It's amazing what you find on the internet, especially Internet Archive, and how a little digging can reinforce a hypothesis that may seem somewhat gaga.
I was rewriting a summary of my book The Real Difference, comparing Jewish Torah and Samaritan Pentateuch and slamming ben Hayyim's self-contradictory and often senseless "grammar" of Samaritan Hebrew. I had a sentence about how northeast Anatolian languages have gutturals -- Semitic, Indo-European, and Indo-Iranian -- except for Latin, which seems to have more of a relationship to Tocharian than to the other languages.
And I referred to the Chechen language. Later in the paper, I got into verb morphology and the similarities between the Anatolian language families. And I thought, what about Chechen, a language of the true Caucasus.
Internet Archive has this.
https://archive.org/details/370682499-chechen-grammar-original
When I got to the verb morphology, I found -- how exciting! -- that it tracked closely with my verb paradigms for Classical Greek that threw out the old tense structure entirely in favor of aspect.
Also, Chechen is an ergative language, and I showed on this blog how the "aor.2" verbs show up in ergative structures in Classical Greek. What's more, Chechen has a morphology with the same function as the certainty epistemic in Biblical Hebrew, and another that has the same function as my Classical Greek oblique.
The Semites and Chechens share the J1 and J2 Neolithic Y-chromosome haplogroups but the Semites belong to an older clade, suggesting that the Chechens have a relationship to the Minoans while the Greeks have that Siberian influence found in the Mycenaeans.
So it's time to shred the old grammars and dig back into the Anatolian languages. I don't support the Nostratic macrofamily concept, I'm sticking to Anatolia and the Caucasus. But I feel my Greek studies sit on firmer ground.
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