Paleo-European languages

[bradrn]

There is a marginal possibility that the "R1b people", whom I suspect to have spoken what I call "Southern IE", instead spoke an ancestor of Basque (while the "R1a people" would have spoken PIE), but that would leave Anatolian unaccounted-for, and the obviously high degree of bride exchange between the two populations (while the Y-DNA is different, the mitochondrial and autosomal DNA is pretty much the same) gives weight to the assumption that they spoke the same language or at least closely related ones.

There are numerous instances of exogamy where the two languages are not at all related — the Vaupés River region springs to mind as a modern-day example.

[Moose-tache]

Arguing with Talskubilos is like farting in church. If you do it really well, there's no reaction at all.

[Talskubilos]

Arguing with Talskubilos is like farting in church. If you do it really well, there's no reaction at all.

As a matter of fact, you're in my ignore list.

[WeepingElf]

IE and Basque are so vastly different that there is no way they could be closely related. There was a time when I considered Etruscan a good candidate for the closest known kin of IE, but I no longer think that way - Uralic looks much more like a cousin of IE than Etruscan does, and is IMHO the best candidate for that.

The similarity between Finnish and Latin was obvious to me before I knew anything about historical linguistics, although IIRC some of that is due to later developments of the Finnish verbal system. But Etruscan might still come in ahead of Yukaghir.

The similarity between Uralic and IE was already noticed by Rasmus Rask, one of the founding fathers of IE historical linguistics, as early as 1814. It is unmistakable. Yet, he wasn't sure about it, as there is so much that is too different between the two. (But he also was unsure about the IE membership of the Insular Celtic languages, and those are of course as IE as they can be.) Yet, most of the "Indo-Uralic cognates" adduced by macro-comparativists look like loanwords from PIE into PU, as each PIE phoneme corresponds to the closest PU phoneme, sometimes with vacillations between several equally close ones; and the Uralic words in question faithfully reflect IE ablaut grades and even vowel colourings by laryngeals, which are almost certainly not inherited from Proto-Indo-Uralic and lost in Uralic!

What regards Yukaghir, I don't think it is as close to Uralic as many people claim - the "cognates" look distinctly Samoyedic and are thus probably loanwords from some Samoyedic language. See this paper on that matter. I do think that Yukaghir is probably distantly related to IE and Uralic as member of the "Mitian" cluster, but within that cluster, not particularly close.

The idea of a reconstructible genetic relation between IE and AA is, of course, also hopeless - it was a very popular hypothesis once for sociological reasons, so if there were any meat to it we'd know.

Yes. One reason for the connections was that "both are inflecting" according to 19th-century typology, ignoring the fact that the inflectional systems are utterly different. But the main reason probably was that IE was equated with the descendants of Japhet, so it had to form a group with Semitic and "Hamitic". (Some people called the IE family accordingly "Japhetitic".)

Some people say that the "R1a people" spoke satem languages and the "R1b people" spoke centum languages, but few IEists believe in such a bifurcation of IE anymore, and again, it leaves Anatolian unaccounted-for, and fails in the light of Tocharian, which was the main reason why mainstream IEists abandoned the satem/centum theory.

It's not a great reason for abandoning it, though - the eastward migration of the pre-Tocharians is probably secondary, and Proto-Tocharian still has to be reconstructed with labiovelars - they were preserved into even Tocharian B, although they could've disintegrated segmentally at some point. Satemization applying differently in different families seems like a better argument - you'd need to posit a lot of loanwords with some suspicious patterns to get out of it being areal. Then again, surely one of akmuo and ašmuo is a loan? (On semantic grounds probably the latter, since it has a more specialized meaning.)

I still don't understand the population genetics stuff, unfortunately.

