Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Zaarin »

Tropylium wrote:but given the general low amount of isolates in Africa or even the Near East, this is unlikely to make a big difference
Well, bear in mind that the Near East got leveled by Semitic (and Indo-European) relatively recently. Look further back and you have isolates like Sumerian and Elamite, small families like Hurro-Urartian, and unclassified languages like Kassite (perhaps Hurro-Urartian).
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Howl »

The shared drift that happens in Sprachbunds can also produce lots of shared changes. Standard Average European has features in it that were definitely not inherited from PIE, the ancestor of most of the languages in this Sprachbund. For example, the definite and indefinite articles and the periphrastic perfects with 'to have' were all later innovations that spread within a West-European Sprachbund.

One of the things that we often don't realize is that PIE is the only 'Mitian' language that has been reconstructed based on languages that were written down 2500-3500 years ago. How would PIE look if we had to reconstruct it based on the languages of the last 1000-500 years? Would we still be able to reconstruct ablaut and the laryngeals without Ancient Greek, Hittite, Tocharian, Sanskrit and Avestan? Maybe some of the typological 'strangeness' of PIE with the Mitian languages is because it was reconstructed from languages that were written down before being affected by a shared drift away from such features.

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by mèþru »

East and South Africa was probably like that before the Bantu Expansion, with Sandawe and Hadza being notable examples.
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by WeepingElf »

Howl wrote:The shared drift that happens in Sprachbunds can also produce lots of shared changes. Standard Average European has features in it that were definitely not inherited from PIE, the ancestor of most of the languages in this Sprachbund. For example, the definite and indefinite articles and the periphrastic perfects with 'to have' were all later innovations that spread within a West-European Sprachbund.

One of the things that we often don't realize is that PIE is the only 'Mitian' language that has been reconstructed based on languages that were written down 2500-3500 years ago. How would PIE look if we had to reconstruct it based on the languages of the last 1000-500 years? Would we still be able to reconstruct ablaut and the laryngeals without Ancient Greek, Hittite, Tocharian, Sanskrit and Avestan? Maybe some of the typological 'strangeness' of PIE with the Mitian languages is because it was reconstructed from languages that were written down before being affected by a shared drift away from such features.
Ablaut is alive and well in the Germanic strong verbs. Laryngeals were first reconstructed before the discovery of Hittite, though the discovery of Hittite was of importance in the laryngeal theory gaining acceptance. But certainly, the reconstruction of PIE would be much more difficult if we had no access to ancient IE languages.

Nevertheless, though, the modern IE languages are typologically quite different from more "typical" Mitian languages such as the Uralic and Altaic ones, and PIE reconstructed on them alone would not look more like Proto-Uralic or Proto-Turkic. But on the other hand, our reconstructions of other Mitian protolanguages would be different - mainly, more secure and detailed - than what we have if there were written records of Uralic, Eskimo-Aleut and other non-IE Mitian languages from about 2,000 years ago. I still don't expect them to be more like PIE, though.

I don't think the typological aberrancy of IE from a Mitian standpoint is an artifact of the better historical attestation of the IE family. Things like the 3-way distinction in IE stop types and the fusional morphology could even be reconstructed from the modern IE languages alone, even if we knew nothing about the ancient IE languages.
mèþru wrote:East and South Africa was probably like that before the Bantu Expansion, with Sandawe and Hadza being notable examples.
Certainly, before the Bantu expansion, Africa south of the Equator was a patchwork of small families and isolates, and I guess that most of these languages had clicks - like the surviving ones do.
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Tropylium »

Howl wrote:The shared drift that happens in Sprachbunds can also produce lots of shared changes. Standard Average European has features in it that were definitely not inherited from PIE, the ancestor of most of the languages in this Sprachbund. For example, the definite and indefinite articles and the periphrastic perfects with 'to have' were all later innovations that spread within a West-European Sprachbund.
Some features are definitely not very genetically attached. Syntactic details such as these seem to be especially prone to being purely due to diffusion. On the other hand, cases like the South Asian retroflexes are just as clearly not diffusion-based. These can be reconstructed already for Proto-Dravidian and Proto-Indic; which means that we have already pared the number of languages whose retroflexes we would like to explain from 200-ish to 2. I actually think that at this point it is no longer absolutely necessary to assume a connection between the two. Retroflexes are maybe rare-ish, but not that rare.

