Tropylium wrote:Salmoneus wrote:In Altaic, btw, the "M" is often /b/, and it's apparently widely believed that there must have been borrowing of pronouns between the three altaic families.
Which even means they might plausibly be a part of an original cluster of "W-pronouns" instead, as in English
we. In Indo-European, of course, this is 1PP and not 1PS; some Nostraticists connect this to the 1PS pronouns in Chadic and Egyptian. This sounds hella skimpier than the evidence for M-pronouns, though.
AFAIK, the Altaic languages have a *bi ~ *min alternation in their 1st-person pronouns. The */m/ in the oblique form *min may be an assimilation of an earlier */b/ to the */n/, but it is also conceivable that the original phoneme was */m/ which regularly denasalized except when another nasal followed.
Afrasian almost certainly originated in Africa (somewhere around Sudan/South Sudan/Ethiopia, I think); sure, the Nostraticists place it in the Near East, but they of course have an axe to grind there, and actually Semitic is the
only branch of Afrasian that has ever left Africa. Furthermore, the morphological structure of Afrasian is so remote from IE or the other Mitian languages that no resemblance can be observed. Together, these two points make any relationship hypothesis connecting the two seem utter random. While there are a few IE words that seem to resemble Semitic words, these are probably just Neolithic
Wanderwörter that spread from the lost language of the first farmers both north into IE and south into Semitic together with the new economy.
Salmoneus wrote:Regarding the non-borrowability of pronouns: leaving aside the pronouns that have been borrowed, we also see processes of imitation, in which a pronoun in one language develops from within the language in a way that mirrors the pronoun of a neighbouring language. An example of this is the Finnish third person pronoun "hän", suspiciously similar to neighbouring Swedish "han", and not present in other Uralic languages, but not believed to have been directly borrowed.
Wrong. Finnish
hän has cognates in all Finnic languages (from Veps
hän to Livonian
eņtš 'own'), and is normally also connected with 3rd person pronouns all over the rest of Uralic, such as Northern Sami
son or Hungarian
őn. Did you happen to have other examples of "imitation of pronouns" in mind — or better yet, some references about this? I don't think I've heard of the concept before.
Pronoun borrowings are not unknown, but AFAIK rare, especially between unrelated languages, and positing 1st and 2nd person pronouns as
Wanderwörter in a continent-sized area is just ludicrous. And chance resemblance, well, for that we are dealing with
too many families. Alas, nobody with a sane mind would build such a vast family proposal on just two pronouns, so research into other meaningful resemblances in morphology and lexicon is required here. The pronouns are just the most visible
hint that there may be something going on.
Salmoneus wrote:However, genetically we know that the overwhelming majority of Proto-Uralic speakers came from east asia,
Uh, no we don't. We do not know the precise genetics of whoever spoke PU at all (there is more than one archeological culture as a candidate, and I don't think we have corresponding paleo-DNA from all of them). What are you going on about?
The "pre-Uralic must have come from east" meme — a speculative hypothesis which all too often gets treated as fact — is actually based on typology. Uralic has typological ties with the Altaic families, all of which have come from somewhere around the east (though I am not very sure about allegedly locating even Proto-Turkic in Manchuria). So if this typology goes back to the Proto-Altaic period or therearound, then also pre-Uralic would have to have been somewhere in the neighborhood.
Indeed, typological similarities between neighbouring language families mean nothing with regard to their relationships - especially in an area like northern Eurasia where people have been moving around at a large scale during all of the area's known history, and the linguistic map shows a complicated patchwork of several families.
In my opinion, if Proto-Mitian existed, the homeland would most likely have been somewhere in Central Asia at the end of the last ice age. The first split may have been into "Euro-Siberian" (IE, Uralic, Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut) and Altaic, but that's highly uncertain. I see no reason to assume that Proto-Uralic arose further east than that. And if both IE and Uralic have entered Europe from Central Asia, the question arises whether these were one wave of immigration (or diffusion) or two. Why can't there have been a Proto-Indo-Uralic, perhaps north of the Caspian Sea, about 8,000 to 10,000 years ago? I can think of at least one genetic marker in support of the Indo-Uralic hypothesis, and that is lactose tolerance (not universal in either speaker community, but quite high in both).
