Re: Deeper relations of Chinese

From: Anti-imperialist (ai_at_anti-imperialist.net)
Date: 09/19/04 

Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 16:51:17 -0700

"Rex F. May" wrote:
>
> in article 414D7D74.53D5@worldnet.att.net, Peter T. Daniels at
> grammatim@worldnet.att.net wrote on 9/19/04 6:37 AM:
>
> > Anti-imperialist wrote:
> >>
> >> "Rex F. May" wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Interesting. Can you point to some good websites?
> >>
> >> Not really. Google "Dene-Caucasian" and see what you can find.
> >
> > It would be preferable, of course, to start with truth rather than
> > falsehood. Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan phylum. Anything beyond
> > that is sheer speculation, unsupported by any evidence.

This is completely false, they are reconstructing Proto-Dene-Caucasian,
it is supported by some genetic evidence, and many sound
correspondences. *You* don't accept the evidence.
>
> I would guess that there are degrees of whackiness. Somebody wrote a
> strange book claiming that Zuņi and Japanese are related, for example, which
> would be at the ultra-violet end. Are there any such notions that are
> considered more reasonable than others? I would think that two language
> groups might be related, but have diverged so much that there could be
> reasonable disagreement about their relationship.

Yes, the following are more reasonable:

Dene-Caucasian phylum: Sino-Tibetan, Burushaski, Yenisien, Hmong-Mien,
Basque, Na-Dene

Austric: encompasses Tai-Kadai, Austronesian

Indo-Pacific: The languages of New Guinea

Nostratic: Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian,
Japanese, Korean, Ainu, Yukaghir, Gilyak, Eskmio-Aleut.

Eurasiatic: More or less the same as Nostratic, but adds a couple and
subtracts a couple.

Amerind: All of the languages of the Americas, except for Eskimo-Aleut
and Na-Dene

Penutian: Am. Indian subgroup

Hokan: Am. Indian subgroup

Australian: Encompasses all the languages of Australia

Nilo-Saharan: Large family in north-central Africa

Khoisan: Bushmen family in Africa

All of the above, some more than others, are ferociously controversial,
but at least they are more reasonable than say, Japanese and Zuni or
other weird 2-ways like that.

There is deeper stuff than that, but that gets pretty weird, a doyen of
Nilo-Saharan studies is linking Nilo-Saharan with Niger-Kordofanian. 

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