Contact between the two families surely explains why the retroflexes have remained such a basic staple of both of them over the last 3000 years, though. When they appear elsewhere they seem to be more unstable: e.g. western Pashto has /ʂ ʐ/, but these already correspond to central and northeastern dialects /x g/, southeastern /ʃ ʒ/; or, eastern Khanty has /ʈʂ ɳ ɭ/, but these correspond to southern /tʃ n l/.
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mèþru wrote:East and South Africa was probably like that before the Bantu Expansion, with Sandawe and Hadza being notable examples.
Certainly, before the Bantu expansion, Africa south of the Equator was a patchwork of small families and isolates,
Isolates in the sense of languages that we would be hard-pressed to demonstrate to be related to any others, most certainly. On the other hand, Africa has had languages in it for 50,000 years at least, and we know of two major (continent-spanning) linguistic expansions already within the last 10,000: Afrasian and Niger-Congo. There were probably a few others during the remaining 80%+ of the timeline as well. There are pretty good chances that the remaining isolates are a part of the aftermath of one of these, not relicts all the way from the dawn of language.

The Near East is a very similar case. Nevermind any primeval hunter-gatherer expansions: the place has had agriculture for 12,000 years, and the 5,000 years of that that we have written history of shows at least five major linguistic expansions: Akkadian, Aramaic and Arabic in Mesopotamia; Greek and Turkish in Anatolia. At least two others are implied (Proto-Semitic and Proto-Iranian). And if we look at the current-day "isolates" of the area, e.g. modern Aramaic varieties or Pontic Greek, they are residues of some of these older expansions, not anything that has been hanging out there "forever". So it's not very plausible to suggest that something like Elamite, still pretty recent anthropologically speaking, would continue the language of a group of modern humans who (1) arrived from Africa already in the Pleistocene completely independently of all other modern humans, and (2) had also invented language all on their own.

If we're counting the entirety of history, it's obviously more likely that there once existed languages that were completely unrelated to anything else. I'm only claiming that the languages we actually have records of are unlikely to be cases of this.

Speaking of Africa BTW: according to Blench some of the livestock terminology used by the Khoe seems to be of Cushitic origin. So, before the Bantu expansion, the two of them were in contact somewhere in Eastern Africa, be it through to Cushitic stretching much further south or Khoe stretching much further North. The existence of Sandawe seems like a point in favor of the latter.
WeepingElf wrote:I feel that the relationship between, say, Semitic and Cushitic is probably almost as deep as that between IE and Uralic, making Afroasiatic a macrogroup like Mitian
Semitic alone is probably at least as old as Indo-European (though the records start a bit earlier), Cushitic is definitely much older than Uralic. Chadic is probably fairly old, too, and Egyptian starts being attested way early. This seems like a major part of what allows Afrasian to be much more legible than anything along the lines of Indo-Uralic.
WeepingElf wrote:Amerind, as you all know, is rejected by almost every Americanist, partly because of the poor method and poor evidence, but partly certainly because of its uselessness in language classification. What use is a "classification" which includes, within the domain of indigenous American languages, everything except two families?
It gives a licence to go wild with etymology: you can just datamine for cognates everywhere across the Americas, instead of having to stick with reasonably established groups…
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by mèþru »

Is there actually good evidence for Niger-Congo?
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

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mèþru wrote:Is there actually good evidence for Niger-Congo?
I've always been skeptical of this. I don't believe in the validity of Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, or Niger-Congo (or, God forbid, Khoisan...).

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Zaarin »

Vijay wrote:
mèþru wrote:Is there actually good evidence for Niger-Congo?
I've always been skeptical of this. I don't believe in the validity of Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, or Niger-Congo (or, God forbid, Khoisan...).
Which Afroasiatic? According to my understanding of the evidence, Boreoafroasiatic (Semitic-Egyptian-Berber) is solid. Adding Cushitic is reasonably sound but needs more work. Chadic starts getting more tenuous but still has some support. It's Omotic, as I understand, that really raises eyebrows.
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by ęzo »

Vijay wrote:
mèþru wrote:Is there actually good evidence for Niger-Congo?
I've always been skeptical of this. I don't believe in the validity of Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, or Niger-Congo (or, God forbid, Khoisan...).
Afroasiatic does make me a bit skeptical; for Egyptian alone, there’s two different sets of correspondences, with Egyptologists split on supporting one or the other. The recent attempts at reconstruction of the proto-language have been riddled with holes, and, as mentioned, very contradictory with each other. The proportion of lexical material shared between the two earliest-attested branches, Semitic and Egyptian, is remarkably low, and much of even that is uncertain. A lot of the shared features look explicable as a Sprachbund, although some, like the Semitic suffix conjugation = the Egyptian stative endings, are maybe less so.

