NOSTRATIC OR VOSTRATIC?
B. Lukács
CRIP RMKI & Matter
Evolution Subcommittee of the Geonomy Scientific
Committee of the
H-1525 Bp. 114. Pf. 49.,
lukacs@rmki.kfki.hu
ABSTRACT
In
1. INTRODUCTION
On
In the last 2
centuries the status of the Magyar language has been continuously discussed. On one hand, the official status. In 1790, naturally, the
official language of
Then, in the second
half of the XVIIIth century Herder, the famous German
philosopher, who tried to understand linguistics [1], happened to issue a
prophecy about the Magyar language, telling that maybe in two hundred years that language, being alone, would be
extinct and its place would be taken by the Slavic idiom. (I guess, by
Slovakian.) From 1784 Emperor Joseph II, governing
No doubt,
non-Indo-Germanic idioms were in use in that time in Europe, e.g. Basque in the
Pyrenees, Fiunnish & Estonian in the Russian
Empire and Turkish on the Balkan Peninsula up to Belgrade & Sarajevo. But
the only country with a non-Indo-Germanic language in use of all administration
levels plus science & business was
But this half-century
long struggle for the officiality of Magyar in
First, some people
would like to have high-ranked old nations as close kins.
This is popular history & linguistics, so I mention only the
lest improbable candidate, Sumerian. Sumerian at leat
had some agglutinative characters, and Sumerian-Magyar etymologies do exist.
But observe that we cannot reconstruct the exact vowels in Sumerian texts.
Second, while the overwhelming
majority of linguists classify Magyar Uralic, it also seems Turkic, so Altaic.
Although in general Uralic and Altaic grammars are rather near to each other,
in some points Magyar is more similar to Turkish than to Finnish. In addition,
hundreds of well-established Magyar-Turkic (generally Bulgar-
or Chuvash- or r-Turk) etymologies exist. The general
explanation is "borrowing", during a symbiosis of 4 centuries on the
Eurasian steppe. In fact, we know that in the second half of this period Magyars
were an alliance of 7 tribes. What is, however, nontrivial, the names of 5
tribes of these 7 were Turkic and only 2 Uralic.
Now, let us accept the
symbiosis, and from two possibilities, let us accept that Magyar is a Uralic
language under heavy Turkic influence, and not backwards. (Anyway, all basic
numbers and majority of basic body parts are named with Uralic terms.) Then one
would expect pidginisation, then creolisation,
and then a language with mixed vocabulary and seriously simplified grammar. But
Magyar grammar is complicated enough and not too unsimilar
to those of the guessed relatives (who were left alone by History). So the
evolution of Magyar is not yet fully understood.
However academic
Hungarian consensus does exist about the genealogical tree leading to Magyar,
at least until we do not go too deep to the past. Let us ignore all influences,
symbioses and such, and start backwards:
Magyar <- Ugric <- Finno-Ugric <- Uralic <- (Uralo-Yughakir?) <- ?Nostratic?
As for Ugric, 3 languages are extant, Magyar, Khanti
& Manyshi, but the last 2 in
Ugric seems to have
been a part of a Finno-Ugric community in the remote past (say, before 1000
BC), where Finnish means present Finnish, Estonian, Lapponian,
other Baltic, Volga & Permian "Finns", and a number of extinct
idioms; instead of a big literature here I cite my own Internet study [2],
where you can find some literature. It seems that Finns were always the Western
group and Ugors the Eastern.
Now, next kins of Finno-Ugrians seem to be the Samoyeds, reindeer
nomads of the extreme North of both Easternmost Europe and Westernmost Asia. So
sometimes before 3000 BC we hypothesize an Uralic
linguistic community (not necessarily unity; population density was very low).
Interestingly enough, numerals of the Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic groups do not
seem to agree, except maybe "1" [3]; but there are very good
etymologies and a vast body of grammatical correspondences as well. In Appendix
2 I give some etymologies to "breast", following Collinder,
but also with a hidden goal.
