Arabic and IE

[Alexis Manaster-Ramer]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------


On Sat, 6 Feb 1999, Robert R. Ratcliffe wrote:

> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> I am curious about something.  This whole thread started with Alexis
> criticizing me for not paying proper attention to work being done on
> "Semitic-IE" comparison.  But is there in fact anyone who is now working
> on or arguing for an IE-Afroasiatic grouping (either within or out of
> Nostratic)?

First, I want to thank Robert for taking my criticism seriously enough
to pursue the questions it raises.  I also want to be careful in
responding.  The way it is framed I am not sure if it asking whether
anyone wants to group IE and AA together as a proper subfamily
of Nostratic or whether
Nostratic or other scholars are pursuing the idea of IE and AA being
related.  As to the former, I don't think so, although I myself
keep thinking that some of the specific proposals that have been
made with Nostratic about the connections between IE and AA
verbal affixes for example may point to a closer connection
than is normally assumed.  Mostly though I am really trying to
point out that, even if Nostratic is valid, we really know
nothing much about its branching.  Overall, it seems as though
the lexical comparisons are particularly strong between IE,
Uralic, and Altaic, whereas grammatical ones seem to be especially
strong between IE, Uralic, and AA.  The question I like to pose
nowadays in the form I did in my earlier posting: Could it be
that IE together with Semitic, Egyptian, and Berber form a
proper subfamily of AA itself (which at first sounds absurd
until we realize just how different Cushitic and Chadic are
from the above) is intended to (a) show just how
little we do know and (b) challenge the few of us who work
on Nostratic at all to do something substantive about the
classification issues.  I am not making any claims at all,
only asking questions.

As to the other part of the question, there are very few
people actually working on Nostratic.  In fact "Nostraticist"
is a very misleading term.  Most "Nostraticists" are linguist
who strongly support Nostratic but do not at all or at best
rarely work on it.  This applies to almost all of the
Moscow scholars who are usually caled by this term.  On
the other hand, the people who actually work on Nostratic
do not necessarily support it, funny though that they may
sound.

I myself have proposed several revisions to Nostratic w/o
being committed to the theory.  In my view, it is wrong
to adopt a theory before you know how good it is and before
you have worked on it yourself in most cases.  Rather you
decide that it is good ENOUGH to spend time on and then
spend the time.

This in my view is the one central problem we face
in both theoretical and historiacl linguistics today
that people have been taught to sign on before doing
any work and contrariwise to refuse to do any work before
signing on--where by 'sign on' I mean become a devotee,
a followed, an adherent, a supporter--whatever the term
is.

Finally, there are of course people who ignore Nostratic
and work on comparing IE and Semitic, but this strikes
as no more scholarly today than it was in the 1920's
or even earlier when Pedersen and others pointed out
you cannot talk about Semitic and IE w/o talking about
AA.

>
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the Nostratic idea started in
> the 19th century as a way to link what was then known about language
> families with the Biblical narrative. There were supposed to be three
> families corresponding to the three sons of Noah-- Semitic, Hamitic, and
> Japhetic (IE).  Other families were gradually added.
>
This is in fact incorrect.  Nothing could be further from the truth.
The man who gave us the idea of Nostratic and the term, Holger Pedersen,
in fact spent an inordinate amount of time just trying to show how
misleading the term 'Semitic' is precisely because the Biblical
assocaitions have nothing to do with the case.  The work on Nostratic
actually goes back to work, the best and most abundant of which
was done by several Scandinavian linguists like Mo/ller, Anderson,
Wiklund, etc., on connecting IE to on the one hand Semitic and
on the other Uralic (or Uralic and Altaic).  Pedersen as far as I
know was the first to propose that these efforts point to a far
bigger unity which he called Nostratic in or around 1903.  He
himself did little work on the theory himself, atlhough at
the 1933 congress of linguists he did advance some arguments
for Nostratic and engaged in a lively debate with such
skeptics as Trubetzkoy and others.

No, there is no more of a Biblical connection here than
there is with Alice Faber's imaginary "Judeo-Christian"
or Benji Wald's even more imaginary racist ideas.

