No contradition: actually it seems we both think that the situation is complex and deserves a discussion. Skinner A.M. 1975. or is that just my imagination running away with me? In other words, it is a Wiktionary): Stachel-Schwein, hystrix, , . The people who brought agriculture to Europe were not from the Fertile Crescent, but from Anatolia before Anatolia got its admixture of Caucasian Hunter-Gatherer/Iranian Neolithic ancestry. For warm-blooded, air-breathing animals, it is well known that related species and subspecies tend to be larger nearer to the poles, where having a small surface-area-to-volume ratio helps them keep warm. Ive seen plenty of papers that took horribly outdated trees from the literature, spliced them together in unsupportable ways, and used that. Specifically, *VstrV is the Grimm outcome of PIE *VsrV, *VrV is the Verner outcome. 5) the same question to Romance porcupine words: did they actually meant a porcupine in the Middle Ages, or did they mean hedgehog like Germanic words with the same meaning? I like how he speaks about 1 (I just like Blench. However, I realize I have no clear idea what to expect for how body sizes should vary among fish. Not only this, but this in particular. pigs, swines, boars, pork, and what not. And more. There is an argument that the split between the familiar Afroasiatic sub-branches could have happened in Africa. they form dynamic, shifting relationships with one another which have nothing to do with historical phonological changes. Languagehat.com reserves the right to alter or delete any questionable material posted on this site. So I just piled them up: they seem to deviate from the general scheme t(a) in koine to the west of Libya, samak(a) to the east. in a dictionary, published in Amsterdam in 1700: Simius, Simia | , [] | Aap Meerkat. Several lower numerals in both Mande and Dogon look definitely related to Volta-Congo, but contrary to the assumptions of Indo-Europeanists and Semiticists, numbers are actually extremely borrowable. I do not know the Arabic alphabet and ask naive questions, so feel free to ignore them ????. Is this different from any other kind of borrowing? Actually, he no longer believes that; for many years now hes excluded Songhay from his version of Nilo-Saharan. It starts off with the standard tree, and uses lexicostatistics to derive dates. Apart from that, youre reduced to things like the Dogon human third person pronouns being sg wo, pl be, which does look a bit like V-C /ba. Put another way, its only bringing us back 6-900 years from Old Nubian, not 2,000, and only doing that in part based on logic derived from Old Nubian itself. Here, we generated 137 high-coverage physically phased genome sequences from eight Middle Eastern populations using linked-read sequencing. Theres a good dictionary of Moba, the Gurma language which borders on Kusaal, and noun cognates are easy to find, while verb cognates are surprisingly few. Plenty of sea (and fish) around Wales/Brythonic territory, so presumably there was a pre-Roman word for it. There are also Romance porc-pic, porcospino / porco-espinho / puercoespn, Bolgarian and Sorbian, Irish (torcn) etc.) ninth century) and Aramaic (ca. may testify to the arrival of these new population groups. Fish just arent all that stable . ], Nobody is claiming that failing to reconstruct morphology is an absolute bar to demonstrating a genetic relationship. Can someone recommend a good basic linguistics text. It is a poor starting point, butit is some starting point. Also stripping it of is uninteresting. Gldemann, Tom 2008. Only messages signed languagehat are property of and attributable to languagehat.com. slight reorganization of []) and does not require a hypothesized transitional lineage of []. In this regard, also compare the side-by-side existence of Spanish pez fish (as a animal) and pescado caught fish, fish (considered as food), where we might see the sort of situation that existed in Brittonic when the inherited Brittonic word (still in the River Usk, probably) was pushed out by the loanword from Latin pisctus. This ancestral population (origin of migration edge a in Figure 4) was approximately halfway between the common ancestor of indicine and the common ancestor of taurine. [After all, the list was drawn up to work for European languages, so it ought not to give bizarre results for English.]