Now, there is a small
nation in
And here the classical
linguistic methods of genealogic trees, Grimm-like regular sound-changes &
such stop. But, if one is fanatic, he may use the method of Dolgopolsky,
leading to the notion of "Nostratic"
languages. With this notion, however, we have arrived at a key point, so we
should rather start another Chapter.
2. WHAT IS
"NOSTRATIC", AND WHICH LANGUAGES ARE NOSTRATIC?
Nostratic
means, of course, "ours", so the Nostratic
group of languages is a group into which the language of the defining person
belongs. Dolgopolsky has defined the group, so it
contains Indo-Germanic plus all others whose relatedness with Indo-Germanic can
be proven by a method acceptable for the definer or for a substantial group of
linguists.
Now, Uralic education
gives the convinction that we are not Indo-European. As for linguistic
arguments, look: we have no genders, we have postpositions instead of
prepositions, our languages use agglutination and not flection & so on. However, if one takes far enough
relations, even we can be classified together with Indo-Europeans, since
Eurasian languages should be rather monophyletic (see Appendix 3).
But if so, then the
notion of "Nostratic" becomes rather
subjective. There are languages, all genetically related to all other. Now
comes the Indo-European scholar and finds that some languages are in closer
relation to Indo-European, some in
farther and in some cases he is in doubts about the relation. He then names the
closer relatives as "Nostratic"; but you
should be aware that Nostratic here simply means
"closely related to us",
being "nostra lingua" is simply "our language". So here "Nostratic" means
(mirror-translating a Hungarian saying to English) "the whelp of our bitch".
Almost nobody
classifies Basque as "Nostratic" and almost
everybody classifies Magyar, dominant language of
And
still...
3. A VILLAGE ON THE SOUTHERN
SLOPES OF THE
There is a rather
exciting book of Bomhard & Kern about the
formation of Nostratic [5]. Let me recapitulate the
idea very briefly. There were 3 "waves" leading to the Indo-European
victory in
Then came the second wave: about 40,000 BC arrived Cro-Magnons or
Aurignacians or so, and they occupied
And then, say, about
15,000 BP, a success story started somewhere just South
of the
Why just South of the
And this is the point
when I, speaker of the biggest Uralic language, tell that something does not
fit here. My objections can be grouped into two arguments, of which the first
is quite definite but not too interesting while the second is harder to grapple
and still it will take this work from the next Chapter onwards.
The first objection is
simple enough. In usual classifications Nostratic
contains 4 extreme Northern families as well: Uralic, Yukaghir,
Chukch-Kamchatkan & Esquimaux-Aleut. As far as we can reconstruct
back, Uralic was spoken at 55° parallel and Northward, Yukaghir
was the dominant language of the Arctic seacoast East of River Lena, Chukchi are also northern enough and Esquimaux
are Northern par excellence.
Of course, you may
believe that victorious Indo-Europeans pushed their close kins
and past comrades Northward, say, between 10,000 and
5,000 BC. But first, let us return once more to [5]. When the story of the
Third Wave starts, proto-Nostratic is only a local
dialect of proto-Dene-Caucasian. But the Mesolithic
Success turns the table. Nostratic groups become populous, they sit on other proto-Dene-Caucasians
and convert the substrates into Nostratic. When
history emerges, the non-Nostratics are already only
mountain peoples (as Basque and Caucasians) plus the
OK.
Proto-Indo-Europeans, proto-Afrasians, proto-Kartvelians, proto-Esquimaux and
proto-We (I am Uralic, remember) started the Great Innovation of Humanity,
Mesolithic. Later the first three groups made one more step: Neolithic (and do
not forget that proto-Chinese repeated that; but I do not want to break the
tune). We and Paleo-Siberians (or Paleo-Siberians
including Us) did not understand the New Age,
therefore ceased to be successful, and became pushed to Extreme North by
glorious Indo-Europeans.
