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Nostratic, a hypothetical ancestral language, purportedly served as the root language from which a large number of the language families of Europe, Asia, and Africa may have descended.

The Nostratic languages would thus constitute a linguistic super-family or high-order grouping of languages. However, the theory does not have wide acceptance among mainstream linguists, and the methodology used in its support has been heavily criticised.

Proponents of the Nostratic theory have included various language families in the Nostratic superfamily. However, general agreement exists on including at a minimum the Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic languages. Many proponents have included the Afro-Asiatic languages as well, though criticisms by Joseph Greenberg in the 1990s suggests a reassessment of this position.

A fairly representative proposed grouping would include:

Joseph Greenberg proposed a similar or overlapping macrofamily which he called Eurasiatic, and which he linked to the Amerind languages of the Americas.

The American Nostraticist Allan R. Bomhard considers Eurasiatic a branch of Nostratic alongside other branches: Afro-Asiatic, Elamo-Dravidian, and Kartvelian.

Edward Finnegan offred a pithy summation of the current state of the Nostratic and Proto-World hypotheses, saying "there's too much there to be nothing, but not enough there to be something."

Origin of the Nostratic theory

In 1903 the pioneering Danish linguist Holger Pedersen proposed "Nostratian," a proto-language for the proto-languages of the Indo-European, Uralic, Afro-Asiatic, and Eskimo-Aleut language-families. The name derives from the Latin word noster, meaning 'our'. While the hypothesis did not make much headway in the West, it became quite popular in the former Soviet Union. Under the slightly modified name "Nostratic" it expanded to include additional language families.

Vladislav Illich-Svitych (1934-66) elaborated the modern Nostratic theory and also published a comprehensive dictionary of the hypothetical language.

Background: From Indo-European to Nostratic

One can best understand the concept of the Nostratic languages in the context of the discovery, methods of investigation, and application of the Indo-European family of languages. When Sir William Jones first suggested the Indo-European hypothesis in 1786, he backed up his idea with a systematic examination of what one might term "phono-semantic sets" — words which, in different languages, had both similar sounds and meanings. Jones essentially argued that too many of these sets occurred for mere coincidence to explain their existence, laying particular emphasis on the resemblance between morphological patterns: declensions and conjugations. He proposed that the languages in question must have stemmed from one language at some time in the past, and that they diverged from one another due to geographical separation and the passage of time. The idea of a "root language" thus took hold, a concept to which the evolution of the Romance languages from Latin offered itself as a clear parallel.

A second major concept to keep in mind involves the argument, starting with Jacob Grimm, that languages would not evolve in a haphazard manner, but rather that they evolved according to certain rules. Using these rules, one could theoretically run the evolutionary process backwards and reconstruct the root language. Comparative linguists have done this, producing parts of the hypothetical language, named Proto-Indo-European.

A third concept suggests that, by analysing the words in the Proto-Indo-European language, one can to some extent examine the time and place of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Words for concepts and objects that were not familiar to these people would receive essentially random names after the time when the languages began to split; only things they knew would produce phono-semantic sets in their successor languages. Proto-Indo-European features many words related to agriculture, animal husbandry, and plains-like landscapes. From this, scholars have plausibly argued that Proto-Indo-European existed as a living language some time from 6000 BC to 4000 BC, in the plains to the north of the Black Sea. (As a measure of the difficulty of this task, some argue that the reconstructed vocabulary of Proto-Indo-European, together with other known information about migrations, indicates a northern Anatolian landscape, although this area notably lacks in flat ground.)

Altogether, the Indo-European hypothesis has proven wildly successful, and naturally linguists have tried to apply the same general theory to a wide variety of other languages. Many languages, though not all, have been shown to be related to other languages, forming large families similar to Indo-European. These families have been only as "high-level" as the connections which have plausibly been made. On the face of it, though, it is logical that the family tree could converge further, and that some or all language families could be related to one another.

A sample Nostratic etymology

As an example of the kind of etymologies put forward by supporters of the Nostratic hypothesis, we can cite the following (from Bomhard and Kerns, The Nostratic Macrofamily, p. 219).

