Ainu and Gilyak

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

Alexander Vovin <vovin at hawaii.edu> 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?
 
 
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Miguel Carrasquer Vidal                     ~ ~
Amsterdam                   _____________  ~ ~
mcv at pi.net                 |_____________|||
 
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