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To: Virginia-American
IIRC, Dene-Caucasian includes the Northern (non-Kartvelian) Caucasian languages. Kartvelian may be related to Afro-Asiatic and Nostratic.

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.). :)

98 posted on 12/03/2003 12:20:23 PM PST by Map Kernow (" 'Hate speech' is just 'speech liberals hate' ")
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To: Map Kernow
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...

99 posted on 12/05/2003 1:20:09 AM PST by Virginia-American
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