Good (or not); but
then Nostratics (including us!) cannot have started South of Caucasus. You may try with an
idea that the proto-Nostratic community included both
slopes of the
Something is not yet
understood; but that is not too surprising about proto-history of 15,000 years
old. I am not too interested in this moment about the surprising route of
proto-Yukaghirs according to Ref. 5 from the Southern slopes of the
I am not interested in
related words. As the ancestral
heritage of Cro-Magnonic Europe from 40,000 BP some
common roots may have survived. I shall be interested rather in grammar.
4. A BASQUE GRAMMAR WRITTEN
BY A BASQUE
There is a Medieval story about the Devil who was learning Basque for 7
years without success; at the end He gave up, so Basques cannot be led into
temptation. From the story I guess that strangers (meaning French, Castilians
& Catalans) are not too successful with this old Dene-Caucasian
idiom. And I think it is because of the grammar, not the vocabulary. Anyway,
Indo-Europeans cannot utilize even the great similarities between Slovakian
(knowledge=veda) and Sanskrit
(knowledge=veda) or between English (snow) and
Russian (snow=sneg), but some Englishmen still can
learn at least French.
Now, there are Basque grammars, and I have found an
excellent, brief and concise one [6]. I think its goal is not to teach people
Basque (it does not give vocabulary &c.), but to give a feeling of Basque
grammar. I seem to feel some malicious mood of the author, Ms. Itziar Laka, demonstrating that
"look, Basque is very, very different; maybe you never saw anything
similar". But, although authentic Nostratics
(meaning Indo-Europeans) tend to classify me as a Nostratic,
some tricks of Basque seem quite familiar to me. The remaining part of this
work will be dedicated to such characteristics. You can find references about
other Basque grammars in Ref. 6.
I do not know what is
behind the Basque-Magyar correspondances. For any
case, some of them are not
Basque-Uralic correspondances but rather Basque-Ugric
ones.
One can guess that some Paleo-Siberian connections are behind. Ugrians were just
the Western neighbours of Dene-Caucasian Yeniseians, for example. But note that while
My point is that the
examples in the next Chapter rather seem to suggest that Magyar (or Ugric?) is
either the most Dene-Caucasian-like Nostratic language, or the most Nostratic-like
Dene-Caucasian.
And note that it is a
common belief that Bear rituals are very old, possibly from the first
Cro-Magnons (so, according to Ref. 5, the first Dene-Caucasians).
Now, Indo-Europeans do not have Bear rituals (I mean the rituals when the
killed bear is honoured, his pardon is asked and so on), and to my knowledge
neither have it Afrasians or Kartvelians.
At this moment Magyars do not have it either, but Magyars are after a Great
Trek from
5. THE WESTERNMOST
DENE-CAUCASIAN LANGUAGE AND THE MOST ABERRANT NOSTRATIC ONE
For simplicity I will
follow the order in Ref. 6. At a number of occasions I will give Magyar parallels.
Note that Magyar orthography is practically unsimilar
to any other languages. Still, it uses Latin letters (with double consonants
and diacritics on vowels for sounds not in Latin). So you can read the
examples. Maybe you cannot utter them: and then what?
For the sample
sentences English will be boldface, Basque an Arial font, and Magyar Times New
Roman. Similarly for separate words where a translation is
given.
Example 1: the topsy-turvy
languages.
Take a simple enough
sentence; that is Sentence (1a) of Chap. 1 of Ref. 6:
The child fell in the
street.
A gyermek elesett az utcán.
(M)
There would be here
really interesting points but for the beginning let us concentrate on the location: in the street, kale-a-n (B), utcá-n (M). Street=kale=utca
(the lengthening in Magyar is trivial); you can see
that English uses particles before
the noun, Basque and Magyar
behind. I am not arguing about the similarity in the
locative end-particles: that may be accidental (albeit Uralic -n is old; see something more in App. 4.)
Example 2: the word order.
