Ket-Na-Dene affiliation?

[Scott DeLancey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote:
 
> 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
 
Pretty much, yes--their both having tone weighed heavily in the hypothesis
(since we now know that in both families tone is a secondary development
in the languages and branches where it occurs this loses any force it
might ever have had), and Sapir saw a fundamentally monosyllabic structure
to both.  (That may not be as completely far-fetched a way of thinking
about Athabaskan as it sounds).
    But he did dig up a handful of actual resemblants.  Some can be found
in Victor Golla's _Sapir-Kroeber Correspondence_, especially letter 332:
 
    Tlingit k'a 'surface' : Navaho k'a 'surface' : Tibetan k'a 'surface'
    Chinese t'an 'charcoal' : Haida s-t'An 'charcoal'
    OChin ti 'this' : Ath. di 'this'
    OChin ti 'pheasant' : Ath di 'partridge'
    Nadene k'u 'hole' : Indo-Chinese [sic] k'u 'hole', with several
        supporting forms from different N-D and S-T languages.
 
Pretty standard "long-ranger" stuff.  In an addendum to that letter
he has a very nice word-family comparison involving words having to
do with 'tie', 'twist', 'rope', 'snare', 'trap', which is the only
evidence I've ever seen presented for Sino-Na-Dene that made me feel
even for a minute like I'd like to see more.
     I had heard that in his notebooks he had more extensive comparisons,
so one day while I was at the APS looking for Chinookan stuff I spent
an hour looking for ST-ND stuff, but didn't find any.
 
> 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).
 
I wish I could remember, or had saved, the citation.  I can't even
remember the journal--but I did once see an article, by some English
individual, from the 1940's or so I think, claiming a Tibetan-Basque
relationship, pretty much entirely on the grounds that they were both
ergative.
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html