The Great Macrofamily thread: Indo-Uralic, Altaic, Eurasiatic, Nostratic etc.

[Whimemsz]

the magical back vowel ("*A") which conditions uvularization in Nivkh even though it leaves no other trace (e.g., "belly, stomach"), and in others before a front vowel ("*E") which leaves velars alone in Nivkh (e.g., "heart")

Not so unreasonable on Nivkh-internal grounds -- internal reconstruction shows that Nivkh underwent dramatic vowel loss, which probably had the effect of making uvulars phonemic. (If you ignore recent loans, the velar/uvular contrast is found mostly [entirely?] in final position.) Postulating vowels for 'PAW' that were preserved until relatively recently in Nivkh and lost without recoverable compensation everywhere else, however, is questionable.

Fair, that was overly snarky on my part. The important point remains that to judge from Nikolaev's reconstructions, assuming they're correct, there doesn't seem to be any identifiable triggering environment, phonological or otherwise, for these "formants", and yet he offers no suggestion for how they arose other than "vowel" differences, with no further discussion -- but there's no evidence for this! And there's no proposed historical pathway for their evolution or expansion or whatever it is exactly he's even proposing happened (which...isn't clear to me).

[WeepingElf]

I think it is also a methodological problem of many long-range reconstructions. In the history of real language families, we often see that multiple phonemes correspond to multiple phonemes in a complex way due to conditional sound changes. For example, Ancient Greek t corresponds to PIE *t and *kʷ, but PIE *kʷ can also correspond to Ancient Greek p and k. But that concept seems to be almost totally alien to the worst lumpers. For example, how many conditional sound changes do the various versions of Nostratic have?

A valid objection - I haven't seen any conditional sound changes in Bomhard's Nostratic, for instance - just correspondence charts with many-to-many matches, which is not the same thing. But in reality, most sound changes are conditional! And Bomhard certainly is one of the least wonky among the macro-comparativists. (Also, he treats people with different opinions with due respect - I can tell because I have had some e-mail correspondence with him, and it is evident from what he writes about Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky - which is a distinction that is not very common in this trade.)

My point was mainly a linguistic observation, though: If you compare the various Mitian protolanguages, PU looks more "typically Mitian" than PIE. Hence, it seems likely that PU is more conservative than PIE. And in some of the points in which PIE looks "odd" from a Mitian perspective, it looks like a Caucasian language - an observation already made by C. C. Uhlenbeck in the 1930s, leading him to the Caucasian substratum hypothesis. However, there are other "oddities" in PIE which don't look "Caucasian", such as the existence of only one sibilant phoneme, *s, which is so frequent that one may suspect a merger of several different phonemes here. Caucasian languages have richer s(h)ibilant inventories, especially the NWC ones.

However, there is one important counterpoint. PIE is the only Mitian language family that has been attested well before before the Middle Ages. All the other language families only have late attestations. And the modern PIE languages look way more "typically Mitian" than the PIE we reconstruct from Anatolian, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit etc. So some of that 'Mitian' typology may simply have been due to shared drift.

One moment. How are modern IE languages more similar to other branches of Mitian than ancient ones? I mean, are English, Spanish, Russian, Hindi etc. agglutinating with vowel harmony, for instance? Please explain. And I didn't base my observation on modern languages exclusively. Where I could find something, I looked at the protolanguages. Of course, some Mitian families are shallow, with time depths on the order of 2,000 years or less, and in all cases, the protolanguage is not as well-reconstructed as PIE. Yet, in most cases the modern languages do not seem to have evolved far away from their beginnings. (OK, this may be a mirage, because we may have missed structural changes which have affected all daughter languages after the dissolution of the protolanguage, and thus wrongly project such innovations onto it.) An exception is Uralic, of whose member languages many have become much more IE-like, probably due to millennia of contact with IE languages, than Proto-Uralic was.

[Richard W]

A valid objection - I haven't seen any conditional sound changes in Bomhard's Nostratic, for instance - just correspondence charts with many-to-many matches, which is not the same thing. But in reality, most sound changes are conditional! And Bomhard certainly is one of the least wonky among the macro-comparativists.

Last I saw, he was proposing dissimilation of sequences of preglottalised stops on the way to PIE.

[Nerulent]

[...] here.

Wowee - just finished reading your summary of Proto-Algonquian and all the footnotes. It’s a great post! I look forward to the follow up posts on your ideas about PA vowels, as well as the development of Arapaho (which is the only Algonquian language that I’m familiar with).