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Dené–Caucasian is a proposed language family that includes the Sino-Tibetan, North Caucasian, Na-Dené, and Yeniseian language families and the Basque and Burushaski languages.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...-Caucasian.JPG
http://ehl.santafe.edu/maps/Dene-Caucasian.gif
I can´t see the point of this, its too far stretched. Is there a real connection or do they just want to rival IE? And is it like IE or Eurasian?
I have read it already that Basque language is closer (genetically) to Chinese than to Spanish or other Indo-European languages. But still I'm not much convinced of the validity of this theory. The only similarities are between the structures of cognates.
The Sino-Caucasian Language Family
What is the Sino-Caucasian language family? It is a family of related languages that includes Chinese, Chechen, Basque, and Navaho. How could languages from such places that are so far apart be related?
Sino-Caucasian formed during the end of the Ice Age in northern Eurasia. Similar culture, technology, racial type and language extended from France to central Siberia. These Ice Age hunters expanded east into North America, where they gave rise to the Caucasoid or Ainu-like Kennewick Man in Washington and Spirit Cave Man in Nevada.
The Sino-Caucasian family is also known as the Dene-Caucasian Family. Denй comes from the Navaho word for Navaho. I did a google search and found 3 entries under Denй-Caucasian, 205 entries under Dene-Caucasian, and 137 entries under Sino-Caucasian. Sino- stands for Chinese.
One branch of Sino-Caucasian, called either Nostratic or Eurasiatic, overran much of the original Sino-Caucasian territory, leaving only pockets of non-Nostratic languages. These non-Nostratic languages are called Sino-Caucasian.
What are the modern Sino-Caucasian languages? Chinese is by far the best known. It belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family (a subgroup of Sino-Caucasian). Sino-Tibetan also includes Tibetan and Burmese. Basque is a member of this family. In the Caucasus Mountains there are Chechen, Ingush and the 50 languages of Daghestan. There is a language spoken by a few thousand people in Siberia called Ket. There is a language spoken in or near Kashmir called Burushashki. Then, there are the Na-Denй languages which are spoken in western Canada. About a thousand years ago, some of these Na-Denй migrated south to Arizona. this is the origin of the Navajo language, the most widely spoken native language in the United States.
Some scholars believe that Sumerian, the language of the world's first civilization, was Sino-Caucasian, but others classify it as Nostatic.
I found a map of the world's languages which shows this family, under the name Dene-Caucasian. It shows red for Basque, a tiny patch of red in Siberia for Ket, a big patch of red for Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese, a big patch of red in western Canada for Na-Denй, and a misplaced patch of red in Texas, which should be in Arizona. Australia is a different shade of red, but Australian languages have nothing to do with Sino-Caucasian.
World Map of Language Families
This map is slightly inaccurate and ambiguous, but still gives a general idea of the world's major language families.
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v33.../ng1113-F5.gif
The 12 families of the Greenberg classification. The Eurasiatic superfamily includes six families (most of which are recognized by most linguists) and an isolate, Gilyak, listed in the central column. The oldest family is the Khoisan that includes Bushmen and Hottentots, many of whom also belong genetically to the oldest haplogroups of both mtDNA and NRY. Australian and Indopacific are also old families. Other African languages are Niger-Kordofanian (mostly west Africa), Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic (that includes Semitic languages like Arab and Hebrew). American languages belong to three families: Amerinds were the first to migrate from Asia, according to some (Fagan, ref. 89) as late as 15 kya, and Amerind shows affinities with Eurasiatic. One of the other two American families is Na-Dene (belonging to Dene-Caucasian), a family that probably spread to Eurasia before Eurasiatic and includes Sinotibetan, spoken in almost all of China, as well as some isolated, probably relic, languages (Basque, a few Caucasian languages and Burushaski, spoken in N. Pakistan) that all survived the later spread of Eurasiatic languages. The third American family is Eskimo-Aleut, the last to spread to America from N.E. Siberia. The Austric family is very large and is spoken in S.E. Asia, Indonesia, all of Polynesia to the east and Madagascar to the west.
Dene-Caucsian includes northeast caucasian languages , not those of the northwest or Circassian family , which has no known relatives . Some linguists have proposed a relationship between northwest caucasian and Indo-European , but this has not been confirmed .
I would agree to this point. Chinese is also closer to Yeniseian and the so-called North Caucasian languages, though this would take up lots of knowledge to deeply go further back to its roots.Quote:
Originally Posted by Roy