Caucasian languages and Asia Minor

[Wolfgang Schulze]

Glen Gordon schrieb:

> It would be really stupid for someone to propose that NEC is related to
> some hypothetical language that I shall name "Mumu" for comedic sake
> that magically disappeared without a single trace.

Remember that it is just this "comedy" which we play when doing internal
reconstruction. It's a mere problem of labeling whether I call an
earlier stage of PIE Pre-PIE or "Mumu". But that's not the problem! The
problem is that people do not accept language isolates. What is an
isolate? It's a language that obviously has no documented relatives.
Relatives are established by means of regular sound correspondencies
based on lexical *words* (and not *stems*) as well as on morphological
correspondencies that match established sound correspondencies. These
correspondencies should reveal to us a systematic structure that serves
as a symbol of both the lexical and grammatical system of an ancestor
common to the languages that are thought to be related. That's common
ground though very often neglected in methodology.
	Now, an isolate means that the language in question does not behave in
the sense described above. It simply is an orphan with unknown parents.
It may well have been that its parents, now dead only had this isolate
as a descendant, nothing more. And it may well have been that the
parents did not have had sisters, no aunts, no cousins, nothing...

I think that's just what the situation is like with respect to East
Caucasian. Perhaps things will change if (I say IF) we will be able to
describe Proto-East Caucasian (PEC) both with respect to grammar AND
lexicon. This enterprise hasn't been undertaken yet. We simply don't
know enough about PEC in order to relate its system to anything else "in
the world". Additionally I ask everybdody who deals with "distant"
relationship incorporating East Caucasian languages: PLEASE, don't just
look up Nikolayev/Starostin 1994! It's hardly a reliable source! It is
much better to get into the single languages, understand their systems
and then to do comparative work within this assumed language family! The
niveau we have reached with respect to PEC isn't much better yet than
that IE standards have reached in 1820. And those standards surely
weren't a good basis for any speculation on distant relationship.

> Maybe there's no need scientifically (it won't give us a cure for cancer
> I suppose), but without doing something like this, we'll never answer
> all the nagging questions about our pre-history. It must be done (but
> done better of course).

These nagging questions are quite trendy, but that does not mean that
they are on safe grounds with respect to method and language theory...
But paradigms [hopefully] change, as Kuhn told us....
_____________________________________________________
| Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze
| Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft
| Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen
| Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1
| D-80539 Muenchen
| Tel:	+89-21802486 (secr.)
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| Email: W.Schulze at mail.lrz-muenchen.de
| http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/
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