Demystifying the Caucasus

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WeepingElf
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Re: Demystifying the Caucasus

Post by WeepingElf »

Avo wrote:I see this claim (that Hurro-Urartian and NE Caucasian languages are typologically similar) all the time, but I never see any examples and I honestly fail to see the similarities, but maybe I'm missing something. Or are we talking about the superficial similarities (the ergative case, SOV word order, primarily suffixing morphology) here? As far as I know, neither Hurrian nor Urartian show any traces of a noun class system, a feature which was clearly present in Proto-NE Caucasian. The verbal morphology looks pretty different too, the most obvious difference being polypersonal agreement in Hurro-Urartian while most NE Caucasian languages lack person agreement entirely (and in the ones that don't it's a later innovation).
Fair. These similarities are far too few to establish a relationship. I am not an expert on any of these languages, and the whole hypothesis may be utterly misguided. HU indeed shows no traces of a noun class system cognate to that of NEC. Burushaski looks much more similar to NEC, but still, the typological parallels do not suffice to posit a relationship between Burushaski and NEC.
Avo wrote:I do think we're dealing with an undrspecifying script here though. It's pretty unlikely that all the unrelated Ancient Near Eastern languages' phoneme inventories fit neatly into cuneiform writing imo. But that's one of the many things we'll never know I guess.
Sure. However, it does not seem very likely to me that in Hurrian and Urartian, 40+ consonants hide behind a script that seems to represent only about a dozen. Of course, related languages may have very different phoneme inventory sizes, but this too weakens the idea of a HU-NEC connection.
Avo wrote:I wouldn't go as far as to say it came from Anatolia, but the Kartvelians certainly were present beyond the Turkish-Georgian border during antiquity, while they weren't in the Georgian border regions in the North-West and North-East.
I see.
Avo wrote:I quickly checked the grammar section of the Wikipedia article on Etruscan for things that look familiar from Kartvelian. Apparently there was a genitive -s/-ś, a dative -si and a plural in -ar. The case endings indeed look similar to the reconstructed Proto-Kartvelian genitive -is1 and dative -s. Svan shows plurals in -ar/-är, among others, that have no cognate in the other Kartvelian languages. That's certainly interesting, but I don't think Kartvelian and Etruscan are related.
One would need to look for lexical cognates. I know too little about these languages to say anything. The difficulty with the Etruscan morphemes is that the scholars don't even agree on their interpretation. For instance, the English and German Wikipedias show different case systems for Etruscan! The "dative" -si which you mention, for instance, is considered a locative of the genitive (like English at John's) qua suffixaufnahme by some scholars.

The idea that Tyrrhenian could be related to Kartvelian was just a fancy of mine that emerged as a possible reaction on the claim that Tyrrhenian was related to IE, or even a branch of IE, which is largely based on the same few morphemes (and a handful of cultural words which probably are loanwords from IE languages) - I observed that these morphemes could just as well be connected to Kartvelian ones.
Avo wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:Fair. Some scholars (e.g. Allan Bomhard) have speculated that PIE may have been a sister language of Proto-Uralic (which seems to be more conservative than PIE) altered by the influence of a Caucasian (NWC, Kartvelian or whatever) sub- or adstratum. I think this makes much sense, though the details need to be sorted out.
That paper looks interesting. I'm not sure what to think about Indo-Uralic to be honest, but it's one of the few macrofamily theories that make at least some sense to me.
The morphological similarities between IE and Uralic are certainly interesting, and hard to explain otherwise. There aren't too many lexical cognate candidates, though, and some that have been proposed have problems. Yet, Indo-Uralic is IMHO one of the most promising macrofamily candidates.
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Salmoneus
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Re: Demystifying the Caucasus

Post by Salmoneus »

I've never really understood what the morphological clues to indo-euralic really amount to, beyond the trivial 1st/2nd person morpheme similarity.
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Re: Demystifying the Caucasus

Post by pittmirg »

DW Anthony's book I'm just reading ("The horse, the wheel and language") enumerates 1sg pronoun, 2sg pronoun, a demonstrative, an interrogative pronoun, an acc. sg ending, a gen. pl ending as possible shared grammatical elements.
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