Comments

— This exemplifies what some linguists find suspect about the Nostratic hypothesis: a single proto-form is being suggested as the ancestor of words meaning 'barley', 'wheat', 'pebbles', and 'seeds'.

— On the other hand, proponents point to parallels in standard Indo-European etymological dictionaries in which seemingly disparate meanings can convincingly be derived from reconstructed proto-forms.

Even within English, the word 'grain' has a wide range of meanings:

  1. 'grain' of sand (= 'pebble, gravel, grit, etc.')
  2. 'grain' of salt (= small crystal of salt)
  3. 'grain' = 'seed' or 'fruit' of a cereal grass
  4. overall term for plants producing 'grain'
  5. 'grain' of wood (= stratification of wood fibers)
  6. 'small quantity', a 'minute portion', or the 'least amount possible' (as in, 'not a grain of truth in what she said'), etc.

— Yet others argue that the terms on this list are not all from equal eras. The usage of the word grain in 'a grain of truth' is far predated by the usage of the word 'grain'.

For comparison, here is a typical Indo-European etymology (from Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, p. 598):

  • PIE *peis-/*pis- 'thresh; mill (grain)': Ved. Skt. pináṣṭi 'threshes; grinds', piṣṭá- 'threshed, ground', Avest. pišant- 'threshing', Gk. ptíssō 'thresh, grind', Lat. pīnsō 'thresh, grind', Lith. paisýti 'thresh barley a second time, cleaning it of husks' (Būga 1958-1961:I.300), Czech pěchovati 'stamp, pound, ram down'; nominal derivatives: Skt. peṣṭar- 'one who threshes', Lat. pistor 'miller, baker', pīsō 'mortar', pīlum, pistillum 'pestle', MHG vīsel 'mortar', OCS pĭšeno 'meal, flour', OPruss. som-pisinis 'bread made from coarse-ground flour'.

Nostratic Urheimat

Bomhard considers that the Nostratic urheimat was the mesolithic or pre-neolithic epipaleolithic Middle East. Looking at the cultural assemblages of this period, two in particular stand out as being possible precursors to the Nostratic language family. One of these is the Natufian (10,500-8,500 BCE) culture of Palestine and the Levant, that also influenced cultures outside the region in Southern Anatolia, for example the Belbasi (Cilicia) 13-10,000 BCE has Kebaran influence whilst the Beldibi (10-8,500 BCE) shows clear Natufian influence. The Kebaran culture of Palestine (18,000-10,500 BCE), not only introduced the microlithic assembly into the region, and was clearly ancestral to the Natufian culture, it also has African afininity with the Outacha retouch with the microlithic Halfan culture of Egypt (24-17,000 BCE). The second possibility as a culture associated with the Nostratic family is the Zarzian (12,400-8,500 BCE) culture of the Zagros mountains, stretching northwards into Kobistan in the Caucasus and eastwards into Iran. In Western Iran the M’lefatian (10,500-9,000 BCE) culture was ancestral to the assemblages of Ali Tappah (9,000-5,000 BCE) and Jeitun (6,000-4,000 BCE). Even further east the Hissar culture has been seen as the mesolithic precursor to the Keltiminar (5,500-3,500 BCE) culture of the Kirghiz Steppe.

To have spread so widely suggests some cultural advantages were possessed by these people. It has been proposed that the broad spectrum revolution of Andrew Sherrat, associated with microliths, the use of the bow and arrow, and the domestication of the dog, all of which are associated with these cultures, may have been the cultural "motor" that led to their expansion. Certainly cultures with these adaptions (at Franchthi cave in the Aegean, Lipinski Vir in the Balkans, and the Murzak-Koba (9,100-8,000 BCE) and Grebenki (8,500-7,000 BCE) cultures of the Ukrainian steppe, all of which had these cultural adaptions.

The continuing search for a cultural urheimat for the Nostratic languages will of course only continue if the existence of the language family becomes firmly established.

