Posted on 11/26/2003 5:35:02 PM PST by a_Turk
Albanian, although it is overlain with subsequent conquering languages such as Latin, seems to be a candidate for being an early offshoot of the Indo-Euro mother language.
Understand, I'm not trying to convince (or "proselytize"? :)) you or anyone else either way. There're some language families, like Indo-European, where the correspondences are so clear and systematic that no one seriously questions the genetic relationship among the component languages. By contrast, the Altaic family is still often referred to as the "Altaic hypothesis," since it is an "umbrella" grouping of languages that are definitely related (Turkic languages), languages that are pretty clearly related (Mongolian languages like Khalkha, Buryat, Kalmyk), and languages that are very likely related (so-called "Tungusic languages," such as Evenki, Oroqen, and the extinct Manchu). The objections to this grouping center on claims that vocabulary correspondences between the groups are due to borrowing, and not to derivation from a "Proto-Altaic" parent language.
If Korean is part of the Altaic family, it is due to plausible affinities between it and the "Tungusic" branch of Altaic, in the main. And a large part of the case for Japanese as an Altaic language are its plausible links with Korean. Lot of room for differences of opinion.
But not as much as with the proposed "Eurasiatic" (often called "Nostratic"--although that term is eschewed now because it derives from Latin nostra--"our" languages---"exclusionary," y'know...) linguistic family, which would incorporate Indo-European, Altaic, and several other language families. Or in turn, that "Eurasiatic" super-family's possible affinity---even deeper in chronological time depth, obviously---with the "Amerind" languages, i.e., most of the languages of the Americas, except for Eskimo-Aleut (part of the "Eurasiatic" family under that hypothesis), and the Na-Dene languages like Navajo (ultimately related, according to an extremely imaginative and by no means established hypothesis, to languages like Chinese).
Actually it would be the other way around since that happened "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away"
Ergo all indo-European languages come from YODA! meaning that Earth is actually Degobah.
Now, all we have to do to prove the theory is find Yoda's house.
Am I correct that the tarim basin back in that era contained several glacier-fed lakes that would have provided the "mummies" ancestors the means for agriculture? That land is so inhospitable today.
Yup, they grew grapes and other things. There are still stumps today of their fruit orchards. The best book to read on these people is The Tarim Mummies, by J P Malloy and Victor Mair...another good one is The Mummies Of Urumchi by Elizabeth Barber.
I read a book recently, "The Basque History of the World" wherein it was the author's contention that the language spoken by the Basques (pronounced A-oo-skar'-a) is a language unlike any other in that it's lineage can't be traced. The language is making a comeback now that Franco is dead and no longer killing anyone caught speaking it. A sentence often consists of a single noun with numerous suffixes. Anyway, the inferance was that the Basque people and their language are VERY old. Their relatively inhospitable and easily defended homeland have kept them from being ousted by everyone from the Romans and Moors to the Nazis, French and Spanish. They always allowed unhindered passage through their mountain passes to any armies that desired as long as they caused no harm to the Basque people.
Do any of you linguists out there have any specific knowledge of the Basque language?
See my Reply #77. There have been attempts to link Basque with many other languages, especially the non-Indo-European ones in the Caucasus like Georgian and Chechen that also seem to be language isolates. The general consensus is still, as far as I'm aware, that no affiliation of Basque to any other language can be shown.
If you're asking about language learning resources, there's a fairly good (although somewhat superficial) introductory text "Colloquial Basque," by Alan King and someone with a Basque name, put out by Routledge which can be purchased in paperback alone or along with tapes.
The language itself is as you'd expect very different structurally from the Indo-European languages, although you might be helped by the fact that in its vocabulary it has borrowed copiously from Spanish.
Here's a series of maps of the world's language famiies:
Map Kernow said: Merritt Ruhlen in his book The Origin of Language, posit a relationship between Basque and languages as disparate as Georgian (Kartvelian), Ket (an obscure, nearly extinct language belonging to a "Yeniseian" language group, because its speakers live along the Yenisei river in Central Siberia), Navajo, and Chinese!
IIRC, Dene-Caucasian includes the Northern (non-Kartvelian) Caucasian languages. Kartvelian may be related to Afro-Asiatic and Nostratic.
By the way, Ruhlen was a student of the late Joseph H. Greenberg, IMHO one of the greatest linguists of the 20th century, if not of all time
Totally agree!
I consider the worldwide etymologies in Ruhlen to be utterly fascinating.
Actually, Aryan is synonymous with "Indo-Iranian", the branch of Indo-European that includes Avestan, Farsi, Dari, Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Romany, etc.
Semitic is one of the components of Afro-Asiatic, others being Berber, Cushitic, Omotic, Chadic and Ancient Egyptian. See the maps I linked to above.
Thanks, I stand corrected. It is indeed the North Caucasian languages I should have referred to, including in my discussion of languages which may eventually be shown to be affiliated to Basque.
On the other hand, fellow Greenberg fan, remember Greenberg considered and ultimately rejected a relationship between Kartvelian and what he called "Eurasiatic" (or Nostratic), or for that matter, between Eurasiatic and Afro-Asiatic (including Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Kabyle, Hausa, etc.). :)
True. He doesn't deny that there's a relation between Afroasiatic, Kartvelian, etc, and his Eurasiatic, just that it's not as close.
I'm basically thinking that Greenberg found a true taxonomic node, and that Eurasiatic may be one branch of a Nostratic node that includes Afroasiatic, Kartvelian, Dravidian, and others (?). I'm not all that familiar with Nostratic studies, but I'm assuming they're onto something real.
How did you become a Greenberg fan? are you a linguist? (I'm not, I'm a programmer by trade. I had access to the "Handbook of American Indian Languages" and also Whord's "Language Thought and Reality" in high school and found them fascinating. So I took a course in (Chomsky-style) linguistics in college and found it boring. Then I came across G's book on universals...
I guess I've been an amateur linguist since a college course in linguistics, and some training in "strategic languages" thanks to the Cold War DoD. I think I first heard of Greenberg (like you) through his universals theory, and then I read about his work in African and American languages classification through his pupil Ruhlen. (His African classification is now generally accepted, although it sounds like they're still fighting over his 1987 (?) work on Amerind language classification in linguistics departments). Since I'm particularly interested (though not particularly knowledgeable!) about Indo-European linguistics, I was intrigued by the "Nostratic" theory (which as you know has been floating around for almost a hundred years ago, but was not taken seriously until about 40 years ago in of-all-places the former Soviet Union), I was happy to bust my wallet to get Prof. Greenberg's two volumes on his own Eurasiatic theory. I recommend them to you.
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