I am not a geneticist either, and don't understand this stuff all too well myself. At least, I understand that things like "R1a" or "R1b" are labels for genetic markers of some sort which can be used to distinguish between populations. But of course, genes don't speak languages, and all this genetic mumbo-jumbo may be misguided when it comes to the question who when spoke what. What regards the Tocharian speakers, we can't be sure. It has been conjectured that the Tarim Basin mummies and the Afanasievo culture have something to do with it, and AFAIK both have yielded R1a, and Afanasievo seems to be an outlier of Corded Ware. But I am not an archaeologist either, though archaeology is far easier to grasp than genetics, and there is a saying among archaeologists that "pots aren't people". Archaeological objects, like genes, don't speak languages (unless they bear inscriptions, of course). Yet, when three utterly different sciences tell the same story that is IMHO a reason to assume that it is true.

There is a marginal possibility that the "R1b people", whom I suspect to have spoken what I call "Southern IE", instead spoke an ancestor of Basque (while the "R1a people" would have spoken PIE), but that would leave Anatolian unaccounted-for, and the obviously high degree of bride exchange between the two populations (while the Y-DNA is different, the mitochondrial and autosomal DNA is pretty much the same) gives weight to the assumption that they spoke the same language or at least closely related ones.

There are numerous instances of exogamy where the two languages are not at all related — the Vaupés River region springs to mind as a modern-day example.

Sure. So this argument doesn't cut it. Still, the idea that the "R1a" and "R1b" languages were unrelated would leave Anatolian unaccounted for. Yet, this is all just speculation, and we simply don't know, and will perhaps never know, what was going on linguistically. I have seen a paper on the Bell Beaker culture titled "A people that will never speak" - the author opined that no inference on the language of such an archaeological entity was fruitful.

[WeepingElf]

Let me try to look at the matter from a different angle. The oldest division in the Yamnaya expansions seems to be one between a northern group, represented by the Corded Ware culture, expanding west into Central Europe (at first north of the Carpathians) and east into Central Asia; and a southern group, first into the Danube Valley, later into Anatolia on one end and Western Europe (the Bell Beaker culture) on the other end. Now, it seems likely that this earliest division in the Yamnaya expansions corresponds to the deepest linguistic division in the IE family, and that appears to be that between Anatolian and all the rest. So the Corded Ware people would have spoken non-Anatolian IE, the southern Yamnaya in Anatolia Anatolian, and the southern Yamnaya in Europe - lost languages more closely related to Anatolian than to the known non-Anatolian IE languages.

[keenir]

Arguing with Talskubilos is like farting in church. If you do it really well, there's no reaction at all.

As a matter of fact, you're in my ignore list.

oi, silence in the pews, both o' ye!

[Rounin Ryuuji]

This is very dramatic.

[Moose-tache]

At the risk of being "ignored," I would like Talskubilos to respond to any of the solid arguments against his ideas. The pattern of this thread has been something like this:

Talskubilos: Iberian ga "artichoke" is very obviously derived from PIE ker "to turn."
Sally Schmo: But why?
Bob Schmo: I thought Iberian didn't have /g/?
Talskubilos: Good question, Bob! Actually, Iberian did have the phoneme /g/. I'm glad we've laid to rest all the questions about this etymology.

Since Talskubilos is like the baby of Eddy and Edo Nyland, (s)he can pick and choose from numerous responses to each new nugget of nonsense, and invariably picks the least threatening one. There have been numerous times in this thread in which cogent rebuttals of the "uh... but what if not that?" variety from multiple posters have been ignored. No attempt has ever been made in this thread to address the matter of statistical coincidence or lexicon-wide correspondences. Instead we get goyim-gaijin over, and over, and over, with any criticism that can't be brushed aside simply ignored.

I'm kind of glad I'm on the "ignore list." It's probably the only time my name will appear on a roster of professional linguists.