Criticisms of the Nostratic theory

1. Many modern linguists express considerable skepticism of the data put forward to demonstrate interrelationships between the various language families under the Nostratic umbrella. The main criticism of Nostratic holds that the methodology used leads people to see patterns that actually result from coincidences. In reconstructing Nostratic, supporters do not use the techniques that linguists have established to prevent false positives, such as insisting on examining only regular sound shifts.

2. Certain critiques have pointed out that the data from individual, established language families that is cited in Nostratic comparisons often involves a high degree of errors; Campbell (1998) demonstrates this for Uralic data.

3. Most of the proposed phono-semantic sets appear much more speculative than those used to group languages into the accepted families — one technique used to support a similar super-family famously "demonstrated" in the 1960s that English belonged to a proposed Central-American language family.

4. The technique of comparing grammatical structures (as opposed to words) has suggested to some that the Nostratic candidates lack interrelatedness.

5. The proposed Nostratic language "super-family" hypothesis suggests links between many Eurasian language families. The precise nature of the links remains the subject of debate, however, as proponents have not agreed on the set of families to include.

6. Many mainstream linguists have dismissed claims (by Aharon Dolgopolsky, among others) that the words reconstructed for Proto-Nostratic point to a pre-agricultural society in the Middle East (as one might expect for a language pre-dating Proto-Indo-European).

7. Some linguists also object to the assumption that languages must ultimately all stem from one reconstructable root. Linguists know that unrelated languages in close geographical proximity can trade vocabulary, syntax, and other features, and some suggest that the present-day "family" structure of languages may simply exemplify an aberration.

8. Certain linguists suggest that in the absence of rapid technological change (which did not occur prior to about the 8th millennium BC) the tendency for languages to trade features with each other would drown out the tendency of languages to evolve. In such circumstances, the axiom that languages change in a manner that can be reversed does not hold before a certain point in the past, and one thus cannot reconstruct older proto-languages (Nostratic or otherwise) using the techniques used to reconstruct the proto-languages of the accepted major language families (all of which, linguists believe, post-date the invention of agriculture).

Nostratic Poetry

The late Vladislav Illich-Svitych, a notable Russian Nostraticist, decided to create a poem using his version of Proto-Nostratic. The famous poem is as follows:

NostraticRussianTranslation
elä weei aun kähla Язык - это брод через реку времени, Language is a ford through the river of time,
aλai palhA-A na wetä он ведёт нас к жилищу умерших; it leads us to the dwelling of the dead;
śa da a-A eja älä но туда не сможет дойти тот, but he cannot arrive there,
ja-o pele uba wee кто боится глубокой воды. who fears deep water.

References

  • Campbell, Lyle (1998). "Nostratic: a personal assessment". In Joseph C. Salmons and Brian D. Joseph (eds.), Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 142. John Benjamins.
  • Campbell, Lyle (2004). Historical Linguistics: An Introduction (2nd ed.). Cambridge: The MIT Press.
  • Allan R. Bomhard and John C. Kerns, The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship. Berlin, New York, and Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994. ISBN 3110139006
  • Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and Vjačeslav V. Ivanov, Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans, translated by Johanna Nichols, 2 volumes. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995. ISBN 3110147289
  • Trask, R. L. Historical Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
  • Salmons, Joseph. "A Look at the Data for a Global Etymology: *tik, 'finger.'" In Garry W. Davis and Gregory K. Iverson, eds., Explanation in Historical Linguistics, pp. 207-28, 1992
  • Shevoroshkin, Vitaly. "The Mother Tongue: How Linguists Have Reconstructed the Ancestor of All Living Languages." The Sciences, May/June 1990, p. 20-27.

See also

External links

Proposed language families

Настратычныя мовы | Nostratisch | Super-famille nostratique | Nostratico | Nostratinė kalba | Nosztratikus nyelvcsalád | Nostratisch | Języki nostratyczne | Ностратические языки | Nostraattiset kielet | Ностратичні мови

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Nostratic languages".

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