Talk:Uralo-Siberian languages

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[edit] Uralo-Siberian and Nostratic

This article is blatantly POV and completely misleading; some serious editing would be needed. At present, it is not stated anywhere that Uralo-Siberian is a fringe theory that is supported only by a couple of scholars in the world - even Indo-Uralic and Nostratic, both highly controversial, have more proponents. --AAikio 04:00, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Hmm. You're way too literal and suspiciously hostile towards progressive theories. You don't seem to be fully aware that Uralo-Siberian is merely a subset of Nostratic. So to say that Nostratic is more supported than Uralo-Siberian is a little nonsensical. This shows me that you haven't read what you purport to understand. A simple flip-through in one of Allan R. Bomhard's books on Nostratic will show you exactly where he stands on the Uralo-Siberian connection. Hard to miss if you've paid attention. So please. More reading, less hostility. --Glengordon01 07:20, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps I should clarify that in articles such as these, we need to keep focus on what the theory claims, not merely the title of the theory. For example, "Nostratic" and its potential subsets of it have been named a variety of things throughout time and depending on the scope of the researcher. So this is why I say that you are too literal. You take the name "Uralo-Siberian" and seem to easily forget the theory behind that name. --Glengordon01 07:27, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

The Uralo-Siberian theory claims that there is a specific genetic relationship between Uralic, Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut. Many variants of the Nostratic theory do not include all these language families, so it is not true that Uralo-Siberian is a subset of Nostratic. And the fact remains that this is article is POV and gives the uninformed reader a distorted picture, unlike for example the article Nostratic languages. This is not a matter of hostility but objectivity. --AAikio 07:56, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Oh dear, but Allan R. Bomhard has written a book you never have read called *NOSTRATIC* and the Indo-European Hypothesis (1996) where he even charts out an easy-to-understand tree specifically connecting Uralic, Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut together. I think you can track it down in Braille format :P

Since Bomhard's work exists to your contradiction, regardless of whether you personally deem him worthy or not, we see that there does exist at least one important variant of the Nostratic theory that considers "Uralo-Siberian" (however we might call it) subset. Trying to hide facts that you find distasteful is a little POV.

PS: Are you really terribly current on Nostratic or related issues? Honestly? Just so that we're on the same page: Vladislav Illich-Svitych died a full forty years ago, even years before the late Janis Joplin performed at Woodstock. In fact, his death was a decade prior to my arrival on the scene as a wee spermatozoid, before which I was possibly an edible mushroom, bottle of alcohol, or even a hot dog. Yes indeed, before Elvis Presley choked on some codeine pills. Before New Wave music. Before "Karma Chameleon"! Sweet feather of almighty Maat, even before Star Trek: TNG! Quite frankly, you may be too far behind to catch up now, hehe :) --Glengordon01 08:18, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Just to repeat my point: nothing that you wrote above contradicts my main point that "Many variants of the Nostratic theory do not include all these language families". The rest of your message is too bizarre to comment on. I might participate in this discussion again if there are edits to the article. --AAikio 01:11, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Some say bizarre, some say light-hearted. Some are happy, some are cranky. Anyways, until you can specify WHAT variants you're speaking of, your statement is without substance. Variants that you might find from 1840 don't really count nowdays. --Glengordon01 20:23, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Update needed

Currently the article focuses almost entirely on Fortescue. Could someone knowledgeable (AAikio?) read Seefloth's more recent work (see external links) and modify the article accordingly?

BTW, it does not make sense to say that Nostratic does not include Uralo-Siberian. Sure, some published versions do not include all four U-S families, but that's because the authors had not investigated those families. AFAIK there is no case where any Nostraticist has said "no, my colleague is wrong, I present evidence that Eskimo-Aleut (or whatever) does not belong to Nostratic". (Such a claim has only been made for Afro-Asiatic... and soon evolved into the claim that Nostratic and Afro-Asiatic are sister-groups, which actually means it has gone full circle.)

It also doesn't make sense to require that U-S must be better supported than Nostratic. Have a look at Indo-European -- everyone agrees on which families are included and which excluded (ignoring here the purely nomenclatural issue on whether to include Anatolian), but there is very little agreement on the internal stucture of IE: Balto-Slavic is universally accepted, Indo-Iranian nearly so, but that, stunningly, is all, after well over a century of serious research. Nostratic is (currently) similar.

