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[James A. Landau]

In a message dated 8/14/02 11:14:48 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
mam at THEWORLD.COM writes:

> The LINGUIST List gets the occasional crank posting
>  announcing a website / mailing list /  book  about
>          Nostratic-Uralic-MacroDinean /
>          [other examples]

Is Nostratic considered a crank theory?  My understanding is that Russian
linguists in particular consider it worth further work.

I shall consider this my cue to post my own crank theory about Ural-Altaic.
If you haven't reached for the DELETE key yet, now is the time to do so.

The "Uralic" or "Finno-Ugrian" languages such as Finnish and Hungarian share
a number of striking grammatical features with the "Altaic" languages such as
Turkish or Mongol.  This implies that they are related, being part of a
"Ural-Altaic" language family.

On the other hand, the Finno-Ugrian languages and the Altaic languages have a
striking LACK of common vocabulary.  This implies that they are NOT related.
(If you're a monogenesis fan, this implies that the common ancestor of
Finno-Ugrian and Altaic was so long ago that the two families are about as
closely related as English and Basque.)

As best as I've been able to determine, the consensus today among linguists
is the latter conclusion, that the Finno-Ugrian and Altaic families are as
unrelated, or perhaps as distantly related, as either one is to
Indo-European.  However, I've never been able to find anything telling why
linguists so feel (if indeed they do.) All I can find is a few encyclopedia
articles which make "hand-waving" arguments such as "the two peoples lived in
the same area and picked up grammar [but not vocabulary] from each other."
This I find very unsatisfying.

So in the absence of data and of theoretical arguments, let me present my own
hypothesis on Ural-Altaic:

At one time, after the glaciers retreated but probably before what we would
recognize as Proto-Indo-European started spreading, a group of Turks
conquered another people who lived somewhere in or around the Urals.  Let's
call the original language of the conquered people "C" (for "conquered").
What family C belongs to is unknwon.  C was probably not something
recognizable to us as PIE, but could have been a distant relative of PIE.

The circumstances, or as Professor Salikoko Mufwene calls it, the "ecology".
of the conquest were such that the subject people did not learn Turkish, nor
did this batch of conquering Turks become assimilated enough to use the
subject people's speech.  Instead an intermediate language, one that perhaps
will meet Professor Mufwene's definition of "creole", arose that eventually
replaced the original language of the subject peoples (either they broke
loose from the Turks, or the Turks eventually did become assimilated but not
until the original subject people's language was no longer spoken.)

What was this intermediate language like?

I have a few data on a language called "Fanagalo", a tongue once widely used
as the common language for miners in South Africa who spoke up to 50
different native languages.  (From what I've heard, Fanangalo is in "terminal
decline" and will soon become perhaps the first language ever to go out of
existence unmourned.)

Supposedly Fanagalo uses English or "English-like" grammar but its vocabulary
comes from African tongues.  One source says 86 percent of the vocabulary is
from Zulu.  Here is a sample:

Kusasa, na kusasa, na kusasa,
Zintsuku zonke hambake gantsani,
Galesoskati, skati zo pelile;
Mazolo kanyisile masituta
Lapa ndlela file. Cima, kandlela!
Tina fana mtunzi yena
Hamba; mbongo yena kala munye
Ntsuku, mbaimbai tulisa.

This is of all things the "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech from
MacBeth---apparently the only literary work in the history of the language is
this translation of MacBeth.  The only recognizable English word in the
entire quote is "kandela".

Zulu, I am told, is one of those agglutinative languages that are so
agglutinative that they are downright inflectional.  For a beginner, the
positional syntax of English is probably much easier to learn than the rich
grammatical suffixes of Zulu.  On the other hand, the vocabulary of English
(except for items referring to modern technology) probably offers no
advantage to a beginner over the vocabulary of Zulu.  Hence I do not find it
surprising that Fanagalo should have an English-like grammar and an
almost-exclusively Zulu or other African vocabulary.

So, like Zulu, the original language of the C people had a complex and
hard-for-beginners-to-learn grammar.  (If it were a relative of the
highly-inflected PIE, that would not be surprising.)  Certainly the Turks
were not about to learn the grammar.  And so the new intermediate language of
the C people had a Turkish-like, that is to say, Altaic, grammar used to
marshal large quantities of words of the old C language.

Eventually the Turks were either kicked or assimilated, but by that time the
C's spoke exclusively the new intermediate language, which we can consider to
be proto-Finno-Ugrian.  And that is why Finno-Ugrian share so many
grammatical features without sharing a vocabulary.

What was the original C language?  It can't have been PIE or a near-relative,
else there would be a large recognizably-Indo-European element in the
Finno-Ugrian lexicon, and there isn't.  However, the original C could easily
have been a distant relative of PIE, and hence would have an inflectional
grammar as complicated as that of PIE or Zulu, and certainly too arcane for
Turks to bother to learn.

                       - Jim Landau