Is Nostratic real? Why or why not?
>>274882
It is plausible, makes more sense to me than some other theories.
>putting Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European that far apart when they have the same word for horn
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/%E1%B8%B1er-
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Semitic/qarn-
>>274985
Oddly enough, the page for the Proto-Semitic word gives the possible Indo-European cognate with a link to it, but the page for *ker- in PIE only defines it as 'to grow' or 'to plait', or as an alternate reconstruction of *kerh-, which it defines as 'head, top', although some of the descendant words do mean 'horn'.
>>274882
It is not real. It is not plausible. The postulation of genetic relationship between language families takes a large amount of overwhelming evidence in the form of REGULAR sound correspondences. Just because a few words in some of these proto-languages superficially sound alike, that does not constitute evidence for genetic relationship. It would have to be demonstrated that the superficial similarities between those words are the result of regular sound changes before nostratic, or even altaic, become serious proposals.
>>275902
look, the reason the nostratic hypothesis gets popular attention isn't because it's a serious scientific proposal up for debate among historical linguists, it's because virtually all non-linguists, and even most linguists whose specialization isn't language relationship/historical linguistics for that matter, have no idea what they're talking about.
nostratic is a cool idea. wouldn't it be cool if we knew just how latin was related to the extinct language isolate sumerian? and what about the exotic languages of the americas? wouldn't it be cool if we could say how those languages are related to afro-asiatic? unfortunately, there is no evidence for the relationships proposed in such hypotheses. if you want to see the kind of "evidence" used by people who support mega-language-families like nostratic, and why such evidence should be dismissed, just have a look at lyle campbell's devastating critique of joseph greenberg's "language in the americas." you can find campbell's paper in the journal "language" from september 1988.
OP here, I have another question: Suppose if Albanian and Welsh, or some other two very distant ones, were the only two attested Indo-European languages, would we even be able to prove definitely that they're related, much less reconstruct any sort of proto-form for them? Looking at some lists of basic words, they look pretty different.
"Pan" means "bread" in Spanish and Japanese.
Indo-Euro-Japonic confirmed.
>>277844
Remember also that má, which is a shortening of mamá (mom in Spanish) is used in Chinese to say mother.
Indo-Euro-Chinese confirmed.
>>278193
I think Chinese ma is first tone.
>>277844
>Spanish
>Euro
You fucked up.
>>277108
again, similar-looking words, even a large amount of similar-looking words, are not evidence of genetic relationship, regular sound correspondences are. look at english compared to hindi; there are virtually no true cognates that still look phonetically similar today, but you can still find a significant amount of true cognates illustrative of regular sound correspondences. albanian compared to welsh is a pretty obscure example, so I couldn't tell you for sure, but my intuition is that there are a significant amount of true cognates illustrative of regular sound correspondences between the two languages such that you would have strong evidence in favor of genetic relationship between albanian and welsh. the evidence for that would not come from words that look similar though. this is a sound correspondence list from the "albanian language" wikipedia article that I think demonstrates the fact that true cognates are often not superficially similar.
>>278342
keep in mind with this list though that some of these are not cognates. gjelber and verdhe in albanian are borrowings from latin.
>>278364
if you're interested in this topic I really suggest you get your hands on the paper that I mentioned.
Campbell, Lyle. (1988). Review of "Language in the Americas." Language, vol. 64, no. 3, 591-615
>>278342
Haven't a lot of words changed meaning or been replaced with other words, though? Mightn't that make it a bit hard?
>>278342
Eurasian R1B spread Afro-Asiatic languages into Africa, is that genetic enough for you?
Nice
>>278576
I wasn't looking at the transparency when I procured it, okay?
>>278968
Pro tip don't transparency
>>278988
How? Is there some option to disable transparency?
>>277844
"Baba" means "grandma" or "old hag" in both Slavic and Japanese.
>>278513
genetic relationship in the context of historical linguistics does not refer to biology, and dna evidence cannot be used as evidence of language relationship. you can use the term genealogical if that's more to your liking.
>>278505
yes and yes. that's why we need large numbers of regular sound correspondences to accept a claim of genetic relationship.
>>279134
So it's entirely possible that two genetically related languages could simply see enough vocabulary replaced that there's no sufficiently broad correspondences, right? Seeing as words for basic things like 'stone' have been known to be borrowed... (For example, the words in all the Romance languages for 'stone' are reflexes of a Greek loanword (petra) and not the Classical Latin word (lapis) )
>>279186
yes. if you believe that there was one first language, which seems like a conceptual necessity, then all languages are related, at least very very distantly. you can't say how they're related in any meaningful way for most of them though because of semantic drift. after enough time, by chance all the words in a given language will be replaced by borrowings.
>>279285
Is it impossible to trace from reconstructions to other reconstructions, by your reckoning? Or is it just that none of the reconstructions we have can be definitely evidenced as being related to each other? (Incidentally, given the history of science in general, oughtn't we be more weary about making 'can't know' claims?)
>>279399
reconstructions are treated as normal languages, which means that they can be used for comparative evidence. indo-european proto-languages are often used in attempts to create detailed subgroupings of the indo-european language families. most of the more distant reconstructions we have (proto-indo-european, proto-afro-asiatic, proto-sino-tibetan, etc) don't give us any reason to believe that they are related. I'm vaguely aware that there is some small amount of evidence for a relationship between uralic and indo-european, but I'm not clear on what it is. in general, the reason I'd say we can't know how every language is related to every other language is because the methods we have to determine such relationships only work reliably a few thousand years into the past, unless we get lucky. with some great luck, we might be able to find correspondences between the few proto-langauges that we have, but otherwise it will take new methods before a claim like nostratic is anything more than an unsubstantiated speculation.
>>277844
Pan comes from portuguese contact with the japs you fuckface.
![My+joke+skyrocketed+over+your+head+not+even+a+close+_66815b942ee838e07bfa07bfe5342939[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/jyHDqiC.jpg "My+joke+skyrocketed+over+your+head+not+even+a+close+_66815b942ee838e07bfa07bfe5342939[1].jpg")
>>279594