David Marjanović 22:33, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Fair point. Sergei Starostin's Borean tree has all four U-S families in Nostratic, but also puts Eskimo-Aleut, ChukKam & Yukaghir in with Nivkh in a Paleosiberian node that's slightly closer to Altaic than to Uralic. I think Fortescue himself used to hold to a Ural-Altaic grouping exclusive of the rest, so it's a brave linguist who would say that the branching order is a done deal. But notice that Fortescue is also pretty adamant that Nivkh isn't U-S, or Nostratic either; instead, he thinks it might be Mosan (or with a Mosan substratum). In other words, there's a large overlap of membership between Fortescue's U-S and Nostratic, but the groupings as such are mutually exclusive alternatives for any version of Nostratic that includes Nivkh.
It may be because I'm dog tired (or returning to a linguistics article after things like Germanic mysticism), but I just realised that what I wrote above doesn't make a lot of sense. I think what I meant to say was, there's a large overlap between Paleosiberian and U-S, but you can't include both in the same version of Nostratic if Fortescue's right about Nivkh. Or something. Hell, just concentrate on my second paragraph, ok? Gnostrat 05:06, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
Anyway (unless I'm missing your point) I don't think the article is claiming that U-S has to be better supported than Nostratic. At least, when I added the Relationships section last year I was simply summarising Fortescue's own view of the matter: that U-S may just be proveable but Nostratic is too remote. That's mainly because he thinks that substrata and superstrata and borrowings back and forth will, given enough time, accumulate to the point where they overwrite the original inherited elements so that genetic linkages can't be recovered. There's no reason why an opposing view shouldn't also be put to balance things out. Gnostrat 00:15, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
So Fortescue says Nivkh is not Nostratic? That is worth mentioning in the Nostratic article.
But… Mosan? Mosan? That is… an impressive idea. Can you tell me more about this? David Marjanović 12:40, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
Well, this one has a bit of history behind it. At the 1988 Ann Arbor symposium on Language and Prehistory, Sergei Nikolaev and Oleg Mudrak presented a paper entitled 'Gilyak and Chukchi-Kamchatkan as Almosan-Keresiouan languages: Lexical Evidence'.[1] 169 etymologies, of varying plausibility, although they note only one regular sound correspondence (in 6 etymologies). This has to be seen in the context of the broader hypothesis (advanced by Nikolaev and, I understand, supported by Shevoroshkin) that all these families are part of 'Sino-Caucasian'. Robert Austerlitz also reported[2] that he had found resemblances between Nivkh and Nootka, but didn't pursue it because of the geographical implausibility.
Fortescue thinks the typological features which tie Chukchi-Kamchatkan to Mosan (stem reduplication, incorporation, prefixing and other stuff) and separate it from the rest of U-S are less fundamental and less archaic than the U-S affinities, but Nivkh is something else with its Mosan-like inclusive/exclusive 1st plural, numeral classifiers, "unusual" vowel harmony, lack of accusative and genitive markers, 1st sing. n-... He doesn't say it's a genetic relationship but it looks closer to it than in the case of Chukchi-Kamchatkan. And he points out the meagre evidence for the Nostratic affiliation of Nivkh. I quote (p. 59):
"As regards the Nivkh 1p inclusive pronoun mir/mer, according to Panfilov (1962...) this (like 1st dual megi/meŋ) is based on mi/me 'two' and thus can have nothing to do with 'Nostratic' m-initial 1st person forms (including CK muri 'we'). Attempts to link Nivkh to 'Nostratic' (and hence also US) languages, such as in Bomhard & Kerns (1994), strike me as particularly weak."
As to how Mosan 'got into' Siberia, Fortescue sees Mosan traits underlying coastal Na-Dene and thinks the stratum may have followed the coast northward all the way round. Think of an ice-age Beringian 'continent' big enough to hold Na-Dene speakers (possibly 'Aurignacoid' mammoth-hunters from central Asia) and Mosan (or Almosan-Keresiouan?) speakers, temporarily shut out of America proper by the closing ice barrier but retaining links down the Okhotsk coast. The Mosan-Nivkhic substratum in northeast Asia was widespread enough to have left traces in Korean, apparently.
For what it's worth, I think it's more likely that Nivkh represents an eastward migration from north-central Asia which absorbed Mosan-like features on the coast. Has anyone noticed that Nivkh has apparently borrowed the IE word for 'wheel' (kwekwlos, cf. Nivkh kulkuls 'wheel', kulkul- 'go round')? Unless IE speakers got as far east as the Amur, we would probably have to assume that proto-Nivkh went east from somewhere adjacent to the Kazakh steppe, or Xinjiang perhaps. Of course, that still doesn't make it Nostratic necessarily. Gnostrat 02:31, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
  1. ^ In Vitaly Shevoroshkin (ed), Explorations in Language Macrofamilies (Bochum 1989), pp. 67-80.
  2. ^ 'Alternatives in long-range comparison', in Sydney M. Lamb & E. Douglas Mitchell (eds), Sprung from Some Common Source (Stanford University Press, 1991).
Interesting (just in case I don't repeat myself often enough :o) ).
Could kulkul- be inherited instead of borrowed? (This is testable in principle: PIE */k/ is supposed to come from Proto-Nostratic */k̕/. If Nivkh k does not correspond to that, we have a borrowing… though it still might be a Wanderwort, and Nivkh has consonant gradation or something.)
Shevoroshkin thinks that Almosan, if not "Almosan-Keresiouan", is Dené-Caucasian – to be precise, he thinks it's a branch of Avar-Andi-Tsez within East Caucasian. Boggles the mind, but a Dené-Caucasian affiliation is plausible to me in the light of the cognate sets that Shevoroshkin proposes. This would, incidentally, mean that the first Almosan speakers arrived in North America at a very late date. But then Basque is new to the Iberian peninsula, too – it shares agricultural vocabulary with Basque and Burushaski!
The n- 1st-person pronoun fits Nostratic (*/m/-) about as well as Dené-Caucasian (*/ŋ/-), though you're right that Proto-Salishan had */n/- and Proto-Algic */nˀ/-.
Why should a personal pronoun in a language that (Nostratic-style) distinguishes dual and plural come from "2"? Plus, the -r in the plural and the velar in the dual look Nostratic again.
Similarities to Korean are not unexpected based on geographic proximity and shared putative Nostratic membership.
Separate inclusive and exclusive "we" are reconstructed for Proto-Nostratic and have survived in several extant languages. The numeral-classifier fusions are weird, though. Accusative and genitive markers can disappear… Clearly, more research is needed. Preferably before Nivkh and the Mosan languages die out. :-|
Oh, and… the Aurignacien was a culture, not (necessarily) a genotype. David Marjanović 19:20, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Morphology again

