Nostratic is a hypothetical language macrofamily including many of the language families of northern Eurasia, first proposed in 1903. Though the Nostratic hypothesis once had a measure of support among mainstream linguists, it is now generally considered a fringe theory with very low support. The exact composition of languages families included in Nostrastic varies based on proponent; it typically includes the Kartvelian, Indo-European, and the controversial Ural-Altaic family, as well as the Afroasiatic languages and the hypothetical Elamo-Dravidian languages.
The Nostratic hypothesis originated with Holger Pedersen in the early 20th century. The name "Nostratic" was put forth by Pedersen (1903) and is derived from the Latin nostrates "fellow countrymen." The hypothesis was significantly expanded in the 1960s by Soviet linguists, notably Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky.
The hypothesis has fallen out of favour since the latter half of the 20th century and has limited degrees of acceptance, predominantly among a minority of Russian linguists. Linguists worldwide mostly reject many macrofamily hypotheses, including the Nostratic, with the exception of Dené–Yeniseian languages, which has been met with some degree of acceptance. In Russia, the Nostratic hypothesis is endorsed by a minority of linguists, such as Vladimir Dybo, but is not a generally accepted hypothesis. Some linguists take an agnostic view.For instance Philip Baldi: "No particular side on the issue is taken in this book" (Baldi 2002:18). Eurasiatic, a similar grouping, was proposed by Joseph Greenberg (2000) and endorsed by Merritt Ruhlen.
History of research
Origin of the Nostratic hypothesis The last quarter of the 19th century saw various linguists putting forward proposals linking the Indo-European languages to other language families, such as Finno-Ugric and Altaic.Sweet 1900: vii, 112–132.
These proposals were taken much further in 1903 when Holger Pedersen proposed "Nostratic" as a common ancestor for the Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Samoyed, Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu, Yukaghir, Eskimo, Semitic, and Hamitic languages, with the door left open to the eventual inclusion of others.
The name Nostratic derives from the Latin word , with plural , meaning "our fellow-countryman," and has been defined, since Pedersen, as consisting of those language families that are related to Indo-European.Pedersen as cited by Ruhlen, 1991: 384. Merritt Ruhlen notes that this definition is not properly taxonomic but amorphous, since there are broader and narrower degrees of relatedness, and moreover, some linguists who broadly accept the concept (such as Greenberg and Ruhlen himself) have criticised the name as reflecting the ethnocentrism frequent among Europeans at the time.Ruhlen 1991: 384-5. Martin Bernal has described the term as distasteful because it implies that speakers of other language families are excluded from academic discussion. However, some people like Pedersen's older contemporary Henry Sweet attributed some of the resistance by Indo-European specialists to hypotheses of wider genetic relationships as "prejudice against dethroning [Indo-European] from its proud isolation and affiliating it to the languages of yellow races."Sweet (1900), The History of Language, cit in Ruhlen 1991: 381-2. Proposed alternative names such as Mitian, formed from the characteristic Nostratic first- and second-person pronouns mi "I" and ti "you" (more accurately "thee"'),Ruhlen 1991:259. have not attained the same currency.
An early supporter was the French linguist Albert Cuny—better known for his role in the development of the laryngeal theorySzemerényi 1996:124.—who published his Recherches sur le vocalisme, le consonantisme et la formation des racines en « nostratique », ancêtre de l'indo-européen et du chamito-sémitique (Researches on the Vocalism, Consonantism, and Formation of Roots in "Nostratic," Ancestor of Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic) in 1943. Although Cuny enjoyed a high reputation as a linguist, the work was coldly received.
Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics
While Pedersen's Nostratic hypothesis did not make much headway in the West, it became quite popular in the Soviet Union. Working independently at first, Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky elaborated the first version of the contemporary form of the hypothesis during the 1960s. They expanded it to include additional language families. Illich-Svitych also prepared the first dictionary of the hypothetical language. Dolgopolsky's most recent Nostratic Dictionary, published in 2008, is considered the most up-to-date attempt at a Nostratic lexicon.
A principal source for the items in Illich-Svitych's dictionary was the earlier work of Alfredo Trombetti (1866–1929), an Italian linguist who had developed a classification scheme for all the world's languages, widely reviled at the timeCf. Trombetti’s defense against his critics in Come si fa la critica di un libro (1907). and subsequently ignored by almost all linguists. In Trombetti's time, a widely held view on classifying languages was that similarity in inflections is the surest proof of genetic relationship. In the interim, the view had taken hold that the comparative method—previously used as a means of studying languages already known to be related and without any thought of classificationCf. Greenberg 2005:159. See also Saussure's remarks on Franz Bopp, the founder of comparative linguistics, after Saussure has described the discovery of Indo-European by Cœurdoux and William Jones: "Bopp's originality is great. His merit is not to have discovered the kinship of Sanskrit with other European languages, but to have conceived that there was a subject for study in the precise relations of one related language to another related language." (From course notes by R. Engler, quoted by Tullio De Mauro in his critical edition of Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, Paris: Payot, 1972, p. 412; cp. Cours p. 14.)—is the most effective means to establish genetic relationship, eventually hardening into the conviction that it is the only legitimate means to do so. This view was basic to the outlook of the new Nostraticists. Although Illich-Svitych adopted many of Trombetti's etymologies, he sought to validate them by a systematic comparison of the sound systems of the languages concerned.
