Nostratic hypothesis

Proposal of an overarching northern Eurasian language family, still of uncertain validity.

Holger Pedersen was the first to suggest that the Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Afroasiatic, and other language families might belong in one broad category (Nostratic). In the 1960s Vladislav Illich-Svitych made a detailed case in favour of the hypothesis and added Kartvelian (see Caucasian languages) and Dravidian to the list; he began reconstructing Proto-Nostratic but died in 1966 before finishing. Important contributions to this theory were also made by the Russian-born Israeli linguist Aron Dolgopolsky. The hypothesis remains highly controversial.

* * *

▪ proposed language family

      proposed, but still controversial, language family of northern Eurasia. The term Nostratic was proposed in 1903 by the Danish linguist Holger Pedersen (Pedersen, Holger) to encompass Indo-European (Indo-European languages), Uralic (Uralic languages), Altaic (Altaic languages), Afro-Asiatic (Afro-Asiatic languages), and possibly other language families under one broad category.

      Modern research on the Nostratic hypothesis began with the work of the Russian Vladislav M. Illich-Svitych, who made a detailed case in the mid-1960s for the relatedness of the four above-named groups, together with Kartvelian (Kartvelian languages) and Dravidian (Dravidian languages). He also offered a detailed but still incomplete reconstruction of Proto-Nostratic. Important contributions to this theory were also made by the Russian-born Israeli linguist Aron Dolgopolsky. A quite different reconstruction of many of the same languages was proposed by the American Allan Bomhard.

      After Illich-Svitych's premature death in 1966, his incomplete work was published with a number of problems still unsolved, and Bomhard's work raised additional unresolved issues. These are among the main reasons why Nostratic has not been well received thus far. More recently, rather than accept or reject the theory in toto, some researchers have focused on ways to correct its doubtful parts and build on the more promising aspects, e.g., revising parts of the proposed Nostratic sound system, adding to the lexical evidence for Nostratic, and resolving conflicts between Nostratic and existing work on the individual language families. This newer work, while also still controversial, is believed by many linguists to lend greater credibility to the Nostratic theory.

      Illich-Svitych's work was based on a number of major advances achieved by the 1960s in the understanding of the prehistory of the various language families involved, so that he was comparing the reconstructed proto-forms of each branch of Nostratic rather than the more divergent later attested forms. He proposed systematic phonological correspondences among the various languages, accounting for these and hundreds of other forms; for example, Proto-Indo-European *t, *d, *dh correspond to Proto-Kartvelian *t', *t, *d, respectively. (An asterisk indicates an unattested, reconstructed form.) In addition, Illich-Svitych proceeded by comparing all six protolanguages at once rather than two at a time, since parallels found across all or most of the language families being compared have a greater likelihood of being cognate (and thus representing a common genetic origin) than forms shared by only two or three of the families.

      One of the most difficult problems in language comparison is to distinguish systematically between those words likely to be derived from a common protolanguage and the many words that are shared as a result of borrowing (and hence are not evidence of the languages themselves being related). Forms such as those listed above, including personal pronouns, some body parts, and natural phenomena, are known to be particularly resistant to borrowing, so parallels in these areas offer a strong diagnostic indicator of genetic relatedness.

      The Nostratic theory remains highly controversial, in part because much of it was published posthumously, with many problems still unresolved. For a number of years after Illich-Svitych's death, there was little further research in Nostratic.

      But in recent years, interest in the classification of the world's languages has been reawakened. In the 1990s, new research eliminated or refined many doubtful parts of Illich-Svitych's work and discovered significant new evidence for the validity of the theory. For example, a number of Nostratic words have been found to be more widely attested (especially in Kartvelian and Afro-Asiatic) than was suspected. One interesting new etymology would offer an explanation for the hitherto troublesome connection between the Indo-European prototypes of the English words five, finger, and fist, all of which appear to come from a newly reconstructed Nostratic word, *p'ayngV (with V representing a vowel whose exact features cannot be determined), denoting the hand, or perhaps a way of holding the hand with the fingers bent (as for counting), based on a comparison of Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic forms.

      The study of Nostratic is still in its early stages and, even if its basic validity is accepted, many issues of reconstruction remain problematic. In addition, the inclusion in Nostratic of some of the six families, notably Afro-Asiatic and Dravidian, has been questioned, while at the same time some further language families are good candidates for inclusion (especially Yukaghir (Yukaghir language), Eskimo-Aleut, and Chukchi-Kamchatkan [Luorawetlan (Luorawetlan languages)]).

      The Nostratic theory is among the most promising of the many currently controversial theories of linguistic classification. It remains the best-argued of all the solutions hitherto presented for the affiliations of the languages of northern Eurasia, a problem that goes back to the German Franz Bopp (Bopp, Franz) and the Dane Rasmus Rask (Rask, Rasmus), two of the founders of Indo-European studies.

Alexis Manaster Ramer Peter A. Michalove

Additional Reading

V.M. Illich-Svitych, Opyt sravneniia nostraticheskikh iazykov, ed. by V.A. Dybo, 3 vol. (1971–84); Mark Kaiser and V. Shevoroshkin, “Nostratic,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 17:309–329 (1988); Alexis Manaster Ramer, “On Illic-Svityc's Nostratic Theory,” Studies in Language, 17(1):205–250 (1993); Joseph C. Salmons and Brian D. Joseph (eds.), Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence (1998).

* * *