Ket-Na-Dene affiliation?

[WB (in Frankfurt today)]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Just a small note of caution, re:
 
>The Yenisseyan-Na-Dene affiliation is subscribed to mainly by Sergei
>Starostin and his Moscow-based school of Nostraticists. (Stefan Georg)
 
My understanding from personal conversations with Starostin
last year is that he himself remains non-committal as far as
the proposed Ketic-Na-Dene affiliation is concerned, and that
he was not particularly amused when Ruhlen arbitrarily added
Na-Dene comparanda to his translation of Starostin's original
1982 _Ketskij Sbornik_ article in _On the Origin of Languages_.
Ditto for Sumerian, Kusunda and Burushaski, which are all ad-
ditions by Bengtson, Blazhek, Ruhlen, Boisson (?) et al., not
by Starostin, as far as I can see. It is true though, that
Starostin's collaborator on NC, S.L. Nikolaev subscribes to the
existence of "Sino-Caucasian Languages in America" (see his articles
in Shevoroshkin ed. 1989, 1991) but that doesn't necessarily mean,
of course, that _all_ "long-rangers" at Humanities U. in Moscow
would agree upon that.
 
For detailed background information on Sapir's view of the Na-Dene
-- ST relationship, cf. Alan S. Kaye, "Distant genetic relation-
ship and Edward Sapir", _Semiotica_ 91 (3-4): 273-300 (see also J.D.
Bengtson, "Edward Sapir and the 'Sino-Dene' Hypothesis",_Anthro-
pological Science_ 102 (1994): 207-230). Judging from Kaye's careful
account, it would seem that Sapir's initial enthusiasm for the
Sino-Athapaskan connection in the early 20ies gradually bleached,
possibly under the influence of his student Li Fang-kuei, who was
certainly more qualified than any other scholar around to judge
_both_ sides of the comparison. (Indeed, one letter to Sapir suggests
that the main motivation for accepting FKL as his student was precisely
Sapir's interest in verifying the ND-ST hypothesis!). A decade later,
in a letter to Nick Bodman (July 21, 1933), Sapir had already become
slightly more cautious, saying:
 
        "It is true that some years ago I announced that the
        Nadene group of American Indian languages might be
        remotely related to Sinitic (Indo-Chinese) group of
        languages. I still believe this is true but have so
        far not prepared my notes for publication".
 
Notice however, that Sapir's original motivation for the assumption
of a genetic relationship was _not_ exclusively lexical/typlogical but
_morphological_. In a letter to Berthold Laufer of 1921 he writes
 
        "I have at last found what I had been looking for some time
        now, namely that in Nadene as in Indo-Chinese there is an
        alternation of unaspirated and aspirated consonants, the latter
        of which have causative value."
 
It would thus be interesting to hear more about the diachronic sources
of this particular causative formation from a specialist in "Na-Dene"
(as well as the current state of opinions about a "Na-Dene" +/- Tlingit
itself etc.), especially since the Sino-Tibetan distinction is now com-
monly accepted to go back to *s-prefixation of the root.
 
In any case, I really wish someone could edit Sapir's manuscript "Atha-
baskan Dictionary, part 2, Sino-Nadene" (preserved in the American
Philosophical Sociery library), since his letters to Berthold Laufer,
most of which have been published by Hartmut Walravens in the meantime,
do not go beyond some rather superficial remarks. Finally I wonder if
someone has ever read Laurence Farget's M.A. thesis _Na-Dene and Sino-
Tibetan: Historical linguistics and new data towards establishing genetic
relationship_ (Lyon 1986), or would know, how to get a copy of it.
 
Best wishes, Wolfgang Behr
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Kaye quotes
 
 
 
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
>Heerstrasse 7
>D-53111 Bonn
>FRG
>+49-228-69-13-32
>