander Vovin On Wed, 26 Mar 1997, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > > One thing that caught my attention in the linguistic database from > Johanna Nichols' "Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time" was the > typological near-identity of Gilyak and Ainu. Of all the typological > features listed, Ainu and Gilyak only differ in that Gilyak has > numerical classifiers (26 of them). Is there any other evidence for > contacts between Gilyak and Ainu? From vovin at HAWAII.EDU Mon Mar 31 21:26:53 1997 From: vovin at HAWAII.EDU (Alexander Vovin) Date: Mon, 31 Mar 1997 11:26:53 -1000 Subject: Japanese/Korean/Tungus In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Stefan, Thanks for support -- and, of course, all the questions you ask are right to the point and need to be answered -- I'll try to do it below. Note that I have to comply with our moderator directions, and therefore, can leave only essential part of your posting in order to make it short. On Fri, 28 Mar 1997, Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote: > Since I have been addressed in Sasha Vovin's posting, let me throw in a few > remarks. Basically, Sasha, this time, I'm on your side, I have no quarrel > with the notion that Japanese and Korean are related (and there might be a > relationship with Tungus after all). Your Diachronica paper helped much to > form my opinion on this, since there you managed to show morphological > evidence, just the thing which - as you correctly observe - I want to see. > > For Japanese you list such forms as (I believe the unasterisked forms > represent attested Old Japanese): > > -ey < *(a)Ci< *(a)gi (to be compared with Korean -Gi etc.)[in Diachronica > XI you give it without the bracketed initial *a, what does that mean ?] > -u < *-wi < *-bi (to be compared with Korean * -bi, Tungus *-bi > etc.), and some minor cases where the actually compared form on the > Japanese side is a reconstruct. > > Could you please help to clarify for us non-Japanologists, how the > proto-Japanese reconstructs are arrived at ? A.V.: Reconstruction of -ey as *(a)Ci is based on the following facts. We do know from internal evidence that OJ ey comes from *aCi (cf. sakey 'rice wine', but saka-dukyi 'cup for sake', examples of this sort are abundant). We have to posit a *C between the vowels, as no vowel clusters are allowed in the proto-language. The proposal that *C goes back to *g belongs to Martin, and is based, if I remember correctly, on observation that this while only two other consonants (*r and *m) can be lost in intervocalic position, their loss is accountable for (Whitman's law), while we can't accont for *C disappearance here. In addition, *g is exactly the stop lacking in the proto-system (only p, t, k, b, d are reconstructable), so we pose *g for pre-Japonic. Now, *(a) is included to account for the pairs like tuk- 'be attached' : tukey- 'to attach' (Unger reconstructs the stem *tuka- for the intransitive pair here, and I do not accept this final *-a, for the reasons too long to list here, but you can trust me that there are other counterarguments that in my opinion outweight benefits of reconstructing *-a for the majority of PJ verbal stems). Reconstruction of final -u as -bi I believe might be warranted by final -mi in some Ryukyuan dialects (cf. Okinawan -N) corresponding to -u in OJ. There is also -mi in OJ which in certain cases may be argued as quality verb final, although the evidence is more slippery here. S.G.: > I'm not so happy with *-gi "causative relic" and your Manchu example. Why > don't you cite straightforwardly Evenki -gi: (with a long vowel, which is > probably of proto-Tung. status) 'transitivizer' ? It does the job much > better, since the Manchu verb algi- you give doesn't mean "let know" at > all, but rather "to become or be known, famous", rather an > intransitive/anticausative formation to the root found in ala- "to report, > say". A.V.: Yes, you are right about Evenki -gi: -- it slipped my mind, as I said that I was typing the list on the basis of my memory, and I know Manchu better than any other Tungusic language. As for Manchu algi-, you are right, it means "be known", but known that this -gi- can still be compared with Korean 'transitivity flipper", since the latter goes both ways. S.G.: > The proto-Tungus negative marker (an independent particle in all > probability) is given in Diachronica XI, by