Arabic and IE

[Robert R. Ratcliffe]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote:

>  In any
> event, my first priority has been to see if there is any
> merit to Nostratic at all and trying to extent it surely
> is not the most obvious way to do that.  To my mind, you
> start out by checking the IE-Uralic-Altaic connection out.
> Kartvelian comes next.  I have not even done any serious
> work on whether AA is likely to be related to these.

I am curious about something.  This whole thread started with Alexis
criticizing me for not paying proper attention to work being done on
"Semitic-IE" comparison.  But is there in fact anyone who is now working
on or arguing for an IE-Afroasiatic grouping (either within or out of
Nostratic)?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the Nostratic idea started in
the 19th century as a way to link what was then known about language
families with the Biblical narrative. There were supposed to be three
families corresponding to the three sons of Noah-- Semitic, Hamitic, and
Japhetic (IE).  Other families were gradually added.

Now from what (little) I know of the modern Nostratic work, the best, or
at least most obvious argument for a common link are the similarities in
the system of pronouns (including the verb conjugation) of IE, Uralic,
and Altaic.  But AA languages show a radically different system. (The
best evidence for AA itself is similarities in this same subsystem). The
older arguments for a Semitic-IE relation relied, I believe, on things
like presence of a two-gender system and a dual number-- broad
typological properties, which are in any case absent from Uralic and
Altaic (though I recently heard that old Mongolian had gender).

So I suspect that the inclusion of AA in nostratic is purely an accident
of history-- a relic of the pre-scientific 19th century roots of the
Nostratic proposal-- rather than something that any contemporary
linguist who knows the material and the methodology has seriously
proposed.  I, for one, am very impressed that Greenberg doesn't include
AA in Nostratic. So who does argue for an IE-AA link and why?

-RR

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Robert R. Ratcliffe
Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics,
Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku
Tokyo 114 Japan