22. What about Nostratic and Proto-World?
Description
This article is from the sci.lang FAQ, by Michael Covington (mcovingt@ai.uga.edu) and Mark Rosenfelder (markrose@zompist.com) with numerous contributions by others.
22. What about Nostratic and Proto-World?
[--markrose]
In recent years some some linguists have attempted to reconstruct languages
far older than Indo-European.
*Nostratic*, said to underlie the Indo-European, Kartvelian (South Caucasion),
Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Uralic, Altaic, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo-Aleut
families, was first proposed by Holger Pedersen in 1903. More recently
the greater part of work on Nostratic is due to Soviet linguists led by
Vladislav Illich-Svitych, Aaron Dolgopolsky, and Vitaly Shevoroshkin.
The methodology is the traditional comparative method, and over 600 roots
have been proposed. Most linguists remain skeptical, believing that chance
processes will have obscured any relationship at this level beyond
reconstruction, or question the accuracy of the derivations (a charge which
makes Nostraticists bristle). Others simply suspend judgment, especially
since much of the supporting material for Nostratic is available only in
Russian.
A good overview on Nostratic is Kaiser and Shevoroshkin, "Nostratic", in
the _Annual Review of Anthropology_, 17:309. Illich-Svitych's original
Russian article (from _Etymologia_, 1965) has been translated in
Shevoroshkin, ed., RECONSTRUCTING LANGUAGES AND CULTURES (1989).
Joseph Greenberg has proposed a grouping which covers much the same language
areas (omitting Afro-Asiastic and Dravidian, but adding Ainu and Gilyak),
called *Eurasiatic*. Greenberg's method of _mass comparison_ (which he has
also used to group together almost all Native American languages into one
superfamily, Amerind) basically consists of assembling huge lists of
common words and doing eyeball comparisons.
This methodology has been severely criticized by many historical linguists.
If 'mass comparison' were applied to the Indo-European languages, it would
be bedevilled by false positives (caused by borrowing or chance) and by
specious phonetic or semantic similarites. Greenberg's methods seem to
linguists to abandon the very methodological severity which has put
Indo-European linguistics on a scientific footing, and distinguished it from
the work of cranks. Relax the rules enough, and you can derive any language
from any other.
Greenberg replies that the patterns he has found are compelling enough to
justify his methods, and that he is merely following in the footsteps of
the originators of the comparative method: linguists had to decide that the
Indo-European languages were related before attempting reconstructions.
The ultimate areal comparison would be *Proto-World*, the hypothetical
ancestor of all human languages. Greenberg has mentioned Proto-World, but
since he is not much interested in reconstruction, his proposal is not much
more than a statement of the monogenetic theory (a single origin for all
languages). Most linguists are skeptical that anything could be
reconstructed at this hypothetical time depth.
Greenberg's work on Amerind can be found in LANGUAGE IN THE AMERICAS (1987);
on Eurasiatic, in the forthcoming INDO-EUROPEAN AND ITS CLOSEST RELATIVES:
THE EURASIATIC LANGUAGE FAMILY. Introductions to the Nostratic and
Proto-World controversies were published in both _The Atlantic_ and
_Scientific American_ in April 1991. The essays in Lamb and Mitchell, eds.,
SPRUNG FROM SOME COMMON SOURCE (1991), are also relevant.
Loren Petrich maintains an annotated bibliography on Indo-European,
Nostratic, and Proto-World. I am also indebted to Peter Michalove for
citations used in this entry.
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