Sent: Thursday, March 04, 2004 7:32
AM
Subject: [nostratic] Books with
Nostratic
Dear Gerry,
I appreciate your
response. I am a supporter of the Nostratic hypothesis, but I am not a
professional linguist. I also don't read or post daily to lists that I
am on.
I looked up the below in Amazon. The Nostratic
Macrofamily was published in 1994 and is available for $213.30 -- out of my
range in price. Bomhard's Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis was
published in 1996 and I did look at it via Inter-library loan, and may even
buy it some day. Dr. Joseph Greenberg is now deceased and the two volume
study has been published: I've looked at the Grammar volume
(interlibrary loan), and it is a tour de force. It masses a lot of data
across languages, but it is not presented in the rigorous type format that I
imagine many scientists like to see. He does indicate that his
Eurasiatic hypotheses does overlap very fully with Nostratic.
The
most recent book listed in Amazon that has nostratic in its title is Aharon
Dolgopolsky's The Nostratic Macrofamily and Linguistic Palaeontology,
published in 2000, and probably a steal at $36. He's been around a long
time, but I haven't looed at any of his titles.
A more recent
interesting book that does not deal with Nostratic, but does deal with
similarities across languages throughout the world is that of Mark C. Baker,
The Atoms of Language. He looks to make a table of languages like the
periodic table in chemistry for atoms. He bifurcates languages into
categories like word order (like SVO [English] vs. SOV, vs ...) and draws a
tree showing similar languages grouped together. He indicates a language
like Edo (I think) spoken in Nigeria, has many syntatical features like
English, although its history is very different. There is also the
feature that as a language progresses through history it may pick up
similarities to geographically close langauges from a different family (not a
new idea -- sometime ago I read that the languages of the Balkan peninsula
(Greek, Alabania, and South Slavic) have for the most part dropped infinitive
constructions in favor of phrases/clauses composed with the subjunctive,
regardless of their historical derivation). For instance, Hindi (northen
India) which comes Sanskrit and has a regular (for Western Europe) nominative
accusative system like Latin or Greek, has developed ergative constructions
somewhat like the close by Dravidian languages of southern
India.
>>Gerry wrote
In a book published last year, "The
Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship" (Mouton de
Gruyter), two independent scholars, Allan Bomhard and John Kerns, compiled
some 600 Nostratic roots with counterparts (what the linguists call cognates)
in languages said to be descended from Nostratic. On another front, Dr. Joseph
Greenberg, a retired Stanford University linguist, is in the midst of a
two-volume study of his own version of the Nostratic hypothesis:
"Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family." Dr.
Greenberg's Eurasiatic overlaps with Nostratic but also includes other
languages like Japanese and Eskimo-Aleut.
In an unpublished manuscript
of yet another forthcoming book, "Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis,"
Mr. Bomhard concludes that the evidence for the common ancestral language is
"massive and persuasive." "As the 20th century draws to a close, it is simply
no longer reasonable to hold to the view that Indo-European is a language
isolate," he writes. "Indo-European has relatives and these must now be taken
into consideration."
Gerry