Tropylium wrote: ↑Thu Aug 30, 2018 7:42 am
WeepingElf wrote: ↑Sun Aug 26, 2018 2:27 pmI have the feeling that Proto-Uralic is especially conservative (though Bomhard at least rejects that notion); the Uralo-Siberian phonology reconstructed by Fortescue, which is quite similar to, but not the same as, the PU one, perhaps gives a good idea of what Proto-Mitian phonology may have looked like, a better one IMHO than the large inventories proposed by both Nostraticist camps, which are bloated by the IMHO questionable inclusions of Kartvelian, Dravidiian and Afrasian.
I am now more careful with Fortescue's phonology; for starters, the distinction between *v and *w hinges on Chukotko-Kamchatkan alone, which F. is no longer sure about belonging to US at all; yet, the Proto-Uralic and Proto-Eskimo-Aleut consonant inventories still look, at first glance, quite similar to each other (though the vowel inventories could hardly be more different - which probably shows the well-known fact that vowels tend to be more volatile than consonants) - but does that mean that both have preserved the Proto-Mitian inventory especially well? Such things can be deceptive. For instance, the Proto-Eskimo consonant system can be reduced to three types - voiceless oral, voiced oral, nasal - where each member of the first type has a counterpart in the second, while the third type lacks the lateral, palatal and uvular members. Aleut adds fricatives such as /s/ and /x/ to this, but these seem to be secondary (weakening of voiceless stops). This is a structure unlike anything in Mitian!
Uralic looks somewhat conservative in having bisyllabic roots and a decent amount of root-internal consonant clusters, but the first can be found across Altaic groups and the second in PIE just as well. By similar logic e.g. initial clusters in PIE could also be considered at least partly archaic. The largeish vowel system in PU is almost surely not archaic; vowels have a half-life of like three centuries during the later development of most Uralic branches. (One of these days I should clean up and put online my conference presentation from last summer on the internal reconstruction of the PU vowel system.)
Fair. What certainly isn't archaic about the vowel system of Proto-Uralic is the reduction in non-first syllables, but the size of the 1st-syllable inventory reeks of some kind of innovation, too. But we don't know how many vowels pre-GVC PIE had - it seems to have
at least */i e a o u/ and no front rounded vowels (otherwise, we'd have labialized front velars in PIE, which we don't), but it may have had more than three degrees of openness, two rather than one low vowel (though the paucity of unlabialized back velars in PIE seems to indicate that there was just one non-front unrounded vowel), etc. I would not be so bold to reconstruct vowel harmony for PIU or Proto-Mitian, though!
What IMHO also has a good chance of being archaic is Eskimo-Aleut (though the vowel system may have once been richer, as if EA had its own GVC). The EA speakers were first footers in most of their area; there were no people in the North American Arctic before them, it seems (the Paleo-Eskimo may have been speakers of a lost branch of EA), so no substratum effects. There are some pretty interesting-looking paradigms in this family, but on the other hand, it seems to lack the (in)famous Mitian pronouns entirely.
Afrasian is so far probably too rough in the making to profitably include in detailed phonological reconstructions so far (although already Proto-Southern Cushitic has a large inventory that's almost the same as Bomhard reconstructs for PAA; pharyngeals, labiovelars, velar fricatives, lateral affricates, palatoalveolars, ejectives…).
Afrasian is a much deeper thing than IE or Uralic, probably about as deep as Mitian (if the latter is a thing at all, of course). There are at least two mutually incompatible reconstructions of Proto-Afrasian (one by Ehret, one by Orel and Stolbova, both published in 1995) on the market, and nobody knows which one - if any - is right. As I have remarked earlier, that Afrasian is generally accepted and Indo-Uralic or Mitian is not, has to do with the fact that in African linguistics, the lumpers dominate the discourse, while in Eurasian linguistics, it is rather the splitters. That said, shared morphology makes it quite clear that Afrasian is a thing, and so is Niger-Congo (while Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan look much worse), but Indo-Uralic looks almost as good to me.
But what regards the question of a relationship between Mitian and Afrasian, I don't see why these two entities should be especially close. There is almost
nothing that seems to match, and what does seem to my just be chance resemblances.
