Unexplained deletions: continuing what appears to be a common theme
Yet again, no specifics are mentioned, and this appears to be an argument by association. Would you be willing to discuss the problematic details of the theory itself, encompassing more than your experiences with "the Nostratic camp"?
Nostratic as an hypothesis appears to assume an Altaic grouping. Altaic itself is not an accepted theory in mainstream linguistics. Why should I accept a theory that tries to build even older and more far-flung etymologies, starting from such a shaky base?
Addressing specific issues that raise doubts:
- Greenberg and Dolgopolsky both appear to espouse OJP /kasipa/ (ostensibly "container for food/drink") as a cognate of Proto-Indo-European *kʷasjo (“basket”) (sp?). However, the OJP term is more likely a compound of 樫 (kasi, modern kashi, “kind of oak”) + 葉 (pa, modern ha, “leaf”): modern 柏 (kashiwa, from older kasipa, “a kind of oak”, related to but distinct from kashi) has a documented ancient meaning of "container for food or drink", with the important addendum that this container was made from tree leaves -- making the compound derivation that much more likely. Moreover, OJP kasi "oak" in turn is an unlikely candidate for a cognate with the PIE term for "basket", and is more likely to derive from the same origins as OJP root kat- meaning "hard, stiff".
- Dolgopolsky lists an OJP term of opo-mono as meaning "food"; the only term I'm aware of means "big thing", as a compound of OJP opo "big" + mono "thing".
- Dolgopolsky lists an OJP term of akuoye "pheasant's spur" as a cognate with a purported Altaic cluster meaning "arrow" and a Nostratic root meaning "sharp point / edge". However, the OJP term is a compound of 足 (a, “foot”) + 蹴ゑ (kuye), the stem of ancient verb 蹴ゆ (kuyu, “to kick something”). Even ignoring the a- prefix, "to kick" does not appear to have anything to do with "sharp point / edge".
- Dolgopolsky lists an OJP term of atuo as a purported cognate with an Altaic and Nostratic root meaning "back (of a person)". However, the OJP term is again a compound, originally meaning "footprint" and deriving from 足 (a, “foot”) + 所 (to, “place”).
Not everything listed is so clearly wrong. But this degree of mistakenness about OJP calls into question the rigor of the author's approach to all of the terms included. How many other purported cognates are in fact compounds with unrelated etyma? How many are borrowings? How many are accidental resemblances? Etc. etc. Without expertise about each and every language included in the hypothesis, the author cannot evaluate the claims that they themselves are making. That's not a firm foundation on which to build.
Wow, these are some interesting examples you've dug up. An answer to our querent, I would mention that, when I was at a conference of Indo-European scholars last month, one of the speakers brought up the concept of Nostratic in his talk, eliciting a hearty chuckle from those assembled. More generally, the field of long-range comparative linguistics (or "paleolinguistics" for those that believe it) normally does not use the same methods of rigorous historical phonological and morphological reconstruction as the historical linguistic mainstream, instead relying heavily on word lists often containing accidental resemblances. To be fair, I know that the adherents of Altaic are growing steadily, and that particularly proposal may bear further consideration soon, but Indo-Uralic and Nostratic, no way.
I downloaded a copy of Dolgopolsky's Nostratic Dictionary (https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/1810/196512/49/00ND_ALL.pdf) and searched for "OJ " (note the single space afterwards). Within 13 entries that included a purported Old Japanese cognate, I found the above four errors. I stopped searching at that point; some day I may dig deeper if a further analysis is called for. FWIW, scanning quickly through the next 15 just now suggests a similar error rate.
Without expertise about each and every language included in the hypothesis, the author cannot evaluate the claims that they themselves are making. That is also my main point. I know Germanic, Slavic, Italic, they are all difficult by the languages included in them, and I still do not dare doing Indo-European reconstruction. What competence has he who wants to reconstruct Nostratic? Of course all goes by wordlists and statistics ignoring all laws of grammar and sounds and regular correspondences which one learns if one deals with multiple languages of a family. This way in StarLing there are all kinds of wildcards for which one could easily posit the correct phonemes if one knew the languages. And of course a user who does that statistics and wildcard thing does not have a babel box.
That is a fair point, how can anyone even think of having a good grasp of all those languages that are supposedly Nostratic, enough so to construct Proto-Nostratic? Even Indo-European studies took a long time to come to where it is today, with lots of wrong ideas and assumptions. Even if Nostratic is a language family, it is beyond modern-day linguistics's abilities to reconstruct.
It is already remarkable how little reliable the reconstructions of Semitic are. In this Article Igor Diakonoff and Leonid Kogan unfold the absurdities in Vladimir Orel’s and Olga Stolbova’s Afrasian etymological dictionary:
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We find broken plurals – an Arabian innovation – as Semitic etyma, late Iranian borrowings, sounds in Akkadian or Hebrew that did not exist, invented meanings …
In the work by Alexander Militarev (find his name on the sidebar) concerning specifically Semitic I even found sounds postulated for Proto-Semitic that did not exist, like he postulates labialized consonants in Semitic; quoting Nr. 15 of his word list: “West Semitic 1: *ḳʷr(r) ‘to be cold’ (#2), possibly related to Afras. *ḳVr- ‘dry”. The selectiveness in forms is worrying. Like for “new” Nr. 59 he gives, reconstructing *ḥadit-, Arabic ǯadīd, though there is also حَدِيث (ḥadīṯ, “new”) which he does not mention. Such is of course caused by using weird sources for representing languages, like the popular Penrice for Arabic – Orel/Stolbova not giving any sources. For *ṭāb- (“good”) (see the discussion on the talk page there why it is ṭāb-) he lists Nr. 34 *ṭayVb for no reason, even worse than Starostin who lists *ṭayb- in StarLing.