DV82LECM wrote: ↑07 May 2021 15:14
Very interesting. As for your assertion, in regards to their geographic proximity, I do believe there might be some genetic relationship between PIE and PNWC.
Not my assertion! Just a common theory. NWC and PIE look quite similar, and would have been spoken in or around the same location. Either a genetic link or areal influence would be prima facie plausible.
However, the only reconstruction I've seen for the latter insists on upwards of 200 individual phonemes; PIE has less than 30.
The 'reconstruction' of NWC is bollocks. Is that Starostin or the like again? The problem is, whenever you decide that two languages are related, you can always just posit a proto-language that they can be derived from, by multiplying the number of phonemes (or morpheme length). If you see that /k/ in one word in Alpha seems to correspond with /k/ in one word in Beta, you say "oh, there was a phoneme /k/ in the ancestor"... and if you then see that /k/ in another word in Alpha instead seems to correspond with /t/ in the other word in Beta, then you can say, "hmm, it seems like Proto-Alpha-Beta actually had TWO velar series, one more palatal than the other (which merged with alveolars in Beta)".
Please bear in mind: no actual human language recorded has ever had more than 86 non-click phonemes, and even that (Ubykh) is a massive, massive outlier. It is vanishingly unlikely that NWC would actually have had over 200 phonemes, but that's exactly what it would look to have if you created a phoneme inventory through this sort of lazy multiplication approach to reconstruction.
To me, a relationship insists characteristic similarity, and the two, for the discrepancy in number of phonemes, seem silly to compare, at all.
But closely-related languages can appear superficially very phonologically different. Finnish apparently can be analysed with only 14 consonants, while Northern Sami - spoken nearby and closely related - may have nearly 40. The languages of New Caledonia, in the Southern Oceanic subfamily, often have between 30 and 40 consonants, while many languages of neighbouring Vanuatu, also in the Southern Oceanic subfamily, have fewer than 20.
As much, and this might be a bygone misconception, but I remember hearing that "caveman" (going back beyond the last Ice Age) speech was supposedly not that advanced (perhaps such is comparable to clicks being considered a primitive sound).
Yes, this is a misconception.
Well, at some point it's likely that some "cavemen" - pre-humans - hundreds of thousands of yeas ago may have had a stage of language between that of chimpanzees (minimal) and humans (extensive). Though whether that semi-language stage would have lasted millennia or decades is unknowable.
However, that stage would have been long, long, long, long, long before the last Ice Age.
There have been theories around the intellectual and/or laryngeal capabilities of Neanderthals (who were not 'humans' in the modern sense, and not the primary ancestor to humans, although many humans have some Neanderthal genes due to interbreeding between species). More research seems to suggest that actually they were pretty smart. Some have suggested that despite being smart, their throats weren't capable of human speech... but this is speculative, and doesn't necessarily mean they weren't capable of something recognisable as language (who knows, perhaps they even used sign-language!).
Anyway, the key point is: whatever we theorise about the initial evolution of human language, that evolution must have taken place so very, very long ago that the distance in time between us and PIE would be just a blip by comparison. Evolution does not appear relevant to the timescales of serious practical linguistics.
I mention this for the fact that these ancestral languages were so much more complex -- almost to the point of MORE advanced -- compared to ours, in both phoneme count and morphological complexity, i.e. Archi.
Archi is not an "ancestral language" spoken by "cavemen" - it's a modern language, spoken by Russians. Contrary to propaganda, Russians are not actually primitive proto-humans, despite many of their languages have complicated phonologies.
It's not clear that "ancestral" languages really were "complex". Etruscan, for instance, probably had under 25 phonemes - four cases in nouns (five in pronouns), male and female pronouns but no nominal gender, two numbers, with case+number being agglutinative rather than fusional, no inflection of adverbs and adjectives, two tenses, two moods (indicative and imperative), two voices. Perfectly bland and uncomplicated.
But in any case, don't just assume that morphological complexity is the same as total complexity - it is generally at least partly compensated for by reduced word order complexity.
Nor can 'complex' be equated to 'advanced' - there's nothing better or worse about having more phonemes, or more cases.
Other than explained away by extreme phoneme loss, what process might explain this?
Random chance is the big one: some areas have lots of phonemes, others have few.
If there is any underlying factor aside from luck, it's probably insularity. Isolated languages with small numbers of speakers are able to evolve more pointless complexity - language is a game, in essence, and as the same small number of people keep playing, the rules can get more complicated. Phonemes and cases accumulate in an in-group in the same way that in-jokes do. [but they don't have to - some small languages have simple phonologies]. Conversely, languages spoken by large and transient populations, with high percentages of non-native learners, will probably tend toward phonological and morphological simplicity, because this is easier for new learners, and helps to preserve intelligibility over larger areas.
I am not going Sapir-Whorf here, but something for this presupposed complexity in relation to the assumed primitive nature of the people has to be addressed.
What needs to be addressed is the unpleasant notion that speakers of Sanskrit or Latin, or indeed Archi, must be assumed to have a "primitive nature" compared to speakers of English. There is no reason to think that this is true.