Sociological Linguistics

[Nik Taylor]

Nicholas Widdows wrote:

> Possibly some descendants of Pre-Proto-World have by chance preserved
> against all entropy some features of PPW; such as CV morpheme pattern.

But CV can also be the result of CVC pattern.  Chinese, for instance,
lost many syllable-final consonants, altho it's by no means CV, it's
close.

> I'd
> imagine all its descendants had an equal stake in this lottery, so why
> didn't CV happen to be preserved in Inuktitut or Ge^-Pano-Carib or
> Gunwingguan or Gur, rather than -- remarkable coincidence -- the two most
> "ancient" languages we can read, in the jejune sense of ancient meaning a
> mere 97% of the distance from PPW.

Perhaps it is just co-incidence.  Whatever PW was, whether it was CV (my
suspicion, given that that's the simplest structure), in the time period
involved between PW and Proto-Nostraic, CV could've easily become CVC,
and then back to CV, among other patterns.  And, of course, this is only
a *reconstructed* form.  We can't base proto-World on reconstructions
that we're not even sure of yet.  Nostraic, if it is a genuine family,
still has a long way to go (from what I've seen of it) to be considered
on firm ground.

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