Areal Typology of Proto‐Indo‐European: The Case for Caucasian Connections

Abstract

This paper re‐examines the evidence for early contacts between Proto‐Indo‐European (PIE) and the languages of the Caucasus. Although we were not able to find certain proofs of lexical borrowing between PIE and North Caucasian, there are a few undeniable areal‐typological parallels in phonology and grammar. Some features generally attributed to PIE are not found in the majority of languages of North and Northeastern Eurasia, while they are common, or universally present, in the languages of the Caucasus (especially North Caucasus). Those features include the high consonant‐to‐vowel ratio, tonal accent, number suppletion in personal pronouns, the presence of gender and the morphological optative and, possibly, the presence of glottalized consonants and ergativity.

Nuevas observaciones en tipología areal sobre lenguas indígenas habladas en la Amazonía Colombiana

“…Posterior a esto, se emplearon 2 algoritmos de compilación geográfica de información: el agrupamiento difuso (Nerbonne et al, 2011), que facilita el reconocimiento de áreas convergentes de menor extensión geográfica, y la clasificación Ward (1963), que establece la identificación de divisiones con posibles mayores dimensiones territoriales. Si bien estos métodos se han empleado en la dialectología, pueden ser empleables para la tipología areal en tanto contribuyen a clasificar la información vinculando ciertas distancias geográficas con ciertas diferencias estructurales (Matasović, 2012;Idiatov, 2018). La superposición de ambos resultados permite identificar una jerarquización espacial entre las comunidades lingüísticas comparadas.…”

Long-Distance Diffusion of Affinal Kinship Terms as Evidence of Late Holocene Change in Marriage Systems in Aboriginal Australia

“…Tuite and Schulze (1998) cite this as a parallel example to the borrowing of the Indo-European term for 'daughter-in-law' (*snus) into a large number of Caucasian languages (cf. Matasović 2012). In both cases, they claim, avoidance between in-laws motivated the replacement of original inherited terms by loans-the Amazonian case between a father-in-law and daughter-in-law, and in the Caucasus the ambivalent and often negative treatment of wives taken into the husband's lineage and community.…”