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Vijay »

Yeah, I've definitely heard of problems with the relationship between Semitic and Egyptian from people who IIRC have worked on both. Like you said, I've also heard that it's not yet clear that the similarities aren't areal rather than genetic.

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by mèþru »

What about Semitic and Berber?
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

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I think that's also supposed to be problematic according to the people I've heard from about this because they've been in contact for a very long time.

I dunno, I'm just a shameless splitter, I guess. :P

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by WeepingElf »

mèþru wrote:What about Semitic and Berber?
If these two are related, one would also expect Egyptian to be part of the relationship, as it sits right in the middle between the other two. Of course, it is conceivable that Egyptian was an unrelated language that entered later, driving a wedge between Semitic and Berber.

Also, I think the morphological correspondences at least between Semitic, Egyptian, Berber and at a somewhat more remote degree Cushitic (I can't say much about Chadic or Omotic) are so good that the relationship hypothesis suggests itself, even if it is hard to underpin it with lexical correspondence sets. But as I have observed earlier, morphological matches of a similar quality exist between IE and Uralic, and also between Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic, and to a lesser degree between these two groups. Hence, I consider the Afroasiatic and Mitian groupings to be of similar quality (and time depth), the difference in acceptance being due to the fact that Africanists are more ready to accept far-flung relationships than Eurasianists for historical reasons.
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Howl »

WeepingElf wrote:Hence, I consider the Afroasiatic and Mitian groupings to be of similar quality (and time depth), the difference in acceptance being due to the fact that Africanists are more ready to accept far-flung relationships than Eurasianists for historical reasons.
I fully agree with that.

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Porphyrogenitos »

WeepingElf wrote: Africanists are much more inclined towards macro-relationship than today's Eurasianists, it seems, though the support for Nilo-Saharan seems to be waning lately, and Khoisan has pretty much been abandoned.
mèþru wrote:Is there actually good evidence for Niger-Congo?
Khoisan has absolutely been completely rejected by Africanists. I'm completely confident that there's no mainstream scholar who accepts it as anything but a term of convenience anymore.

Likewise, Nilo-Saharan as a top-level grouping has also been pretty much totally abandoned.

And in addition, many scholars of African languages now regard groups once linked with Niger-Congo as independent top-level families, such as the Mande and Ubangian languages. This is basically the direction in which African historical linguistics is spreading - more closely investigating relationships within and between various smaller groupings, and rejecting broad groupings for which there is little evidence.

And how is the idea of a "mesh" different from a sprachbund/linguistic area? The term's meaning sounds exactly the same, except the name - suggesting a kind of net - seems to be a way to suggest some kind of linear linkage, like the tree model of a genetic relationship, but different. (EDIT: To be fully honest and make my innuendo explicit, it sounds to me like a weasel word that lets people portray linguistic areas as genetic linkages. But I haven't read the literature in which that term is used, so that's not fair of me, but it is my first impression.)

Also, just being an occasional visitor to the ZBB and not a frequent participant in the historical linguistics threads, I will admit I am rather distressed by how much of a lumper everyone here seems to be. Like, it sounds like the ZBB consensus is that we all know the Indo-Uralic genetic link is true, but it's just a matter of finding the right evidence to prove it beyond any doubt...
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Vijay »

Porphyrogenitos wrote:Also, just being an occasional visitor to the ZBB and not a frequent participant in the historical linguistics threads, I will admit I am rather distressed by how much of a lumper everyone here seems to be. Like, it sounds like the ZBB consensus is that we all know the Indo-Uralic genetic link is true, but it's just a matter of finding the right evidence to prove it beyond any doubt...
Amen. This is part of the reason why I usually ignore these threads myself.

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

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Porphyrogenitos wrote:it sounds like the ZBB consensus is that we all know the Indo-Uralic genetic link is true, but it's just a matter of finding the right evidence to prove it beyond any doubt...
There's very little people actively discussing these topics, so it's easy to reach a consensus if you've got only a handful of people. However, I think that all that argue in favour of such a genetic link are well aware, and express these sentiments often, that they may be wrong, and admit they argue from "gut feeling". There's no quacks here that argue agains evidence, at the very least.