In English the
"natural" or neutral word order is SVO. Linguists list the word
orders in hundreds of languages. However observe that Ref. 6 is rather cautious
about this in Basque. There are 2 good reasons for being cautious. First, a lot
of simple Basque sentences contain a case which is neither Subject (so
Nominative) nor Object (so Accusative), but something else, not existing in
Indo-European (nor in Magyar either, but that will be another point). Of
course, you may tell that in Basque (or Caucasian) sentences
"logically" the ergative is the subject and the nominative is the
object; but this may be (or may not) a violence on Basque logic; and for an argument against calling simply a Nominative Object and whatnot wait until Example 7. But also, Ref.
6 tells: "...it is not so clear what the neutral word order is".
Conclusion: "Euskara is a free word order
language". Exactly so Magyar. Let us see again
the English sentence (1a): The child
fell in the street, with Basque and Magyar translations. The child =
(The symbol <-> stands for the same structure. It is another
matter if the secondary meanings of
the Basque and Magyar sentences are the same or not.) This is a rather neutral sentence in Magyar;
maybe with a very slight emphasis on the location,
but maybe not that either.
Here the Magyar sentence has a slight emphasis on the verb.
Kalean erori da
The Magyar sentence starts with the location.
It is still a simple statement; but the word order tells that you can collect
the child thence and not from the garden. (Look: this is not the answer to the
question: where did the child fall? This is a statement, starting the
conversation. But it sends listeners to the street, for any case.)
Erori da
In Magyar this is rather an
exclamation; but not necessarily.
Erori da kalean
Here again the emphasis is on the verb, however the secondary emphasis
is on the location.
There would be a sixth permutation:
Kalean
I do not know why Ref. 6 does not give this sentence; maybe the author forgot it, or maybe this word order is ungrammatical in Basque, but for any case the Magyar mirror sentence is quite usual. The stress is on the fact that "the child on the street" fell; so there were more than one children in the neighbourhood, one was at the street and that child did fell.
Seemingly I should be
ready, because there were 3 words in the Magyar sentence, which means only
3*2*1=6 possible permutations. But elesett = el-esett. A Magyar verb has agglutinative endings; but may
have some modifier prefixes at the beginning as well. (See Navajo for analogy.)
The modifier "el-" may mean two things. Either a motion from a point elmegy
= goes away; or some more subtile "direction". A person
who stood originally, may fall down from standing position to a more or less horizontal one. This is "elesik".
Vertically a person simply "esik",
falls from a high platform down.
Then we can separate
"el" and "esett" somewhat
analogously with "erori" and "da", although this is no
more a mirror translation. For
example:
A gyermek
az utcán
esett el (M)
indicates a strong stress on the
location. Or for example, even a sentence
is quite possible; although it is either
poetic, or needs a previous half sentence, e.g.
Az ajtóban ugyan már
megbotlott, de el a gyermek
az utcán esett = The child
slipped already in the door but in the street did he fall;
but the Magyar sentence carries some tertiary
stresses too which would be difficult to translate.
Example 3: Galdegaia
Galdegaia,
the informationally relevant phrase is a very tricky
and useful notion of Basque grammar; Magyar grammars do not have the formal
equivalent of it. But the reader can see from the previous point that the
phenomenon behind does exist in Magyar as well; the circumscription speaks
about stresses, primary, secondary & such. But I emphasize that this is
not: "which question is answered?". In many
cases the sencence is not an answer; and in many cases the answer would be much shorter,
as we are going to see.
Example 4: Absent phrases
& such.
Ref. 6 gives a
sentence as translating
Thou
hast seen the child in the street.
as
Zuk
Some words were used in Examples 1 & 2; the new ones are "zu"=thou, in ergative case, and "ikusi duzu"=thou hast seen, but with an inverted
word order. The Magyar mirror translation would be cca.:
Te a gyermeket
megláttad az
utcán (M).
Quite correct although complicated a sentence.
