Proto-World, Nostratic, etc.

1. Was there a single Proto-World language?

The biological monogenesis of Homo sapiens seems likely (though it would be hyperbolic to claim that it has been demonstrated beyond all doubt) in the light of genetic and palaeontological findings to date. Our species may indeed be derived from a single geographical variety of H. ergaster or H. erectus (if the African and Eurasian populations were indeed separate species; at any rate not from H. habilis, who lived 2-1.5 million years ago and is possibly our evolutionary GRANDparent). Let us accept, then, that H. sapiens emerged as a distinct species ca. 200,000-150,000 years ago, and that its geographical distribution was at first restricted to sub-Saharan Africa. There are, however, several things that DO NOT follow automatically:
- MONOGENESIS in the evolutionary sense means descent from a single population within which the exchange of genetic information is relatively free (that is, whose members produce offspring with one another). If we are monophyletic in this sence, it doesn't follow that we are literally descendants of a single pair of primordial parents. Even at the time when H. sapiens was a rare African primate, its population size was thousands rather than dozens. Assuming that our remote ancestors lived in groups of 20-50 members, there were probably hundreds of such groups at any given moment during our speciation. In other words, there was enough population to support the existence of many different languages.
- Language can't have appeared suddenly; it evolved out of protolinguistic forms of communication (presumably used by other hominids if THEY couldn't speak) together with its users and their brains. It can hardly be doubted that linguistic universals exist (that is, there are numerous universal constraints restricting the typology of possible human languages), and that human linguistic competence has an innate component which is the same in all humans (or as nearly the same as matters for the purpose of the present discussion). In other words, the language instinct results from the same biological (genomically determined) features in all normal humans. But language as a GENERAL phenomenon (type of communication), must be distinguished from INDIVIDUAL languages, which are specific instantiations of that universal type and are possessed and inherited as CULTURAL, not BIOLOGICAL assets. The relative unity of the language instinct is accompanied by a wide differentiation of individual languages. The cultural evolution of the latter must not be confused with the biological evolution of our species and its language instinct.
- The fact that any normal child is capable of learning any language with equal success constitutes, if anything, an argument AGAINST, not FOR ultimate monogenesis. It suggests that the existence of many different languages is part of the natural condition of H. sapiens, so that we need a universal learning mechanism to cope with a variety of possible languages. If language is so flexible by nature, why should it ever have been a uniform code? Recent studies have shown that even chimpanzees demonstrate a good deal of (proto)cultural variation.

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.
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.

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). 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.
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.
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.
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.

Piotr Gasiorowski