But I would very much appreciate hearing where you
think you picked this up,  There are many vicious rumors
circulating about Nostratic and the scholars who worked
on it, and I try from time to time to deal with some of them
in print.  So any references would be apprecaited or even
any hints as to who spreads this disinformation.

BTW, Holger Pedersen's The Discovery of Language (a title
imposed by an American publisher, not his own), which was
once one of the most widely known basic books in our field,
deals with the state of comparative ling generally and hence
includes what little as known or thought of Nostratic
in the early period,  It is in any case a very fine book
and an irreplaceable one for anyone with an interest in
the history of linguistics.  For more recent work on Nostratic,
I posted some basic references earlier.

> Now from what (little) I know of the modern Nostratic work, the best, or
> at least most obvious argument for a common link are the similarities in
> the system of pronouns (including the verb conjugation) of IE, Uralic,
> and Altaic.

Not entirely.  IE and Uralic yes but Altaic not so much.  And there
have been proposals linking IE verb morphology quite intimately
with AA and also Kartvelian.

> But AA languages show a radically different system. (The
> best evidence for AA itself is similarities in this same subsystem).

Not necessarily.  Dolgopolsky and perhaps others independently
have argued that what they take the most archaic parts of
the verbal inflectional system in IE and AA are quite
strikingly related.  I am not endorsing this at least not
fully.  I am just pointing that this is a point addressed
at reasonable length in the literature.

Also, re AA, it is true that the relationship of
Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, and some but not all of Cushitic
(languages like Somali) was noticed early on and argued
above on the basis of obvious pronominal and verb-inflectional
parallels (Pedersen's op. cit. book, p. 121 is a good quick
reference for nonspecialists), there are other groups of
Cushitic lgs where this is not the case.  And one of the
groups often assigned to AA, Omotic, is extremely divergent
in this regard, and in fact its AA status still (or agai?)
controversial

> The
> older arguments for a Semitic-IE relation relied, I believe, on things
> like presence of a two-gender system and a dual number--
This has nothing whatever to do with Nostratic scholarship
of any stripe.  There have been and I think still are people
who say such things, some of whom are academics with impressive
resumes, but not among Nostratic comparativists, not now, not
a hundred years ago.

> broad
> typological properties,
Which as you know have nothing to do with language relatedness,
a point Pedersen, Greenberg, and so many other fine linguists have
had to repeat so much and so often.

> which are in any case absent from Uralic and
> Altaic (though I recently heard that old Mongolian had gender).
>
Doerfer talks about gender as an argument against the
validity of Altaic, I believe.

> So I suspect that the inclusion of AA in nostratic is purely an accident
> of history-- a relic of the pre-scientific 19th century roots of the
> Nostratic proposal--
That is just not so.  And you have to distinguish two kinds of
thought about language in the 19th cent AND today (scientific
vs. nonscientific rather than prescientific). The scientific
comp. linguists who linked AA with IE (or Nostratic generally)
were some of the finest scientific comp linguists of the time
and I would argue the same is true today.

> rather than something that any contemporary
> linguist who knows the material and the methodology has seriously
> proposed.
Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky, who created modern Nostratic
studiesin the 1960's and Bomhard, who came up with a similar
though distinct approach independently a little later, all
did/do.  To the extent that I accept Nostratic, I find the
AA connection no less compelling than Kartvelian and more
than Dravidian, for example.

Starostin is the one major Nostraticist (although he actually
has done little published work on Nostratic) who has argued that
AA is a sister of Nostratic and not a daughter, but this is
an issue of branching rather than saying that there is no
relationship.

> I, for one, am very impressed that Greenberg doesn't include
> AA in Nostratic.

I did not think he had published his work on the topic, so
I cannot judge whether his reasons are something to praise
or otherwise.  All I know is that he excludes AA from what
he calls Eurasiatic, which is similar to Nostratic, but
I am rather sure that he, like Starostin, does not reject
a relationship but merely thinks it is a more distant one.

>So who does argue for an IE-AA link and why?
On the basis of the numerous lexical and grammatical
forms which are argued to be cognate, to be found
in works by Illich-Svitych, Dolgopolsky, Bomhard,
above all, and some others.

AMR