familiar thing. https://dialmformara.tumblr.com/post/177703660363/the-swadesh-100-list-as-emoji. Andras Rajkis Etymological Dictionary of Arabic Lapis Lazuli wild goat ornament found with female skeletons in upper layer of Early Bronze Age Tomb 1. Both the workshops, filled with quantities of tin, obsidian, lapis lazuli, etc., and the texts document Ebla's control of major trade routes. The Berber-Semitic connection, whether true or not, doesnt add much to it. The total number of Bantu languages ranges in the hundreds, depending on the definition of "language" versus "dialect", and is estimated at Jewish Lexicon Project An ka taa (resources and lessons for Bambara, Dioula, Malink, and Mandinka) And Dimmendaals belief that Songhay is definitely related to Nilotic seems to do no harm at all to his work on Nilotic (though I cant say that it seems to help at all, either.). What signs suggest that it flowed in the opposite direction? How do the biological mathematical models cope with widespread lateral transmission of genetic information (a well-known thing in bacteria, after all, though presumably not quite as pervasive as the analogue with languages, where it is the rule rather than the exception)? https://pages.sandpoints.org/dotawo/library/BROWSE_LIBRARY.html#/book/c0a34308-1929-42cd-b792-1a1890f14564. @Hans, the coincidence between [unfamiliar to me] Polish meaning boar and all the boars mentioned above (just Germanic. Trond wrote: Basic word order emerges very early indeed, first between phrasal constituents, only later within phrases. Farefare and Dagaare have the same etymon as Moor, though the three languages dont seem to constitute a branch of WOV together; its difficult to be sure with so many criss-crossing isoglosses. ), I was just looking at William Samarins grammar of Gbeya (an Adamawa language of the CAR, but you all knew that) to see what the word for fish looked like (its zoro, which is pretty meh, really) and noticed in passing that steal in Gbeya is zu (= Kusaal zu) and head is zu (= Kusaal zug, stem zu-.) And yet, I think you miss the thrust of my argument. l and one of the possible s letters) consonants, but the closest P-S root I could find is Though quite a lot of recent good descriptions of languages from that unhappy part of the world have actually been primarily based on work with refugees in Khartoum or even farther afield. Though not as cool as Oti-Volta, obvs.) Im re-reading this thread, and long ago before expansive digressions on hedgehogs and fish, Nilo-Saharan was a topic, including DEs comment that even sub-branches of sub-branches were still being unraveled. These are some of the more familiar schemes. We have (then) gained a quantification of which phylogenetic hypothesis, which hypothetical tree, is the most parsimonious. Well, yes, Blench is right: Gldemann here is not interested in genetic relationship. also -rez- cut. This extends even to systems that seem to be semantic in nature. Interestingly, Stewart is actually specifically denying the point made here: It is [. In. I agree with you (and Starostin) that lexicostatistics cant provide dates either in principle or in practice; I think it can help with establishing internal family relationships, but only if you take it with a large grain of salt. Thats a fault known as Word Not In, or WNI: the use of a word in a definition that does not appear in the dictionary. (Though, I concede, apparently wrong given the DNA match with the Natufian culture.). Chinese Character Dictionary Drehen is transitive, to make it intransitive you need sich drehen; etymologically its *drjan with the famous causative/more-or-less transitivizing suffix, explaining the Bavarian /a/ (< MHG // < Proto-West-Gmc /aj/). In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, I hereby separate the whales from the fish. But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeuss express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the Leviathan.. Not by much. YBP = years before present (presumably 1950 as typical in that sort of thing), so the dates are 850 BC for Akkadian, 150 AD for Aramaic, 250 AD for Geez, 650 BC for Hebrew, and 1450 BC for Ugaritic. The singulative marker is similar to one found in Russian (-in-). The opposite idea, that Semitic originated geographically close to the other AfAs language families (so, in Africa), has been proposed a few times but not been widely accepted. The general idea has been that for establishing a linguistic area, the more shared features, the better. I have this comment by Hans in mind: That said, I seem to remember that the idea that Semitic originated in Ethiopia and spread from there to Asia (propagated by Roger Blench?) (His implication that three-term number marking is common in Gur languages is false; there are some forms here and there, which look as if they originated as singulatives in some cases, but thats it; and Welsh has a lot more singulatives than any Gur language I know of, but this is probably not due to Nilo-Saharan influence ). Id be truly delighted if someone produced good evidence for the relationship. But the basic yes/no on adenine, cytosine, thymine and guanine is binary and unforgiving. 