Now Ref. 6 starts to
explain what could be omitted. For example "zuk" may be omitted (I do
not know why the word order is changed at this point (galdegaia?);
in Magyar the thou="zu(k)"="te" can simply be omitted if there is no stress on it;
but anyway):
Kalean ikusi duzu
The explanation is
very simple for a Magyar speaker. The
initial "zuk" indicates
that the "subject" (in ergative; but that will be another point) is
Sg2. Now the Sg2 "subject" is indicated too on the verb. The pronoun
is redundant. In most cases the Magyar sentence would go without the pronoun,
so without a formal subject at all; something impossible in English and
ungrammatical in Russian.
Example 5: The ergative
case.
Let us go back to the
sentence:
Thou
hast seen the child in the street = Zuk
Here the Basque employs a formula not existing either in Indo-European
English or in Uralic (Ugric) Magyar. Namely the "logical subject" is
in ergative case indicating activity,
work &c. while the "logical object" is in nominative called Absolutive; being simply no Accusative in Basque.
Now, this structure is
par excellence Dene-Caucasian; although up to now I
showed mirror translations to every Basque trick, there is no ergative in
Magyar. But it almost exists.
We must go step by
step. In English you could avoid Accusative by using Passive voice cca. as:
The
child (in the street) is seen by thee.
I admit I have simplified the sentence to Simple Present instead of
Present Perfect for Magyar reasons; and now the bracketed term is trivial. Then
"by thee"
could be regarded as the ergative case of thou;
but in English the verb also changes while in Basque it does not.
Now let us see the
Magyar structure. The formal equivalent of the
child is seen by thee is
A gyermek
láttatik általad(/tôled) (M).
Here "a gyermek"=the child is in nominative; "általad/tôled"=by/from
thee is Ablative or near to it, and again the verb is in Passive Voice.
(This is a somewhat formal sentence; rather rarely used in Magyar.) Sees is "lát",
is seen is "láttatik". Another
translation is "látszik", but the two
verbal forms are not equivalent.
"Láttatik" is the Passive Voice of "lát" (the Active Voice); "látszik"
is not a Passive Voice, but a "state" when everybody can see
it. (It seems that see is the only English verb with this aspect in seem. )But the "-ik" ending is common in the
two verbal forms.
"Láttatik", the Passive Voice of "lát" is exactly "lát-tat-ik".
Here "-tat" is a Causative ending: "láttat"
is something he makes it to be seen.
Now an "-ik" without the Causative is cca. a Reflexive. But "-ik" is also a Definite Pl3 verbal ending (for Indefinite/Definite
wait a moment) and Pl3 serves frequently as a substitute for General Subject. (They here can mean cca.
"I do not exactly know who and I am not interested".)
Now let us see a
simple sentence
The tree breaks
in 3 Magyar versions:
A fát törik. (a)
A fa töretik. (b)
A fa törik. (c)
Sentence (a) would be deficient in English, because there is no pronoun
in it; but the verbal ending shows that the subject is They, so
They
break the tree. (a)
Sentence (b) is the formal Passive Voice, so
The
tree is broken. (b)
And what is Sentence (c)? It has a good translation:
The
tree breaks. (c)
but only because the English break is really 2 verbs: one transitive
and one intransitive.
It seems that in Old
Magyar there was no Accusative ending, but no Ergative ending either, and the
verb took the ending showing who is Subject and who is Object. Now already the
Accusative ending is almost obligatory; but only almost. Namely Accusative ending may be omitted after 1st and 2nd Person Possessive endings, and in
some frozen expressions.
Still: no Ergative in
Westernmost
Example 6: Polysyntheticity
The notion has been
introduced by Sapir (see e.g. [7]), with a not too
rigorous definition (for an Ugric). The polysynthetic languages are "even
more synthetic than the synthetic ones", and in them the structure of
words is "complicated". These languages developed the principle of
synthesis "ad absurdum". And so on.
Now Ref. 6 in its
Chap. 5 gives a sentence which I must rather correct to Sg2:
I
have seen thee.
Nik hi ikusi haut (B) = Én téged megláttalak
(M).
