Odp: Nostratic family

----- Original Message -----

From: Manuel Rosario

To: gpiotr@... ; cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Monday, December 20, 1999 1:32 PM

Subject: [cybalist] Nostratic family

Manuel writes: I'm venezuelan and behind me there are some people gathered on Indoeuropean studies, despite of we are not linguists. Fortunately I have found this and I shall ask you many things to clarify our ideas. Today's question is about Nostratic family. In short, what is the fundamentals of this hypothesis? Was it a language family or rather a human race? What are their daughters? Kind regards MR Dear Manuel,   Nostratic is the name given to a hypothetical "macrofamily" grouping several already established language families of the Old World: Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, Dravidian, and Afroasiatic. The name (coined from Latin nostrâs 'of our country') was used already in the late 19th century by linguists who speculated on the common origin of Indo-European and various other families. It was made popular by the Danish scholar Holger Pedersen early in this century, and then adopted in its current sense by the Russian linguist Vladislav M. Illich-Svitych, the founder of modern Nostratic studies.   The hypothesis is based on a number of shared similarities which could be explained as resulting from distant relationship linking all the families in question. In the most widely canvassed version of the Nostratic hypothesis it is claimed that the proto-Nostratic language was spoken in western Asia (somewhere south of the Caucasus) about 17-14 thousand years ago (during the local Upper Palaeolithic or Mesolithic period). If Alexander Stolbov is reading this, I'm sure he will be willing to provide more information on the "where and when" question. He will know much better than I what archaeological cultures could be associated with Proto-Nostratic and its "daughters": Proto-Afroasiatic, Proto-Dravidian, Proto-Uralic, etc.   Here is a typical "word equation" (I quote the forms after Aharon Dolgopolsky and take no responsibility for their validity): Proto-Indo-European *mori 'sea', Egyptian (an Afroasiatic language) mr 'pool, channel', Megrelian (a Kartvelian language) mere 'lake', Proto-Mongolic (a branch of Altaic) *mören 'large river, lake, sea'. Dolgopolsky's Nostratic reconstruction is *moRE, where R = plain or palatalised ('soft') r, and E = an unspecified front vowel.   The definition of Nostratic is linguistic, not ethnic, and least of all racial. The Nostratic hypothesis is about the relatedness of the languages in question, not about the shared genetic features of the people who speak them. There may have been an original Nostratic-speaking population in which a specific anthropological type predominated; but its mixing with other groups in the course of Nostratic migrations would have prevented the development of a "Nostratic race".   Nostratic is only one of a number of proposed "macrofamilies". Indeed, most of the "families" of the New World, Africa, Australia or Melanesia are much more tentative groupings than the Indo-European family (which is not hardly surprising, given the lack of historical evidence for them) and might well be regarded as "macrofamilies". Even some of the members of Nostratic are not very securely established and are not regarded as true families by everyone. For example, some scholars prefer to split Altaic into three unrelated groups: Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic. Most Nostraticists, on the other hand, believe that Altaic is a bona fide family and, moreover, that Japanese and Altaic also belong to it.   Other "macrofamily" groupings similar to Nostratic include such African giants as the Niger-Congo "phylum" (more than 900 languages) or the famous Austric superfamily of southeast Asia, comprising the Austronesian, Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien and Austroasiatic (Mon-Khmer and Munda) languages. As an alternative to Nostratic, Joseph Greenberg has proposed that Indo-European forms a genetic unit (called the Eurasiatic macrofamily) with Uralic, Altaic, Korean, Japanese, Eskimo-Aleut, Ainu and a number of languages of northeastern Asia -- but not with Dravidian, Kartvelian or Afroasiatic. On a less ambitious scale, the Indo-Uralic hypothesis maintains that the Indo-European family is related to the Uralic (Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic) languages and leaves open the question of its more distant relationships.   Some recently proposed "megafamilies" like Joseph Greenberg's Amerind are regarded as highly controversial by most competent experts. The same goes for "Proto-World" reconstructions, endorsed by only a handful of linguists. The evidence for Nostratic itself is not considered convincing by many (I'm in this category, if you want to know my personal opinion), though I must say, to be fair, that the similarities pointed out by the Nostraticists certainly merit attention.   My best regards to you and your friends,   Piotr