[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?>>
[Gerry]:
<<Piotr is one of the correct people to ask about the Nostratic family;
Alexander Stolbov is the other. Piotr doesn't recognize a Nostratic
family while Alexander Stolbov does.>>
[Alexander]:
I must say that Piotr is a linguist, but I'm a biologist and programmer. So we
are not debators of equal qualification (I can bring only extralinguistic
considerations or rely on meanings of other linguists). Moreover, Piotr for me
is a person of a very high authority not only as a good professional in
linguistics, but also as a scholar with accurate and correct sientific views.
Nevertheless we differ in opinion on many principal positions.
[Piotr]:
<<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.>>
[Alexander]:
It's easy for me to say "when" - about 9 000 BC and "where" in the broad sense -
the Near East. These are the time and the place of wheat/barley and goats/sheep
domestication. To my mind right this fact allowed people of the Nostratic
families to press or assimilate all the "not-neolithized" tribes they met and to
spread so widely. By the way the same mechanism was the reason of analogous
expansion of Austric people (due to rice domestication), and Sino-Tibetian
(Chinese millet+pigs), and all other superfamilies. (This is my private point of
view)
Much more difficult to connect Nostratic proto-families with concrete
archaeological cultures. The Near East center of neolithization seems to be a
doble center (goats and emmer wheat vs. sheep and einkorn wheat) and only a part
of early Neolithic cultures there can reflect Nostratic groups. I have a draft
but not ready yet to present it.
[Piotr]:
<<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.>>
[Alexander]:
Besides such "word equations" there are cognates among personal and other
pronouns, various particles (negative, locative and other), many affixes, terms
for body parts, natural objects, many "basic" verbs, some colours, and such
words as 'big', 'small', 'high', 'wet', 'young', 'good' etc.
Unfortunately I cannot judge whether all these conparisons are covincing enough.
But I'm impressed by the number of them.
[Piotr]:
<<The definition of Nostratic is linguistic, not ethnic, and least of all
racial.>>
[Alexander]:
It's true. And if languages could exist, live and move separately and
independently from human bodies nothing to argue about.
But every human group using a language has a certain set of social (cultural)
and biological (among them racial) features. Of course they are not the same,
but they are not statistically independent. Development of some features
influences development (and maybe the destiny) of other. We must be carefull
when studying it byt we may not ignore it.
[Piotr]:
<<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".>>
[Alexander]:
Are not we able to reconstruct the initial racial type as we have reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European language? If we found the common genetic complex (maybe
"masked" by other) in Chadic, Tungusic, Dravidian and European groups why could
not we call it "Nostratic racial type"?
Alexander