1994. However, it has been shown that in Icelandic (Magnsdttir & Thrinsson, 1990), bare stems are almost never produced, even when a -affixed form exists in the language, as is the case with the imperative and the typical first person singular present form of verbs. It partly confirms my version: if the word was coined in Russian by a translator under influence of Polish usage, it must be a Kievan translator. Greenberg refuted Meinhofs linguistic theories and rejected the use of racial and social evidence. Id use Wow! instead. If youre trying to figure out where the turtles come from, all mammals are the basalmost living amniotes, and Ive seen them quite casually called that in a paper that wasnt joking either. He believed he was an Ukrainian szlachcic, from a family of Polish origin. The Flaxen Wave ]. Of course, derivation and inflexion are creative, genitive or dative depend on what I mean, but it is I who decides what I mean and no one else (it is just that speakers creativity in these areas is recognized by grammar descriptions rather than goes against them:)). In current usage, as far as I can tell, Hamito-Semitic is what elderly European linguists use if they want to make a point of how Greenbergs contribution to the discipline was exaggerated, and Afroasiatic (with or without a hyphen) is what everyone else says. 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? As discussed here, there are 24 non-native words in the Swadesh 200 (88% native), whereas a 4000-word list is 47% native and the 80,000 Shorter OED wordlist is only 22% native. There is no similarity between Arabic languages( languages of Assyrian and (Blench has argued for 1, with Chadic being somehow most closely related to Cushitic, but that makes no sense to me.). The timeline of Proto-Semitic migration induced by desertification is appealing, and Im sure others have thought of it too. These papers are usually published in hard sciencejournals rather than linguistics outlets. There is or used to be an important commercial whitefish fishery on Lake Superior and other large lakes in that area. I have no grasp of the diversity, its true. I wonder how common is creative use of class markers, though. But we have a compound for porcupine, which in modern Russian folk-etymologizes as wildimage. 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. A de facto group of distinct language varieties within the Semitic branch, the languages that evolved from Proto-Arabic have around 313 million native speakers, concentrated primarily in the Middle East and North Africa. WebBANTU SPEECH: A PHILOLOGICAL STUDY As undoubted traces of Semitic influence occur in Bantu formatives and Bantu roots, this paper is modestly put for-ward as an He regards Chadic and Omotic as the branches of Afroasiatic most remote from the others. Not even close. Manessy classified Waama and Byali as both Eastern Oti-Volta but the grouping is very much more diverse internally than WOV. its not a bad way to go if you can convince yourself at an early stage that the subgroups are conservative, Trouble is, conservative is not equally distributed. These are the ground-truth dates Rabin uses to calibrate his lexicostatistics. I have some dim recollection of some Hittite words which are indeed cognate to forms in the rest of Indo-European but actually dont mean the same as in any other branch, like the *mer- root, which (I gather) is disappear in Hittite, rather than die. And what Ive seen of discussions of Hittite etymology seems to turn on ingenious PIE etymologies of words whose meaning is already known. Good to have confirmation of Early European Farmer ancestry in the Maghreb. The Hague and Paris; Mouton. For example, theres no way he isnt overinterpreting the variation in plene spelling. I knew he likened evolution in biology to evolution in linguistics, but he barely engaged in phylogenetics at all. That result was based on a massive blunder in the coding of the dataset: the presence/absence of each cognate set was treated as an independent character, instead of treating each meaning as one character and the cognate sets as its states. Honey, sorry, but were going to need to quit our jobs, pull the kids out of school and move to Darfur. Harold Fleming (2006) proposes that Ongota constitutes a separate branch of Afroasiatic. The former was spoken millenia before the later and hardly in the same place. World Wide Words The list itself can be based on Mande data. But whether its actually necessary to complicate the notion of simple once-for-all branching in the case of Anatolian versus The Rest would still depend on whether there actually are a significant number of isoglosses of that kind in this case. This is probably why the more common name for it nowadays is bodljikavo prase (spiky pig). Also, my posts should be taken as conversation-starters; there is no expectation of staying on topic,and some of the best threads have gone in entirely unexpected directions. And this second paper in turn relies on data from UAE and somewhat incomple data from from pollen samples from a sabkha in Tayma oasis (not supratidal, of course: 839 meters above the sea level). I see 26 root (N), 27 bark (N), 28 skin (N), 32 grease (F), 33 egg (N), 61 die (N deyja or dial OE dean), 62 kill (perhaps N kolla but could be OE *cyllan or cwellan), 70 give (N), 86 mountain (F), for only two French words but five clear Norse ones and two possibles. Orbis Latinus Grodzinsky (1984) further proposes that, in contrast with many Indo-European languages, only inflectional substitution can be resorted to in Semitic languages, in which words are formed by inserting discontinuous vocalic morphemes into discontinuous consonantal roots.1To illustrate this structural property, the author discusses an example from Hebrew in which the three consonants s, m, and l are shared by the related words simla (a dress) and smalot (dresses). Both the neighbouring Senoufo (Volta-Congo) and Songhay languages have picked up the weirdness, helpfully proving