AAikio deleted the sentence "All of these are considered evidence for Nostratic by others.", claiming it was "too vague" and didn't mention who the "others" are. That's why the link is in there: read the Nostratic languages article, and you'll see. So I put the sentence back in, with somewhat clearer wording.

Now, does anyone have access to Seefloth's work? The Linguistlist posts on it are quite impressive, but too confusing for me to make a Wikipedia article out of them. David Marjanović 12:37, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Support by genetics

The Uralo-Siberian hypothesis is fairly probable from the view of genetics. We know that a part of Mongoloids bearing Y-chromosomal N3-lineage expanded somewhere from Northern China after the end of the Ice Age (ca. 14 000 BP) and colonized Siberia that was then sparsely inhabited by the remnants of Paleoindians (Q). Today, the N3-lineage is the main male lineage of the Uralic and Chukotko-Kamtchatkan speakers. It is also present in the Eskimo-Aleut group that actually came into being as a mixture of North-East Siberian Paleoindians (Q) with N3-Mongoloids. However, the marked presence of the Paleoindian Q-lineage in Kets, Yukaghirs and Nivkhi reveals that their isolated languages may be descendants of the Old Siberian Paleoindian language. 82.100.61.114 12:04, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

That's interesting and deserves further research, but don't confuse genes and languages. They are not always inherited in the same way. David Marjanović 21:03, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] What is Fortescue's real position?

Actually, although previous scholars may have been arguing for a genetic relationship between these languages, Fortescue (1998) does not do so. See the following from his own book: "...although it has not been proven conclusively that the Uralo-Siberian languages constitute a deep genetic stock... the attempt has brought us considerably closer to establishing the reality of an ancient Uralo-Siberian mesh displaying a particular typological profile, out of which most of the existing circumpolar languages of the Arctic arose. Recall... that my conception of a 'mesh' covers any degree of historical relatedness between a group of erstwhile geographically adjacent languages linked by relationships of lexical and/or phonological or structural 'family resemblance'. This ranges from Sprachbunds of unrelated languages, through interlocking chains of languages where the ends are unrelated by where there is considerable overlap and actual language mixing in the core region, to situations where all the ingredient languages are ultimately derived from a single ancestral proto-language but the time depth is simply too great to prove it, and finally to cases of traditional language meshes known exclusively to involve related languages (such as the Northern Athabaskan one)" (Fortescue 1998:230). --149.159.2.216 03:39, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

Fortescue qualifies the central thrust of his book in a cautious way, but it remains quite clear: he believes there is a genetic relationship between Uralic, Yukagir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo-Aleut. He reconstructs the sound system of the proto-language (pages 124-133) and offers a list of 94 lexical items reconstructed to the proto-language (pages 152-159), along with extensive remarks on its morphology (chapter 4) and typology (chapter 3).
Typical of Fortescue’s modest but unmistakable claims for the validity of a Uralo-Siberian genetic node is this statement (page 86):
I must stress that my use of the term ‘Uralo-Siberian’ is to be understood (for the time being at least) as referring to a mesh rather than to a strict genetic unit for which a proto-language can be reconstructed in detail, although, as will be seen in the following chapters, it does approach the level of reconstructability.
Compare this statement (page 219):
If the language spoken immediately north of the Sayan mountains at a certain time began to expand outwards, eventually to cover most of Siberia, it would have had its roots in a mesh focused in this area but would have approximated to a unitary proto-language as it expanded via the adjacent spread zone.
Note also Fortescue's chapter title, "Who could have spoken Proto-Uralo-Siberian - and where?"
Thus, while one may agree or disagree with Fortescue’s thesis, it must be acknowledged that it essentially posits a genetic relationship between the languages he classifies as “Uralo-Siberian”, although he is also sensitive to areal interactions that may have ensued before and after the language spread territorially. VikSol 03:37, 18 October 2007 (UTC)