Re: Proto-World, Nostratic, etc.

Piotr and I are not in really in disagreement. He is much more careful in what he publishes than I am, whereas I tend to do things off the top of my head without too much second thought (I have often posted in haste and repented at leisure). Yes, H. erectus and not H. habilis.

With 'proto-World', I think language was invented just once. You have to be immersed in language from birth (even before birth, it's been suggested). Whichever way it developed, once a group of our ancestors had real language, the adaptive value of language, the things it did for them made them infinitely more successful than any of there pre-linguistic relatives. Without real language, you cannot exchange information except by physically showing someone else what it is you want to tell them. With language, you can tell your grandchildren what your grandmother told you her grandmother said about food and water sources at some distance. With language, you can discuss hunting and gathering stragegies, not just the tried and true ones, but some innovative ones, ideas that require a high level of co-operative pre-planning. With language, you can fed you and yours much better than those without language. More food, healthier food, means more babies, healthier babies. You've got a population explosion. Those who were not co-opted by the speaking humans were marginalized into extinction. I'm saying it's likely some pre-linguistic humans were incorporated into the speaking group, but find it difficult to believe full-fledged language developed more than once. It is conceivable that pre-linguistic humans hung on until rather later, perhaps even into historic times in isolated corners of the world.

2. Greenberg's "multilateral comparison"

Joseph Greenberg did not "discover" Afroasiatic, though he renamed the former Hamito-Semitic family in that fashion, recommending the (previously disputed) inclusion of the Omotic and Chadic branches in it. He won his reputation as a great taxonomist by gradually reducing the number of language families in Africa to just four large-scale families or "phyla": Afroasiatic, Niger-Kordofanian, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan. It must be emphasised that his classification is not accepted by all specialists as a valid genetic grouping. The particularly shaky Nilo-Saharan phylum has been called "Greenberg's waste basket" (it contains most of the phyla of his early classifications); but even the unity of Afroasiatic is not without problems. If IE is a family, Afroasiatic certainly isn't a family in the same sense; for example, there is no generally accepted reconstruction of Proto-Afroasiatic.

This accords with what I've read. As for Nilo-Saharan, I've been told even Greenberg admitted there were difficulties. It's his 'misc' category. The name 'Hamito-Semitic' was unsatisfactory (and inaccurate). The most graceful way I've heard the issue described is that, for all the problems, it's now unthinkable to consider Afro-Asiatic in any other way.

After his African successes, Greenberg applied his "multilateral" or "mass comparison" method (in which lexical comparison is performed simultaneously for hundreds of languages without much attention to regular sound correspondences) to the Americas, reducing their scores of small families to just three phyla, the largest and most famous of which is called Amerind (the other being Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut). This time, nearly all specialists have rejected his methods and his results. Unabashed, Greenberg and his students have proceeded to unify languages on a still grander scale, coming up with such romantic names as Dene-Caucasian, Eurasian (an alternative to Nostratic rather than its other name!), and finally Proto-World. In the opinion of many linguists, including Yours Truly, this game, whatever its popular appeal, has nothing to do with rigorous scholarship.

This accords with everything I've read. Greenberg is bitterly criticized for this. Merritt Ruhlen is even more savagely criticized.

3. The validity of Nostratic and similar "macrofamilies"

Nostratic is a hypothetical genetic grouping including several known families. In the best-known version of the Nostratic hypothesis, its family-size branches are Indo-European, Uralic (plus the Yukaghir language of Siberia), Altaic (which is taken to include Japanese and Korean), Kartvelian, Dravidian (possibly including the dead Elamite language), and Afroasiatic. One of the best-known names in Nostratic studies was Vladislav ("Slava") M. Illich-Svitych, who died prematurely in a car accident; his posthumously collected Nostratic etymologies are the Holy Book of Nostraticism, or at least of its Russian school (which dominates Nostratic studies).

The Eastern Bloc scholars are less well known in the West. Part of this was do to the previous political regime. Another part of it is the lamentable fact that if it's not published in English, in an English-language journal, it essentially doesn't exist.

Among the chief Nostraticists of today there are some of Slava's disciples (Aharon Dolgopolsky, Vitaly Shevoroshkin) but also several American scholars (such as Allan R. Bomhard). Nostraticism is not monolithic; there are individual opinions about the composition and internal genetic taxonomy of Nostratic, but common to all Nostraticists is the conviction that whatever the questions of detail, the existence of the superfamily and its validity have already been demonstrated. Unfortunately, many linguists do not share that belief.

I've heard of Dolgopolksy, but not of Shevorshkin. I confess to being a self-taught amateur who has come to IE studies in only the last couple of years.

Nostratic reconstructions have many weaknesses, though (as opposed to Greenberg's phyla) Nostratic has purportedly been reconstructed by more traditional means, respecting the comparative method and its insistence on the regularity of sound correspondences. But critics have pointed to unacceptable deviations from the rigour of the orthodox comparative method. In general, from the point of view of somebody accustomed to methods and procedures admissible in studying language families, the evidence paraded in support of the Nostratic hypothesis is far from impressive. Much of it must be rejected for various reasons, and the cumulative weight of the "sound core" is minimal -- insufficient, in my view, to decide between distant cognacy and areal similarity or the possibility of lexical borrowing.

This is the the criticism consistently leveled against all such studies. It's not that there is anything wrong with the idea of Nostratic, etc; in fact just about everyone admits that something like this is indeed the case.

On the one hand, there is no consensus of experts whether, for example, Mongolic, Tungusic and Turkic are three different families with common areal traits or constitute a single Altaic family; and some linguists diffidently suggest that Indo-European might be related to Uralic. On the other hand, some less diffident scholars without a shadow of doubt locate Proto-Nostratic on the map of mesolithic Eurasia, speak of "Proto-Nostratic material culture" reconstructed from its lexicon (the PNs had fig-trees, monkeys, spleens, necks, fathers, and mothers), and speculate about the relation of Nostratic to other macrofamilies, or its position in the global family-tree of languages.

Yes, I've seen the arguments vis-a-vis Altaic. As for Uralic, no tenured Indo-Europeanist is going to risk his reputation by saying IE and Uralic were in unity at a (relatively) recent depth of time without some superb evidence, but at the same time, they seem to admit there is enough material to make an intuitive judgment that something like this is indeed the case.

Some people accept macrofamilies because the epic time-depths and migration-mileages involved appeal to the romantic side of their nature. Some people want to keep pace with what they believe to be the frontier of knowledge; they follow their gurus and cite them, trusting that THEY know better. Some people quite simply have no idea that most linguists don't take Proto-Nostratic or Proto-World all that seriously. If linguistic amateurs -- including archaeologists, anthropologists and geneticists who'd like to know what we linguists have to offer them -- know anything about linguistics, let alone HISTORICAL linguistics, they know it mostly from the popular press (where Proto-World may well be hailed as THE linguistic discovery of recent years), rather than from serious publications. Some people, including a few really competent scholars, believe the evidence to be convincing or at least very promising. But other, no less competent scholars have seen the same evidence and found it worthless. Theories that do not command enough conviction to gain the general recognition of those whose opinion matters must be treated with great caution, even if one would like them to be true.

No disagreement. At best, all that historical linguistics can do today is reach back perhaps 7500 or so years, and then only when there is a lot of evidence to go on (as is the case with Indo-European).

Mark Odegard.