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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

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I'm very definitely not a lumper. My opinion on Indo-Uralic is that it's intriguing, worth investigating, but probably won't amount to anything provable.

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by mèþru »

Most of what I do on this thread is complain about methodology and lack of evidence, so maybe I should just do as Vijay
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

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mèþru wrote:Most of what I do on this thread is complain about methodology and lack of evidence, so maybe I should just do as Vijay
Or perhaps not, to avoid this turning into an echo chamber.


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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

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gach wrote:If you take the plain voiced stops as the last stop series that PIE gained, why couldn't you explain their distribution simply by the distribution of their originating condition? You could for example easily imagine a Pre-PIE stop system with a plain two-way distinction of [-voiced] and [+voiced] stops where the ancestral [+voiced] series later gained secondary breathiness. If you then have some later split leading into the development of [+voiced, -breathy] stops that contrasted with the older [+voiced, +breathy] series, their distribution could simply reflect the distribution of their originating condition. I don't know how much evidence there is for such development history but the point is that a restricted distribution of a phoneme can reflect its history without the phoneme having to have any particularly special phonetic features.
This is also very much the direction in which I am thinking. But the restricted distribution only occurs when a root has two stops. So the case of one stop would still need an originating condition.
jal wrote:
mèþru wrote:Most of what I do on this thread is complain about methodology and lack of evidence, so maybe I should just do as Vijay
Or perhaps not, to avoid this turning into an echo chamber.
I may be a (moderate) lumper, but I am still interested in the views of the splitters.

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

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WeepingElf wrote: What use is a "classification" which includes, within the domain of indigenous American languages, everything except two families? It is pointless.
The point, the use, of such a classification is that it may be true. The purpose of genealogical linguistics isn't to group languages into groups of equal size, it's to tell us something about how languages, and hence their speakers, are related. If it's true that, the north of north america, no new migrants have brought their language to the new world and maintained it, then a classification that recognises that truth is inherently not pointless. It's not pointless, because being true is part of the point of a scientific theory.

Should linguists just randomly mix up american languages into an arbitrary number of groups and pretend that those are the real families? Because if not, I don't see what the alternative is to just speaking the truth.

The truth in this case, by the way, is that the Amerind languages almost certainly do form a valid language family. This is clear from population genetics - the Amerind population is genetically homogenous, descends from a very small founder population, and shows so far no evidence, outside ND, EA, and possibly some other extinct groups in the arctic, of any later introgression of people until the Vikings. It is conceivably possible that some small language somewhere is indeed a newcomer, and it would be valuable if linguists could show that. That would be very interesting. But if there evidence isn't there, they can't just make it up.

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Regarding Indo-Uralic: no, like most people here, I think, I don't think Indo-Uralic seems particularly plausible*. Given the near-total lack of plausible cognates, any relationship must surely be very deep, at which point it becomes implausible to assume that these two families are more closely related than any other. A broader north eurasian language family is a possibility, but the evidence for it is minimal - as discussed already, the "M/T" thing crumbles away pretty much as soon as you look at it.

*it's probably not great for the theory that this forum ranks so highly in the google hits...
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Soap »

The apparent lack of diversity among Amerind people's may be an illusion due to1)the founding populations do no match neatly to extant tribes in Asian
2l they have commingledwith each other
3l many tribes are small and difficult to place on a genetic tree since one family can have a disproportionate effect on the genetic identity of the whole.
I don't believe there was ever a stage at which all if the Amerind people's spoke the same langusge.
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by KathTheDragon »

Salmoneus wrote:This is clear from population genetics
I thought this doesn't prove anything about language.

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Zaarin »

My issue with Amerind is that, even if it's true (which is very far from proven simply by genetic evidence), it seems to me that it would have been at a time depth that is utterly unprovable. Even younger proposed macro-families in North America like Hokan (generally disregarded), Gulf (now generally limited to Natchez-Muskogean), Penutian (partially accepted), and Macro-Siouan (Mithun describes it as "promising") have been difficult to prove simply because the recorded material on Native American languages is A) young and B) often scanty. The theory is further hurt by the fact that its biggest proponent is Greenberg, whose groupings within his proposed macrofamily are certainly...creative.
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