. At least in my experience, uses such as this are common only in very colloquial use, as illustrated by the second quote. : May his pen rest in peace. I prepared corresponding lists for each of the six source languages Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian, Arabic, weighted in the original Lojban construction process relatively to the numbers of speakers: L1 + L2/2, where the Arabic source was MSA but total number of speakers of all colloquials were counted. On the other hand, WOV as a whole has some suggestive features, like what appears to be a radically simplified verbal system, and (judging by diversity) the centre of gravity of Oti-Volta is well to the east, in Benin, so that WOV and Buli/Konni may well be historical intrusions from the east. (Caveat lector; for one thing, the tables should not be confused with etymologies or cognate sets.). TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. The worst error you can make in phylogenetics in biology is to score identical things as different because they could be convergent. In short, do science. For example, Yom and Nawdm have always been grouped together, and this seems valid based on shared morphology and distinctive Yom-Nawdm vocabulary (unfortunately though there are very good accessible materials for Nawdm, this is not so for Yom, so I cant be as sure of this as I would like.) Just wondering what contraindications there are. This of course goes with their different position over against Bantu: the difference goes back, not to morphology but to a difference of word order. The method which the adapters employed in turning the Egyptian script to their own use was dubbed the acrophonic principle by the British Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner. David Eddyshaw: Okay, if I understand you correctly, to you, Volta-Congo is Niger-Kordofanian MINUS: Dogon, Mande, Kordofanian, and Atlantic, with (some or all of) the various Atlantic languages being POSSIBLY genetically related to Volta-Congo as a whole. Perhaps it can be generalized to any sociolects and dialects to an extent (just to an extent): they can be shaped by decisions, not mere action of some language machine that obeys language laws. Anikins new Russian etymological dictionary, now on letter ) It is also quite possible that Niger-Kongo and Nilo-Saharan languages have a common ancestor some 12kya. In fact, if the two groups did live together, why didnt the Proto-Berbers respond in the same way to changing climate and migrate east as well? fish, i.e., PIE *hduH- > Pre-Gk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (link) However, his suggestion found little acceptance. A similar thing has happened with the loanword pysgodyn fish, though that one seems also to have involved some creative reanalysis of Latin piscatus as a Welsh plural form. I mean, at least in the southern part of Russia a hedgehog is an animal you find in your own garden. In other words, the noun classes do not function, diachronically, like the Indo-European declensions; they form dynamic, shifting relationships with one another which have nothing to do with historical phonological changes. . He is actually usually very sound over lower-level subclassification. If you cant find any, its going to be a good bit harder to demonstrate a genetic relationship with reasonable confidence, but harder doesnt necessarily imply impossible., Lexical correspondences are much more likely than morphological to be due to borrowing, but even so that doesnt make the task hopeless at all. Vasmer says on : The argument is based on diversity. So carry coals to Newcastle is send something to a place where it was already commonplace. Vendemos una gran variedad de pescados We sell many kinds of fish (the implication is that they are dead, hence sold as a food) versus Vendemos una gran variedad de peces We sell many kinds of [live] fish (for aquariums, fishbowls, and the like). Blench: One intriguing issue that remains unresolved is the position of the Gurage languages of Ethiopia; these languages are so different from Ethiosemitic (i.e., Amharic, etc.) The singulative marker is similar to one found in Russian (-in-). It looks like Cushitic groups have been overrun by/assimilated by Nilotic language speakers from farther north in the not too remote past, too. I was afraid of something like that. The place for that would not be in the heartland of WOV in N Ghana and E Burkina, where the languages are all quite similar, but in the Atakora dpartement of Benin, and I nominate Boulba speakers: https://www.sil.org/resources/publications/entry/9094. So if Im talking about the origin of turtles, all mammals are the basalmost amniotes because the basal (!) Shark also appears there alongside with the recently discussed coin: hle fish fr Oman in BRO 84f ist nicht nur hele = Hai wie in RHO II:13, sondern allgemeine Bezeichnung: sayd and hle are synonyms. Heres his magnum opus on Nilo-Saharan, where he ends up suggesting a link between East and Central Sudanic, unexplorable under current conditions but faintly suggested by some core evidence (see part 4 for details). I apologise to his win. The software usually makes an unrooted tree (imagine looking at a real tree from above) and then places the root afterwards, either in the middle of the longest branch (as was done in the two papers on the phylogeny of Sino-Tibetan) or between the manually designated outgroup and the ingroup. Its not a textbook (unlike the Bloomfield one) but it gives you a real feel for what one of the greatest of all linguists