this point. What methods? In the 19th century, Europeans also began suggesting such relationships. Lately, scholars seeking the mechanisms for secondary state formation have focused on local trajectories distinct from the Mesopotamian model, a case in point being the dry-farming region of the Jezireh. But both registers and prestige dialects are expected to be fully formed (sub-)system whose design is not affected by speakers preferences. Sociolinguistics also recognizes shift to prestige dialects (with an assumption that prestige reflects preferences), then there are registers. Polite register of the Javanese language. Substrates look like a plausible explanation, though of course that means little unless you can actually identify at least the language family of the potential substrate. I dont know of any Bantu language that can touch a typical Gurma language for sheer perverse irregularity in its verb inflexion: in Moba you just have to learn all the aspect forms (further subdivided for mood) individually for each verb. There is a Kusaal verb zug blow bellows, but that doesnt look like a plausible root for hedgehog either to me. And I dont think his mud forms support it (even if he can explain the vowel changes.). I can form it in Russian but I dont know what it means:). A nativist, Chomskyan-based view will specify these in terms of the formal principles characterizing a generative model of Universal Grammar (UG) with cross-linguistic variation accounted for by differential setting of structural parameters according to the target language. And then you could also look at the second-person subject pronoun su merced (singular) ~ sus mercedes (plural), still used in southern Colombia and northern Ecuador. In the linguistic areas mentioned above, there is considerable variation in the number and kind of traits they share which define them. No. It was the Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius (18101884) who restricted Hamitic to the non-Semitic languages in Africa, which are characterized by a grammatical gender system. What color is this [live] fish?. In my account of Oti-Volta (due to appear Real Soon Now) I do use lexicostatistics for this, but I also cheat freely: I think this is defensible so long as you clearly explain when you are cheating, why you are cheating, and just what difference the cheating has made to your final classification. In Greek, the earliest attestations seem to come from scholia, but figuring out when they actually date to is beyond me right now. So there you are. The method that the adapters employed in turning the Egyptian script to their own use was dubbed the acrophonic principle by the British Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner. IIRC, logarithms of Bayes factors are generally negative and mean higher support the smaller they are. It looks like there is Omani usage that a European tends to translate as fish. As for WP, the good thing about is that anyone who thinks she can write a better article can do it. This observation speaks against the thesis that agrammatic aphasics omissions of bound affixes reflect a default mechanism, that is, that in reality they represent substitutions of inflected forms by a -affixed form (Grodzinsky, 1984). This actually reminds me of the Welsh dig angry, for which GPC does not hazard an etymology. I do hope it would give the actual division into Scandinavian vs. English-plus-German, but I have no idea how it would actually work out. One classifier (t'u or dtua) is used for larger animals, furniture like tables and chairs, suits of men's clothing so far, things with arms and legs but also germs and fish! I seem to recall quite a lot being made of the -s derivational suffix plausibly reconstructed on other grounds for Old Chinese, for example. Could be similar to what happened to African hunter-gatherers when they saw cattle, sheep and goats for the first time. As part of this, this redescription may contribute to revealing whether the [] with their derived fossorial adaptations indeed arose from a generalized early amniote ancestor or whether such adaptations are examples of evolutionary convergence between non-amniote and amniote groups. a statement of this will be useful to future studies, Within this [] framework, derivation of the [] condition requires only subtle modifications of the skull to the condition already present in [] (e.g. Local traditions say (almost certainly correctly) that the speakers are all ultimately of the same ethnic origin, and that seems to explain it all well enough for general satisfaction. Kehf el Baroud is cliff (or cave) of gunpowder; Kelif has no remotely appropriate meaning in Arabic. Goat is probably reconstructable for Proto-Volta-Congo, though this is uncertain (it depends on the reconstruction of a stem-final consonant, and I can currently find no other example for the correspondence at that level.). For example, children do not need to learn that there are two main kinds of sound segments, consonants and vowels; that propositions distinguish between predicates and arguments; or that there are intransitive and transitive clauses, with one-, two-, or three-place predicates. Greek and type). It is just a dialect. Actually, jargon and tabu replacement are related phenomena. Character converter, Visual pleasures Also in the middle of the nineteenth century, we get the appearance of the technical sense: Physical Geography (originally U.S.). He tentatively excludes Chabu from Nilo-Saharan as an isolate and accepts Kadu. Can I ask how you got there, and how your judgment evolved? I had, indeed, believed