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Loanword analysis is a unique contribution of historical linguistics to our understanding of prehistoric cultural interfaces. As language reflects the lives of its speakers, the substantiation of loanwords draws on the composite evidence from linguistic as well as auxiliary data from archaeology and genetics through triangulation. The Bronze Age of Central Asia is in principle linguistically mute, but a host of recent independent observations that tie languages, cultures and genetics together in various ways invites a comprehensive reassessment of six highly diagnostic loanwords (‘seven’, ‘name/fame’, ‘sister-in-law’, ‘honey’, ‘metal’ and ‘horse’) that are associated with the Bronze Age. Moreover, they are shared between Indo-European, Uralic, Turkic and sometimes Old Chinese. The successful identification of the interfaces for these loanwords can help settle longstanding debates on languages, migrations and the items themselves. Each item is analysed using the comparative method with reference to the archaeological record to assess the plausibility of a transfer. I argue that the six items can be dated to have entered Central and East Asian languages from immigrant Indo-European languages spoken in the Afanasievo and Andronovo cultures, including a novel source for the ‘horse’ in Old Chinese.

The morphological expression of non-verbal predication is a geographically widespread, although not very frequent, typological feature. This paper highlights the existence of two radically contrasting types of non-verbal predicative inflection. Construction A has already been described in the literature. It consists of attaching person-sensitive inflection markers to non-verbal predicates, possibly extending this treatment to adverbs and adverbial phrases (locational and temporal), pronouns and quantifiers. This type is well attested in Uralic, Turkic, and Paleosiberian, as well as in some Amazonian language families (most notably Chicham), but it has also been pointed out for some sparse languages of Oceania and Africa. Such non-verbal person inflections diachronically stem from incorporation of conjugated copula elements. Construction B, by contrast, is much rarer and is described here for the first time. It also consists of a dedicated morphological form of the non-verbal predicate (limited, however, to nouns and adjectives), but such form stands out as morphologically lighter than any other form to be found in nouns or adjectives in argument or attribute position. While the latter forms carry some kind of case marker, the noun/adjective predicate merely consists (or historically did) of the word's root. This type of construction can be found in the small Zamucoan family and still survives in some Tupí-Guaraní languages. Diachronic inspection of Semitic indicates, however, that this predicative strategy was possibly adopted in some ancient varieties, although at later stages it intertwined with the expression of referential specificity. The paper compares the two construction types, highlighting similarities and differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although nobody doubts today that a Ural-Altaic protolanguage is an obsolete idea there still exists some peculiar conformity between Uralic and Altaic that cannot easily be explained by simple borrowings. In this article some similarities between Turkic and Uralic pronouns are to the fore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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