Kartvelian seems like a clear phonological outlier; several of its contrasts such as *č versus *čᵏ, velars vs. uvulars do not seem to have counterparts elsewhere. It's grammatically immediately out of the line too, with stuff like prefixing verbs, noun classification, "version" marking… Some of this is probably areal Caucasian business, but it should be worked out what exactly.
Yes, these things (there are no noun classes in Kartvelian, though; that's a NEC thing) make Kartvelian look "weird" from a Mitian standpoint, and I don't think it is close (essentially, the only morphological bit that seems to match well is 1sg. nom, *me, which, however, is as isolated in its paradigm as PIE 1sg. nom. *h
1eǵhom, and may just be a chance resemblance).
I do not have any big categorical objections to the idea of including Dravidian; it's typologically quite "Ural-Altaic" already. The biggest issue seems to be that DED is full of junk etymologies, including a lot of narrowly distributed vocabulary restricted to one group, such as South Dravidian or North Dravidian, often also South Dravidian plus Telugu but no other Central Dravidian reflexes (so probably indicating old literary loans from Tamil). Weeding these out from comparisons could end up also kicking out the chair from under the supposed etymological connections to Mitian/Eurasiatic families, but that's hard to say in advance of course.
Typological similarity to "Ural-Altaic" means
nothing. AFAIK, there are no morphological matches between Mitian and Dravidian, and the phonology is also structured in a totally different way. (Dravidian consonants look, if anything, like Aboriginal Australian, but otherwise, there is nothing of value to justify a Dravidian-Australian connection, leaving aside the fact that "Aboriginal Australian" is in itself just a geographical-typological classification and not established as a family.)
As an aside, I have recent idea on the Kartvelian "*čk-cluster" series (which yields clusters /čʼkʼ čk džg/ in Svan and Zan, but plain /čʼ č dž/ in Georgian). Given (1) *w > /g/ in Armenian, and (2) velar/uvular + *v clusters being common, I suspect that PKv should be reconstructed with labialized consonants; in *čʷ etc. labialization is then lost in Georgian, but in the other languages it unpacks: > *čw > *čɣ > *čk etc. (Presumably this then implies that also the pan-Kartvelian unpacking of labiovelars: *kʷ > /kw/ (Svan) > /kv/ (Gerogian-Zan), etc. was only post-Proto-Kartvelian.)
This begs the question why only back sibilants have a labialization distinction! There is some evidence of labialization in PK, but somewhere else: any consonant except the labials may be followed by *w. What regards the "*čk-clusters", as you call them, I am more leaning to a model with sibilants at three points of articulation, which IMHO is the standard model in Kartvelian historical linguistics. Yet, I am not a Kartvelianist, so my opinion doesn't count for much.
Howl wrote: ↑Wed Aug 29, 2018 1:42 pmOne problem with Uralic is that its reconstruction is very much like a long-range comparison. The actual set of cognates is relatively small. And there are many unconditional splits in the sound-laws, where a reconstructed phoneme X in proto-Uralic becomes either phoneme Y or Z in a daughter language in a seemingly random way. If you'd start to reconstruct separate phonemes in proto-Uralic for all these cases, you'd have a much bigger phoneme inventory in no time.
You can find this in Indo-European just as well, if you start looking at all the second-degree daughter languages, with things like Gothic having sometimes
þl for *fl, Albanian having sometimes unexpected
h, Lithuanian having unexpected
s for *š, all of Balto-Slavic having unexpected velars for palatovelars, various Indo-Aryan languages having unexpected retroflexes… Reconstructing PIE with twice the segment inventory would not be hard. The main reason this looks worse in Uralic (or for that matter, language families like East Caucasian) is surely not much else than the lack of old attestations.
Yes, Uralic is harder to reconstruct than IE because there aren't those nifty ancient literary languages which bridge half of the time in the case of IE. Basically, IE can be reconstructed as if it was just 2,500 years old, because we know how Indians, Persians and Greeks spoke 2,500 years ago. Also, the Neogrammarian model of regular, exceptionless sound changes is just a
model which doesn't capture all detail; anyone who has ever perused a dialect atlas of whichever language knows that phonological isoglosses tend to vary (though usually not by much) from word to word. There is no reason to assume that prehistoric languages were any different in this regard.