Also, research into a language relationship is not really invalidated by the initial omission of further related languages. At most the later recognition of such languages may ask for a renaming of the entity and a refinement of the reconstruction. If we find meaningful resemblances between IE and Uralic, there is always the possibility that further languages (such as Turkish, Yukaghir or Eskimo-Aleut) share in. Then our results would no longer be "Indo-Uralic", but still valid to whichever name we may assign to the macrofamily. Rasmus Rask, one of the founding fathers of Indo-European comparative linguistics, did not consider the Indo-Iranian languages, which later turned out so valuable to the discipline, in his
Undersøgelse, yet he diagnosed the relationship between Germanic on one hand and Greek and Latin on the other hand in basically correct ways.
So even if the Indo-Uralic node may turn out to be invalid (as did Rask's "Thracian" node consisting of Greek and Latin), that doesn't mean that we can't start our endeavours into Northern Eurasian long-range comparative linguistics with this nice pair of families, which have the advantage of being well-studied, and just two families make for an overseeable endeavour where useful results are more achievable than when someone tries to compare half a dozen (or a full dozen) language families, including poorly known ones, in one course.
This hangs on the assumption, though, that the modern "Ural-Altaic typology" is old enough in the first place. I am skeptical. For an example: it's been recently shown that e.g. Proto-Mongolic, Proto-Tungusic and Proto-Korean should be reconstructed with pharyngeal harmony (*u̘ ~ *ʊ̙ etc.), as still in Khalkha, instead of palatal harmony as in Uralic (*y ~ *u etc.). Turkic has also been proposed to have shifted from pharyngeal to palatal harmony recently; there are lines of evidence such as "front vowels" triggering initial voicing in Oghuz (= Turkic-Azeri-Turkmen), which makes zero phonetic sense, but which starts working quite well with +ATR vowels triggering voicing instead. The same also happens to be attested from Armenian right nearby.
Things like vowel harmony can easily spread by diffusion between different families, and there is no need to reconstruct anything like that for Proto-Mitian. Also, the vowel harmony reconstructed for Proto-Uralic is very different from that found in Turkic, let alone Mongolic or Tungusic. Proto-Uralic had nothing like the famous Turkic vowel cube; it had a full vowel inventory in the first syllable, and (probably) a highly reduced vocalism consisting of just a higher and a lower vowel in non-first syllables, each with a front and a back allophone depending on the quality of the first syllable vowel.
— So, if at least one of the alleged "Ural-Altaic" typological parallels is demonstrably secondary, how many others might be as well? We know that "Altaic" has at any rate behaved as a language area for a couple thousand years. Once we reach deeper to something like 5000 years, the typological profile could have been relatively different really.
Indeed! Typological profiles of languages may change much over the course of their history. This can happen at a breathtaking pace - consider how the Insular Celtic languages changed from a conservative Indo-European profile to something the early Indo-Europeanists had trouble recognizing as IE at all within about (at most) 1,000 years!
Also much of the original typological evidence is of very little value in the first place, since they're common-as-dirt features such as SOV word order, initial stress, lack of initial consonant clusters, or lack of ablaut. Many of these were originally defined in contrast to typologically weirder families like Semitic and Indo-European, but by now we know that it's these that are the weird ones, not "Ural-Altaic". Maybe you can put together an argument that there are enough of these that we can still statistically speak of a typological cluster, but any such group would probably also end up including at least Yukaghir and Eskimo-Aleut.
Yes, these features are mostly common as dirt. SOV is the most common of the six possible basic word orders in the languages of the world. Initial stress is perhaps the most common stress pattern. Lack of initial consonant clusters is quite common. Many languages lack any kind of ablaut. Such features are found, for instance, in Dravidian, which seems to have nothing to do with Mitian (though the Nostraticists include it, but this inclusion opens up a keg of problems). No scholar worth his stripes believes in Ural-Altaic anymore.
As you mention Yukaghir and Eskimo-Aleut: I am still unsure about Uralic-Yukaghir; the lexical resemblances may be due to Samoyedic loanwords, and the morphologies look very different. Eskimo-Aleut shows a rather close structural resemblance to Uralic, but that may be merely due to both families being the most conservative members of the MItian bunch, and need not speak for a "Uralic-Eskimo" node which would be hard to justify giving the geographical separation.