Now, I do know that the Magyar sentence is unnaturally long. I would
shorten also the Basque sentence; surely it is redundant a lot, and for me,
Hungarian, "Ikusi haut" (B) would be quite
enough (but I do not know if some rule is against it). Namely the auxiliary
"haut" carries
both I and thee. Roughly "haut" is I have thee, but then one word carries
3 English words, a verb indicates simultaneously Subject and Object. This is
too much for an Indo-European, Basque has carried the principle of synthesis
"ad absurdum", the structure of the auxiliary is
"complicated", so Basque is polysynthetic.
Now
I
have seen thee = Ikusi haut (B) <-> Megláttalak (M).
"Megláttalak" contains the
"have" cca. in
"meg-" (the verb has happened, the act is finished successfully),
"lát" is see as we have seen, the second "-t-" shows the Past
Tense (originally a Perfect), and "-lak" is
an ending I thee. So I have given a
mirror translation to a polysynthetic
Basque structure.
Polysynthetic
structures are commonplaces in the Dene-Caucasian
block (superfamily? remnant?). Some Caucasian
languages are very expressedly polysynthetic, and the
American members of the group are well known for this property.
Magyar is Ugric, so
Uralic, so Nostratic (?). And still it shows
polysynthetic tendencies. To be sure, not so strong
tendencies as Dene-Caucasian. Still, tendencies enough. One such characteristics
is the "-lak" ending:
"Látlak"
= I see thee.
"Láttalak"
= I have seen thee.
"Látnálak"
= I should see thee.
"Láthatnálak"
= I could see thee.
and so on. All these examples show Subject and
Object simultaneously on the verb.
Another such
characteristics is in the Indefinite/Definite
inflection. Let us see:
Give(s) =
"ad".
I
give sg indet to sy = "adok"
I
give thee to sy = "adlak"
I
give myself or him/her or sg def to sy = "adom"
&c. But also Magyar can
indicate the possessor on the word, e.g.
House = "ház".
My
house = "házam".
Thy
house = "házad"
His/Her/Its
house = "háza".
Our
house = "házunk"
Your
house = "házatok"
Their
house = "házuk"
and now ad absurdum:
My
houses = "házaim"
Thy
houses = "házaid"
and so on. Magyar's next kin, Ob Ugor Manyshi has Dual, and then
of course has proper ending for, say Dual Second Person possessor, Dual goods.
27 forms altogether.
Example 7: Deficient
sentences and galdegaia in answers
English is an SVO
language. So (almost) each sentence must have a Subject, a
Verb, and if the verb is transitive, then also an Object. I read a book. I give you a book. Noch dazu: It is raining.
(I beg your pardon: what is really
raining?)
We have seen from the
Basque examples that there a lot of pronouns can be omitted. And similarly:
I
read a book -> Olvasok egy könyvet (M).
Nowhere a subject in the Magyar sentence, although the idea is that
Magyar should be an SOV language (?). The Magyar sentence here is VO; the Sg1 Subject and the indefiniteness of the Object is indicated in the Verb.
Now let us see a
simple statement about weather:
It
has rained today = Gaur euria egin du (B) <-> Ma
esett (M).
Step by step: "gaur" =
"ma" is today, "euria" is the rain, "egin
du"
is cca. has made. Now let
us see what is the Magyar translation of “euria”.
We know already the English meaning, but the Magyar word is not the mirror
translation (of course) from English. The meteorological phenomenon “euria” is called “esô” in Magyar (plus some “determinant” which is trivial).
Now, formally “esô” is the Present Participle of “esik”, i.e. fall(s).
Observe again the "-ik" ending. Fall(s) is "esik",
"esô" is literally the falling, but in the dictionary it is rain. Raindrops indeed fall.
Let us see first the
Basque sentence "Gaur
euria egin du". The
temporal is trivial. The next word is in Absolutive
so in Nominative. Now if this is the Object, then we would expect a Subject in Ergative;
the person who has made the rain. But there is no ergative. Nobody has made the
rain, still the rain has been made. Illogical,
not?
