Hello Everyone, As I'm not a native speaker of English (I've never been to a country in which English is the official language...well, in fact, I was on an eleven-day school trip in Britain many years ago, but I guess that doesn't count) I'd like to ask for help.
I have been co-working on a Wikipedia article and I'd like somebody to check the following article for grammatical and stylistic mistakes. Thanks a lot in advance! :-) The link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9-Caucasian_languages Here's a copy of the Introduction: The Dené-Caucasian (also called Sino-Caucasian or Dené-Sino-Caucasian) language family is a conjectural language superfamily containing the Basque1, North Caucasian2, Yenisseian3, Burushaski, Sino-Tibetan, and Na-Dené4 languages 5. The first glimpses of the hypothesis appeared in works of such scholars as Robert Bleichsteiner, Karl Bouda, E. J. Furnée, René Lafon, Edward Sapir, Robert Shafer, Morris Swadesh, Olivier Guy Tailleur, Vladimir N. Toporov, Alfredo Trombetti and others. However, in the 1980s, it was Sergei Starostin who, using strict linguistic methods (regular phonological correspondences, reconstructions, glottochronology etc.) first put the ideas on a firmer ground. Despite the increasing amount of lexical and morphological evidence, the proponents still more often consider their hypothesis "an explanatory model" rather than a final and definitive solution to the problem of possible deeper genetic links among the groups. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notes 1 It has been suggested that the ancient Aquitanian and maybe also Iberian languages were related to Basque, belonging to the so-called Vasconic language family. John D. Bengtson proposes a so-called Vasco-Caucasian family, comprising the Vasconic and North Caucasian languages, and a so-called Macro-Caucasian family, adding Burushaski to the former two. 2 The North Caucasian family consists of two distinct subbranches: Northeast Caucasian (or Nakh-Daghestanian) and Northwest Caucasian (or Abkhazo-Adyghean). The ancient Hurrian, Urartian and sometimes Etruscan have been proposed to belong the the former, whereas the latter might include the ancient Hattic language as well. A brand-new branch has been tentatively proposed by Vitaliy Shevoroshkin, consisting of the Salishan, the Wakashan, and maybe a few other North American language families.. 3 Edward Vajda has suggested that Tlingit, Eyak and the Athabaskan languages are closely related to the Yeniseian languages, rejecting any genetic relationship of the former to Haida. 4 Hans-Jürgen Pinnow has recently revived the idea of Haida's Na-Dené affiliation.. 5 The ancient languages mentioned above have rather uncertain positions within North Caucasian and Dené-Caucasian. This is mainly due to severe paucity and stereotypical character of linguistic material (cf. Etruscan), or rather uncertain semantics or phonetics (cf. Sumerian, which might be a separate branch of Dené-Caucasian according to Bengtson). For these reasons it should be noted that other hypotheses exist: Sumerian and/or Etruscan are thought by some to be Nostratic languages, while others consider Sumerian to be an Austric, if not specifically Munda language. Best, Petr --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Correct my English" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/correct-my-english -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
