1. Review of
Linguistic Fossils
by John D. Bengtson
• Theophania Publishing, 2010
• ISBN-10: 0986510270
• ISBN-13: 978-0986510274
Linguistic Fossils covers the author’s research in the Austric and Dene-
Caucasian languages. The first two chapters, On Fossil Dinosaurs and
Fossil Words, and Global Etymologies Involving Six Macro-families, are
devoted to evidence for the monogenesis of language. Monogenesis means
that all modern languages have a single origin, a mother tongue which has
been called Proto-Human or Proto-World among others.
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2. Even those mainstream linguists that accept monogenesis hold to the belief
that it’s impossible to demonstrate genetic relationships between languages
beyond a certain time-frame. Long-range historical linguists like the late
Professor Joseph Greenberg, Merritt Ruhlen, Allan Bomhard and Bengtson
argue that no such temporal ceiling exists. They claim that traces of the
mother tongue may indeed be identified through the phenomena of localized
phonetic conservatism & random phonetic retention, and by means of
multilateral lexical recovery & reconstruction.
Localized phonetic conservatism means that some languages undergo less
phonetic change than others whilst random phonetic retention means that
even in languages that are not phonetically archaic, certain words resist
radical phonetic changes. Multilateral lexical recovery refers to the
comparison of vocabulary across clusters of languages in order to recover
the original vocabulary of their proto-language, whilst historical linguistic
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3. reconstruction is the reconstitution of older forms from related words in two
or more languages.
The most convincing word comparisons are those involving the most basic
meanings, such as body parts or substances (arm, heart, blood), natural
phenomena (fire, sky, water), simple social terms (man, woman, child),
parasites (louse) and basic verbs (die). Research has shown that basic
vocabulary in these categories is much more likely to remain stable in any
given language over vast periods of time than words with non-basic
meanings.
In the third chapter, The Greater Austric Hypothesis, Bengtson provides a
brief overview of the Austric macrofamily which includes
(a) Austroasiatic with about 155 languages spoken mainly in India, the
Nicobar Islands, Cambodia and Vietnam, including Munda, Khmer and
Vietnamese
(b) Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao), less than 10 languages scattered through
southern China, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand
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4. (c) Daic (Tai-Kadai), about 55 languages of Southeast Asia including Thai
and Lao
(d) Austronesian, an extensive family of nearly 1000 members ranging from
Madagascar through Indonesia, the Philippines and the Pacific islands,
including Hawaiian, Malagasy, Malay, Javanese, Tagalog, Maori and
Tahitian.
The historical implications of the Greater Austric Hypothesis would
encompass the fact that speakers of “Proto-Austric” lived from India in the
west to Taiwan in the east before they were displaced so that the direction of
further expansions was southwards, ultimately establishing Austronesian as
far west as Madagascar and as far east as Easter Island. Perhaps the Austric
people followed the speakers of Australian and Indo-Pacific into southern
Asia and the islands, since the latter may have left a trail in language isolates
like Kusunda in Nepal & Nahali in India.
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5. The next five articles examine Basque and Burushaski, languages that
Bengtson consider members of Macro-Caucasic which belongs to the large
macrofamily Dene-Caucasian. Burushaski is spoken in the Hunza, Nager
and Yasin valleys of northern Pakistan whilst Caucasian languages are
spoken in the northern Caucasus, primarily Abkhazia, Chechnya, Dagestan,
Ingushetia and Kabardino-Balkaria. Bengtson presents convincing
phonological correspondences between Basque, Caucasian and Burushaski,
as well as substantial lexical and morphological evidence.
He provides an extensive list of cognate sets in basic vocabulary and shows
the regular phonological patterns in these cognates and a similar
morphological structure. On the basis of a shared cultural vocabulary such as
words for domestic animals, grain cultivation and artifacts, he suggests that
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6. speakers of Basque, Burushaski and the Caucasian languages may have
separated approximately 7000 to 9000 years ago.
Bengtson then considers Basque phonology in the light of the Dene-
Caucasian hypothesis. This proposed Dene-Caucasian macrofamily would
consist of
(a) Macro Caucasic
(b) Sino-Tibetan
(c) Yeniseian (Ket) of Siberia and
(d) Na-Dene of Alaska, Canada, California, Arizona and New Mexico. The
penultimate chapter examines the position of Haida in respect of Tlingit,
Eyak and Athabascan which includes Apache, Navajo and Chipewyan. The
book concludes with a discussion of the lateral affricates in the Na-Dene
family.
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7. Further valuable findings in the prehistory of languages are available
in Merritt Ruhlen’s books On The Origin of Languages and A Guide
To The World’s Languages, Language In The Americas by Joseph
Greenberg, Indo-European & the Nostratic Hypothesis by Allan R
Bomhard, Sprung From Some Common Source, edited by Sydney M
Lamb and In Hot Pursuit of Language in Prehistory: Essays in the
four fields of anthropology, edited by Bengtson.
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