Constituent language families The language families proposed for inclusion in Nostratic vary, but all Nostraticists agree on a common core of language families, with differences of opinion over the inclusion of additional families.
The three groups universally accepted among Nostraticists are Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic. While the validity of Altaic itself is generally rejected by linguists, it is taken for granted by Nostraticists. Nearly all proponents also include the Kartvelian and Dravidian language families.
Following Pedersen, Illich-Svitych, and Dolgopolsky, most advocates of the theory have included Afroasiatic, though criticisms by Joseph Greenberg and others from the late 1980s onward suggested a reassessment of this position.
The Sumerian and Etruscan languages, regarded as language isolates by mainstream linguists, are thought by some Nostraticists to be Nostratic languages as well. Others, however, consider one or both to be members of another macrofamily called Dené–Caucasian. Another notional isolate, the Elamite language, also figures in a number of Nostratic classifications.
In 1987 Joseph Greenberg proposed a similar macrofamily which he called Eurasiatic.Greenberg, J., "The Indo-European First and Second Person Pronouns in the Perspective of Eurasiatic, Especially Chukotkan", Anthropological Linguistics Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), p. 187. It included the same "Euraltaic" core (Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic), but excluded some of the above-listed families, most notably Afroasiatic. At about this time Russian Nostraticists, notably Sergei Starostin, constructed a revised version of Nostratic which was slightly broader than Greenberg's grouping but which similarly omitted Afroasiatic.
Beginning in the early 2000s, a consensus emerged among proponents of the Nostratic hypothesis. Greenberg basically agreed with the Nostratic concept, though he stressed a deep internal division between its northern "tier" (his Eurasiatic) and a southern "tier'"(principally Afroasiatic and Dravidian). Georgiy Starostin (2002) arrives at a tripartite overall grouping: he considers Afroasiatic, Nostratic, and Elamite to be roughly equidistant and more closely related to each other than to anything else.Elamite. Starling. Sergei Starostin's school has now re-included Afroasiatic in a broadly defined Nostratic, while reserving the term Eurasiatic to designate the narrower subgrouping which comprises the rest of the macrofamily. Recent proposals thus differ mainly on the precise placement of Kartvelian and Dravidian.
According to Greenberg, Eurasiatic and Amerind form a genetic node, being more closely related to each other than either is to "the other families of the Old World."Greenberg 2002:2. There are a number of hypotheses incorporating Nostratic into an even broader linguistic "mega-phylum," sometimes called Borean, which would also include at least the Dené–Caucasian and perhaps also the Amerind and Austric superfamilies. The term SCAN has been used for a group that would include Sino-Caucasian, Amerind, and Nostratic.Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. William Morrow and Company: New York, 1994. p. 256 None of these proposed links have found wider acceptance outside of Nostraticists.
The following table summarizes the constituent language families of Nostratic, as described by Holger Pedersen, Vladislav Illich-Svitych, Sergei Starostin, and Aharon Dolgopolsky.
Linguist Indo-European Afroasiatic Uralic Altaic Dravidian Kartvelian Eskaleut Yukaghir Sumerian Chukchi-Kamchatkan Gilyak Etruscan Pedersen Illich-Svitych Starostin Dolgopolsky
Proposed features of Proto-Nostratic
According to Dolgopolsky, the Proto-Nostratic language had analytic structure, which he argues by diverging of post- and prepositions of auxiliary words in descendant languages. Dolgopolsky posits three lexical categories in the Proto-Nostratic language: Lexical words Pronouns Auxiliary words Word order was subject–object–verb when the subject was a noun, and object–verb–subject when it was a pronoun. An attributive lexical word preceded its head; a pronominal attributive ("my," "this") might follow the noun. Auxiliary words are considered to be postpositions.
Status within comparative linguistics
The Nostratic hypothesis is not endorsed by the mainstream of comparative linguistics.
Nostraticists tend to refuse to include in their schema language families for which no proto-language has yet been reconstructed. This approach was criticized by Joseph Greenberg on the ground that genetic classification is necessarily prior to linguistic reconstruction,Greenberg 2005:337. but this criticism has so far had no effect on Nostraticist theory and practice.
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), for example, demonstrates this for Uralic data. Defenders of the Nostratic theory argue that were this to be true, it would remain that in classifying languages genetically, positives count for vastly more than negatives (Ruhlen 1994). The reason for this is that, above a certain threshold, resemblances in sound/meaning correspondences are highly improbable mathematically.