Not according Magyar
logic. "Esik" is "it is raining". There is no subject at all in the Magyar sentence! And look: the
absent Basque Ergative would correspond to an absent Magyar Nominative. So again
the Magyar sentence is a mirror translation of the Basque! Then you can see the lameness of "logical Subjects and such.
Ref. 6 gives 3
"deficient", but quite grammatical Basque sentences in Chapter 1,
example (14). Examples (a) and (c) would be somewhat cryptic in Magyar
(although I could tell
environments where such a sentence would be proper), but (14b)
"Gizonak liburua eman dio" would be absolutely
good Magyar if you changed the word "eman dio" = gave into e.g. sell. The sentence
"A férfi eladott egy könyvet" (M)
is absolutely correct, although the person to
whom the book was sold is not indicated anywhere.
And especially
"deficient" Magyar sentences can be correct as answers. This is the
reason that I do not like the terminology This sentence is the answer if you ask... Look:
Who
has seen the child in the street?
In Basque this is Sentence (19a) from Chap. 1 of Ref. 6:
"Nork ikusi du
Ref. 6 gives an answer:
"Zuk ikusi duzu
Impossible.
At least the Magyar answer is something "Te láttad
= Thou sawest
= Zuk ikusi duzu." Or rather "Ikusi duzu"?
Magyar can even more
abbreviate the answer. Let us see first a question:
Hast thou written the
housework I gave you? So "Megírtad-e
a házifeladatot amit adtam nektek?" The
textbook answer is something: Yes, I
have written the housework thou gavest us, which
would be "Igen, megírtam
a házifeladatot, amit adtál nekünk." (Here Anglo-Saxon scholars would correct "gavest" to "gave" being the Anglo-Saxon form "thu geafe", being the verb Strong. However in Modern Icelandic it is "thú gafst". There is no Quaker Prayer Book at my hand.) But nobody
tells thus. There are 2 possibilities. The answer may be simply "Igen"=Yes;
but you can tell that it is unfair to give a Yes/No answer. Then maybe the
answer is "I have written".
And now let us see the
Magyar answer. I have written is
literally "Megírtam", where "ír" is write and "meg-" indicates the finishing of the
action. But according to the formal rules of Magyar for an affirmative you only
need to answer with the repeated verbal
prefix here: "Meg". This is a full sentence: no S, nor O, nor V.
6. THE LONG, LONG WÜRM III
GLACIAL AND THE DENE-CAUCASIANS
Let us go back for a
moment to Ref. 5. Homo sapiens has arrived at
The original highly
synthetic grammar could survive in high mountains whither the agitated
relatives could not climb. So the characteristic Dene-Caucasian
structure remained in the
Surely, the Basque-Magyar parallels cannot come from contacts. My guess is that from the advent of agriculture such contacts were geographically impossible, even unimaginable. But the old language structure may have remained in the neighbourhood of River Ob. Indeed, in the next river valley there remained some lazier Yenisseians (the more active ones, as we know, crossed the waters of the Bering Straits to become Na-Dene). They retained polysynthesy and ergative structure. We completely ignored the ergative suffix but kept some moderate polysynthesy.
And on
APPENDIX 1: ON THE LANGUAGE
ABILITY OF A HUNGARIAN POST OFFICE DOG
St. Poniatowski, as Lord Lieutenant of Przemisl,
travelled through
APPENDIX 2:
"BREAST" IN URALIC AND YUKAGHIR LANGUAGES
For the details see
[9]. From the 9 convincing etymologies I take that for "breast".
Breast is mälge in reconstructed
Finno-Ugric and melu in recent (southern) Yukaghir. The comparison goes as:
|
FU lang. |
Word |
Meaning |
|
Finnish |
mälvi |
breast of a bird |
|
Estonian |
mälv |
breast of a bird |
|
Lapponian |
miel'ga |
breast |
|
Mordvin |
mälhkä |
breast |
|
Votyak |
myl |
belly |
|
______ |
|
|
|
Khanti |
mögel |
beside |
|
Manyshi |
mägl |
breast |
|
Magyar |
mell |
breast |
You will understand the Khanti line from the
information that in Magyar "mellett" is
"beside". For fullness' sake I give here "maas"="breast"
in Nenets Samoyed [10], although there the
"l" is absent.