you as *aana (a:na, with a long > vowel), I think that reconstruction is the one which should be preferred, > since Evenki a:chin 'not, yok' seems not to leave another choice. Btw., do > you have any idea about those obscure elements as Manchu -kU or Evenki (and > other Tungus lgs.) -chi(n) here ? In the same Diachronica paper you give > the MK (Middle Korean ?) equivalent as /ani/, here as an(h); which is > correct ? A.V.: You are right again about the vowel length in Tungusic, should be *a:na. I would compare J and K forms to Even a:n etc. (TMS 1.41a), rather than to Evk. a:cin, although they are probably also related. As for Manchu akU, I have demonstrated recently that Manchu -k- < *-nk- (forthcoming in JSFOu), that gives us *ankU. It is not possible to separate -KU as such, but I trust that we can of course have *ank-U on the basis of the other Manchu negative waka. MK ani appears to be the original form, and anh- (verbal stem) is a contraction of ani-ho- "not-do", although there is, I believe some scanty evidence fro dialects permitting to pose two of them as equal variants. S.G.: > > On the correspondence pattern: > -kyi < *-ki MK -e/-a ?< *Ga/Ge Manchu xa/xe/xo < *kV > retrospective perfective perfective > > you give in Diachronica XI (*if* this is the same cognate set, I may of > course be totally wrong here), > > as equivalent to Manchu -ha/-he/-ho < -*kV a Japanese "past marker" *-iki : > is this the same thing as "retrospective -kyi < *-ki"? In the same list you > give as MK (unasterisked, therefore attested ?) -ke-, here -e/-a ?< *Ga/Ge, > could you please clarify what is actually attested, what is reconstructed > and on what reasons ? > > On the cognate set > -te- < *-ta-Ci- -te-/ta- ---- > perfective perfective > > we read in Diachronica XI: Jap. *-ita-Ci-, MK -te- (and Tungus *-taa-, > which I don't know well, there seem to be several dental suffixes you could > have in mind, would you mind giving an example ?). Again, which is the > state-of-the-art ? A.V.: The discrepancy here is due to the fact that I have changed some of my views recently. My original position was that retrospective and perfective markers in OJ do not follow the infinitive (gerund) marker -i, therefore I posited *-iki and *-ita-. Now, I am persuaded by majority's point of view that they do follow *-i, and therefore, I presented *-ki and *-ta-Ci- here. S.G.: > > Furthermore, is the MK "realis participle" -(V)n the same thing as the > *-na- suffix from Diachronica XI, which is there compared with Jap. *-in- > "perfective" ? A.V.: Stefan, I believe you were looking at the wrong column in Diachronica XI, which compares PJ *-in-, MK -n (which is the same as -(V)n here, and PMT *-na- (which I did not include here this time). S.G.: > The "tentative/volitive" suffix from your posting (Jap. -ama-, Tung. -Vme-) > looks in your paper again a little bit differently: Jap. *-am- (OK, I > think, the latter is the reconstruct, whereas the former the attested form, > or ???) and Tung. *-m-. I'm not too familiar with that latter suffix, so > one or two examples might help a bit. A.V.: If OJ subjunctive -amasi is not build on tentative *-ama- and -si (also appearing in negative tentative -azi < ?*-an-si), then tentative should be reconstructed as -am- rather than -ama-, but this is a difficult choice to make. I forgot to add Korean promisory -(V)ma to this list, btw. Tungusic - *-m- or (V)me- (likely the first one, as I told I was typing from my memory this time) is taken from O.Sunik's "Glagol v tunguso-man'chzhurskikh iazykakh", which is at home at present time, so I can't give you the exact reference to the page (you'll find it in the section on mood markers). Again, from my memory, Even has -mna- for tentative, and -mci- for subjunctive (cf. Evk. subjunctive -mca:-, I don't remember the Evk. tentative form), on which Sunik builds his reconstruction. Finally, I might be overcautious with Jurchen data (you are right, there are markers that resemble -me and -re both phonetically and functionally), but this is the same point I've already brought once in our discussion of the "Secret History": until the careful Chinese-oriented reconstruction of Jurchen is done, it might be premature to operate with Jurchen data, in the sense that preference should be given to Manchu, since our understanding of Manchu phonology is better than that of Jurchen. I hope this will clarify the matter, Cheers, Sasha