[bradrn]

At the risk of being "ignored," I would like Talskubilos to respond to any of the solid arguments against his ideas. The pattern of this thread has been something like this:

Talskubilos: Iberian ga "artichoke" is very obviously derived from PIE ker "to turn."
Sally Schmo: But why?
Bob Schmo: I thought Iberian didn't have /g/?
Talskubilos: Good question, Bob! Actually, Iberian did have the phoneme /g/. I'm glad we've laid to rest all the questions about this etymology.

Also, question-dodging. On those occasions where I’ve tried to ask a yes/no question, Talskubilos has simply ignored it.

Since Talskubilos is like the baby of Eddy and Edo Nyland

Oh please. Despite their other problems, Talskubilos is hardly a crackpot. On those rare occasions where they’ve explained their theories in terms I can understand, Talskubilos actually struck me as being pretty sensible.

[KathTheDragon]

So if ignoring criticisms of a bad theory, or dismissing it with further bad theory, isn't crackpottery, what is it?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Forgive the pun, but I believe if you made pottery of a certain addictive substance, it would also be crackpottery.

[keenir]

Forgive the pun, but I believe if you made pottery of a certain addictive substance, it would also be crackpottery.

I thought that was crackypottery to avoid confusion and poor sales.

(sorry)

[Nortaneous]

Oh please. Despite their other problems, Talskubilos is hardly a crackpot. On those rare occasions where they’ve explained their theories in terms I can understand, Talskubilos actually struck me as being pretty sensible.

he used to be a lot worse but has improved somewhat

What regards Yukaghir, I don't think it is as close to Uralic as many people claim - the "cognates" look distinctly Samoyedic and are thus probably loanwords from some Samoyedic language. See this paper on that matter.

Still reading thru this but it's not a promising sign that the first example in the paper is so uncompelling - I don't think pundu- "tell, narrate" ~ *puna-* "spin, weave" can be characterized as a clear-cut semantic mismatch when the same metaphorical extension is commonplace in English. The other two alleged semantic mismatches don't look so unpromising either.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Forgive the pun, but I believe if you made pottery of a certain addictive substance, it would also be crackpottery.

I thought that was crackypottery to avoid confusion and poor sales.

(sorry)

But wouldn't cracky pottery have a sort of crackle finish, or be a work of wabi-sabi?

[keenir]

Forgive the pun, but I believe if you made pottery of a certain addictive substance, it would also be crackpottery.

I thought that was crackypottery to avoid confusion and poor sales.

(sorry)

But wouldn't cracky pottery have a sort of crackle finish, or be a work of wabi-sabi?

Hm. To be honest, I never thought of that. Though, on reflection, as I re-read your post, perhaps crackful pottery or crackyful pottery would fit what you've just suggested.
(crackiful?)

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I thought that was crackypottery to avoid confusion and poor sales.

(sorry)

But wouldn't cracky pottery have a sort of crackle finish, or be a work of wabi-sabi?

Hm. To be honest, I never thought of that. Though, on reflection, as I re-read your post, perhaps crackful pottery or crackyful pottery would fit what you've just suggested.
(crackiful?)

I think all those sound rather wabi-sabi, too.

Perhaps we might call it "freebase pottery"? Or does that sound too much like a flower pot with a saucer not directly attached to it? Would that be the wrong kind of pot, given the line of the joke?

[bradrn]

The correct term is of course psychoceramics, ‘the study of “cracked pots” ’.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

My, my, we have so very many options at hand, it seems — how ever shall we choose whether our pots are made of crack, we study cracked pots, or we're wabi-sabi afficionadoes?

Addendum: Does this bring us back full-circle? Pottery is often among the remains our more remote ancestors tend to leave us to ponder over.

[Moose-tache]

My, my, we have so very many options at hand, it seems — how ever shall we choose whether our pots are made of crack, we study cracked pots, or we're wabi-sabi afficionadoes?

Addendum: Does this bring us back full-circle? Pottery is often among the remains our more remote ancestors tend to leave us to ponder over.

All pots were deposited recently by Basque monks.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Oh, were they now? The plot thickens.