Now, Greenberg & Ruhlen discovered a lot of correspondences in various Eurasian
languages, using the trick that they accepted "teat", "suck"
or even "milk" [11]. With the last extension English is kin to Yukaghir, and we have a wide enough family, namely consider
these examples too:
|
AFRASIAN |
Arab |
mlj |
suck the breast |
|
|
Egyptian |
mndy |
udder |
|
DRAVIDIAN |
Tamil |
melku |
chew |
|
|
Malayalam |
melluka |
chew |
|
|
Kurux |
melkha |
throat |
|
ESQUIMAUX |
C. Yupik |
melug |
swallow |
|
AMERIND |
Proto-Am. |
*maliq'a |
swallow, throat |
+ at least 16 etymologies from extant Amerind languages, generally with the meaning of "swallow",
"throat" or "drink" [12]. Greenberg's viewpoint is that in
Proto-World "mälge" or what was a very
important word of maternal care, feeding the baby or such. Some groups then
retained the word for the feeding process, some others for the anatomical source,
&c. Of course, there is an intimate connection between the notion of "breast" and those
of "teat", "milk" and "suck".
APPENDIX 3: MONOPHYLECY VS. DIPHYLECY VS. POLYPHYLECY
The question if the
existing languages are all descendants of an "Ur-language" or not is
very old and its final answer needs better methods than available now. However
an answer can be given if we accept
some commonplaces of modern anthropology. Let us do this for argumentation's
sake.
Let us accept
"out of
Now, the simplest picture conform with the known facts is 2 waves of
emigration: one from
But then all
non-African languages must be descendants of either the first wave or of the
second; or even the speakers of the two waves spoke related languages.
Then all languages of
APPENDIX 4: CONSERVED
ANCIENT SUFFICES?
In the street, kalean, az utcán. Accidents or remainders of the Proto-language of Cro-Magnons?
For our present goal
it is not absolute necessary to decide. But look: "-n" is the suffix
of Locative (the where) in Uralic, Yukaghir, Itelmen of Chukch-Kamchadal, Esquimaux (all Nostratic if true); and also in Ket,
which is Dene-Caucasian.
But it is somewhat
eerie that in Basque the directional
suffix answering the question whither
(the equivalent of English to) is
"-ra". Namely in
Magyar it is "-ra/re", the alternative is
for vowel harmony. According to Hungarian linguists, "-r-" suffices
are not too old. Accident?
Swadesh
[13] found a lot of "etymologies", or at
least some correspondences in a terrifying chain of languages from the
REFERENCES
[1] J. G. Herder: Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache.
[2] B. Lukács: On the Border of Two
Worlds. http://www.rmki.kfki.hu/~lukacs/angyar.htm
[3] B. Lukács: The Great 7. http://www.rmki.kfki.hu/~lukacs/big7.htm
[4] Until
[5] A. R. Bomhard & J. C. Kern: The Nostratic Macrofamily. Mouton
[6] Itziar Laka:
A Brief Grammar of Euzkara, the Basque Language.
http://www.ehu.es/grammar/
[7] E. Sapir: Language. An Introduction to the Study of Speech. Harcourt, Brace
& Co.,
[8] St. Poniatowski: Pamietniki.
Vol. 1, Skt. Petersburg, 1914
[9] B. Collinder:
[10] P. Hajdú: Chrestomathia
Samoiedica. Tankönyvkiadó,
[11] J. H. Greenberg & M.
Ruhlen: Sci. Amer. Nov.
1992, p. 60
[12] J. H. Greenberg:
Language in the
[13] M. Swadesh:
Amer. Antropol. 14,
1262 (1962)
My HomePage, with some other studies, if you are curious.