EVAH thought about language. then they explicitly use European Neolithic, contrast it with Natufian, though mentioning some small Natufian affinities, and posit an influx from Iberia. You can say the same about any crank: If he believes the earth is flat, he is right to object to the round-earth hypothesis. You seem to have a charming but unhelpful (if one is searching for truth) fondness for cranks. But I guess the linguistic question might be whether there are Bantu-origin loanwords in the regional varieties of Arabic where that ancestry is most common? However, an abecedary found at the Palestinian site of Beth Shemesh, consisting of consonantal cuneiform characters like those in use at Ugarit, shows the same letter order as found in the Old South Arabian script. Modern astronomer, modern hunter and ancient villager all use strange words, and when it is an astronomer we say jargon, and when it is an ancient villager we say tabu and when it is a modern hunter who behaves like the ancient villager we hesitate. Not so in West Germanic, where the whole mess was already established at the time of the earliest texts. they matter little for cognacy judgments, but maybe not enough of the Swadesh list is available. And what it says is that these are the the kind of people who see everything in terms of darkness and light and Great Scholars. hedgehog, Danish pindsvin, Norvegian piggsvin Faroese tindasvn, Icelandic broddgltur (hedge, pin, pike, tine, brod), West Frisian ychelbaarch hedgehog pig, Swedish, Icelandic igelkott, igulkttur (Wiktionary explains the first part as Old Norse sea urchin, but it is the germanic root for hedgehog. And geese are poultry. in Twitter. a fish 2. the sign of the zodiac Pisces 3. name of a teacher of yoga, In contemporary Russian can also mean strange, weird, but I dont know how old that meaning is. >> Maybe Ill become a specialist in Eastern Sudanic! Anyway, grammar is not quite the same as lexicon. was that Bantu preserved the system of the protolanguage, from which everyone else has degenerated (nicely matching nineteenth-century conceptions of language change in general.) ), Frh-, Mittel- Sptindogermanisch. No evidence is offered for this so the case is hard to assess. Good. Go give your heart, and if it break But compare e.g. He has a book, Archaeology, Language and African Past. So maybe not. . First the authors rarely engage with the literature, failing to describe the errors that presumably characterise the proposals of those who want to argue for the reality of particular phyla. (The vowel is long nowadays, but, as a stressed prefix, ur- is a phonological word and would have undergone the Early New High German vowel lengthening of monosyllabic words anyway.). Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (Open Access PDF version of volumes A M and O P) But how much has changed in the two years! ), Some excellent comparativists have what I (in my wisdom) think are weird and unsubstantiated ideas about the highest-level groupings, but its often a case of So what if they do? (See my previous remarks about Myers-Briggs ), Its only seriously damaging to progress if they start drawing unwarranted conclusions about the languages in question, and that seems rarely to happen in reality. But as usual it looks like we need more ancient DNA from the African side, In Semitic, as in many other places, what are called theories for the location of the Urheimat are often mere plausible fables. (elegant, figuratively) merperson. and (mtcha), Javanese: iwak, ulam (ulam: 1. Its not just Latin and Berber we have to play with here: the words also found in Greek (kattos/katta), Arabic (qitt), Syriac (qatt/qattu), not to mention Nubian, Celtic, and Germanic Plenty of space for specialists in each family to decide its origin is someone elses problem. Several of these traits reflect the diffusion of the Cushitic SOV basic word order into the formerly VSO Ethiopian Semitic languages. Proto-Oti-Volta had a perfectly good word for fish, which survives to this day (after four thousand years, if Sarostins methods are reliable) in all the languages I have data for except Hanga, Nateni and Nawdm, despite the speakers of Oti-Volta languages all living a good few hundred miles from the sea . You dont need to feed such things into any phylogenetic method a priori. l k to lick (Hebrew ). They are widely believed speculations, but it still surprises me a bit that someone of his evident gifts is not more critical of their shaky evidential status. What is the P-S reflex of AA *ramc? Waama may even be genetically closer historically to WOV than Eastern, but in general its pretty far from anything at present. Irish ( torcn ) etc. ) the basalmost amniotes because the basal (! is searching truth! To WOV than Eastern, but maybe not enough of the earliest texts specialist. * ramc for cranks quite the same as lexicon derive dates need to feed things. 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