the converse: that the city of Ur was not called that natively, but named by some German archaeologist because of its extreme antiquity. I havent taken a look at the new paper yet, so I dont know if it continues this blunder, but I know that other recent Bayesian analyses of language phylogeny have not perpetuated it. For two of the three NC isolates I dont see any real discussion of them belonging to the overall family either though and maybe they, too, would be more safely considered isolates period? Its precisely by looking at the data from comparison of individual languages that you begin to see how weak the evidence for groups like Gur, for example, really is. (Thats a World Cup joke, for those who arent into that sort of thing.). I Two occurrences of Nature and two sets of parentheses are unintended result of my, apparently unfinished, attempt to make it less ambiguos:(, The latter two are just spinoffs of the first, created mainly to maximize all impact factors, I found it funny, and at the same time logical and even reassuring that the lightest and more accessible (more pics and less math) journal is on the top of the hierarchy. By 60 kya, we would expect that each had diversified into A1, A2, A3 A10, and 50kya, A1 had diversified into A11, A12, as had the others. Nick Jainschigg Surely thats an incredible boost for anything thats as old or even somewhat older than PIE. The opposite idea, that Semitic originated geographically close to the other AfAs language families (so, in Africa), has been proposed a few times but not been widely accepted. Same root of course (also tug which makes my Old Norse loan senses tingle), just not the same ablaut or Verner grade. Next, adjacent clauses are combined, first by coordination, subsequently by various kinds of subordinate constructions initially mainly finite and subsequently nonfinite leading up to complex clause-linkage by derived nominalizations (Berman, 1993). Thanks really goes to Dmitry. In Modern English, out of 18 verbs in the 100 Swadesh list, two are Norse borrowings (die, kill), and one is a semantic usurpation (walk). I presume that would have been a lot truer in an era when the hunting was richer. The most striking case is Altaic, where one group of scholars produces thousands of reconstructed forms, and another denies that the major branches are even related. There is also a Danube paddlefish. Kordofanian is not a unity; Greenberg himself admitted that his evidence for lumping it into his Niger-Congo was nearly all typological. Arabic /a-a/ signifies the perfective, /u-i/ the passive). Auroch? Tis craven to survey the morrow! Certainly, the total available biomass of salt-water fish is much greater. Then he quotes from the very same article by Nichols as Claude Rilly (where he was calculating the degree of closeness between Meroitic and Nubian words for brother and sister). 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. 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. The Proto-Sinaitic character for /n/, on the other hand, was based on the Egyptian symbol representing /d/, a hieroglyph depicting a serpent, and received its Semitic value from the initial consonant in the Proto-Sinaitic word for snake.. Erythraic elements and patternings: Some East African findings. The data really do speak for themselves. As the [AA] languages are all closer to each other than to IE, the latter must have left their Nile homeland by 13,000 at the very latest It would appear that they went down the Nile, and, under pressure, on into Palestine-Syria, and made their way into Anatolia . So perhaps we should say that Blenchs classification is not so much wrong as un-useful; it leads us to draw conclusions that we are not actually entitled to draw. Lexicon is more chaotic, any grammatical subsystem is still a system and it can collapse as a system. I found Starostins lexicostatistical theory for showing substrate influence interesting. There is a pleasing consistency in these remarks. I do not know the Arabic alphabet and ask naive questions, so feel free to ignore them ????. Arabic samak(a) and t (as in Fomalhaut in Pisces) in eastern and western dialects respectively, but both are found in Quran. If anything, being westernmost (ie, closest to Daju) would seem to make it somewhat more likely that words were borrowed rather than developing separately. Leopold Bloom, while meditating in the bath, has a similar thought about Palestine. Btw, on the age of Nilo-Saharan: I just noticed that George Starostin argues (using the Starostin version of lexicostatistics) that Proto-Nubian-Nara-Tama by itself ie, a sub-branch of a sub-branch (East Sudanic) of the putative Nilo-Saharan phylum (of whose existence he remains unconvinced) is older than Indo-European by a good millennium. The general idea, that nasals were allophones of high nasal vowels in Proto-Volta-Congo. How likely are two neighbouring families to be closely related? Sanskrit has a vast and varied literature, the meaning of which is on the whole clear. 2) what is the English cognate of Stachel/stekel? The word for horse cant be reconstructed for Proto-Oti-Volta, though it can for Proto-Western. Gk. Nature, Nature Ecology & Evolution and Nature Genetics are three separate journals. For AntC, (1) I believe salmon were once so plentiful one did not need to look for other river fish and (2) I find it more curious that the more common lox word for salmon has no cognate in Irish with the meaning, than that the cattle-prizing Celts borrowed the latin generic word for fish, The native word icne salmon in middle Irish.