Ket-Na-Dene affiliation?

[Ralf-Stefan Georg]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
>I'm wanting to know, does anybody subscribing to this EBB know anything
>about this?
 
The Yenisseyan-Na-Dene affiliation is subscribed to mainly by Sergei
Starostin and his Moscow-based school of Nostraticists. It forms part of a
much larger grouping, called Dene-Caucasian, comprising no less than the
following languages and families: Basque, Iberian (yes, Iberian, though
nobody knows anything about Iberian !), Burushaski, Yenisseyan,
"North-Caucasian" (comprising NW- and NE-Caucasian which are not generally
grouped together by Caucasianists), Hurro-Urartean (lumped with N-Cauc.),
Kusunda (an extinct language of Nepal, on which little is known; Bengtson,
another supporter of this grouping, recently informed me that Kusunda has
been taken out of the grouping; I'm inclined to call this a step in the
right direction ;-) and Na-Dene (I'm currently unsure whether further North
American lgs. have made it into the family yet), and, sorry I forgot, the
whole of Sino-Tibetan, and of course Sumerian.
It is clear that one of the goals of this grouping is to hoover up most
languages of the Old World, which are currently thought to be isolates.
Larry Trask has shown on numerous occasions that (the supporters of) this
theory treat(s) Basque data in a less than competent manner; the same can
be said about Yenisseyan and much of the Tibeto-Burman (part of
Sino-Tibetan) data I've seen in connection with this theory.
Parts of this giganto-macro-grouping have some history, though: a
Yenisseyan-Sino-Tibetan connection has been en vogue in the earlier days of
Yenisseyology with investigators like Donner, Bouda and the outsider
Ramstedt, comparing Na-Dene languages with Sino-Tibetan (especially
Tibetan) has a Sapirian pedigree (I await to stand corrected, but as far as
I remember this was based on typological resemblances only), Sumerian has
been compared to pretty much everything, so has Basque, but I think it is
safe to say that a Basque - (unspecified) Caucasian connection has probably
lured more early researchers than anything else (probably originally
instigated by ergativity, which once made up for a quite exotic
look-and-feel of a language - which is hardly the case today).
Readers may already have inferred from my slightly ironic tone that I'm
personally disinclined to buy much of this (I have working experience with
Tibeto-Burman, Yenisseyan, NW-Caucasian, NE-Caucasian and a bit of
Burushaski).
 
St.G.
 
Stefan Georg
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