Nostratic languages: Encyclopedia II - Nostratic languages - Criticism

Nostratic languages - Criticism

Almost all modern linguists are, at best, highly skeptical of the facts put forward to show that the language families under the Nostratic umbrella are, in fact, related. The main criticism of Nostratic is that the methodology used leads people to see patterns that are the result of coincidence. In reconstructing Nostratic, supporters do not use the techniques that linguists have established to prevent false positives, such as insisting on examining only regular sound shifts.

Most of the proposed phono-semantic sets are much more speculative than those used to group languages into the accepted families — one technique used to support a similar super-family was famously used in the 1960s to "demonstrate" that English was a member of a proposed Central American language family. Another blow against Nostratic is that the more recent technique of comparing grammatical structures, as opposed to words, has suggested to some that the Nostratic candidates are not related. However, recent work by Joseph Greenberg (and Allan R. Bomhard, forthcoming) has done a lot to dispel doubts in this area. Claims (by Aharon Dolgopolsky, among others) that the words reconstructed for Proto-Nostratic point to a pre-agricultural society in the Middle East (as one might expect for a language pre-dating Proto-Indo-European) have been dismissed by many mainstream linguists as wishful thinking exacerbated by that very expectation shaping the results. However, the possibility that Natufian and Zarzian Proto-Nostratic speakers helped spread the cultures involved in the post glacial "broad spectrum revolution", using new bow-and-arrow hunting technologies, and domesticating the dog, cannot be lightly dismissed.

Some linguists also object to the assumption that languages must ultimately all stem from one reconstructable root. It is known that unrelated languages in close geographical proximity can trade vocabulary, syntax, and other features, and it is suggested that the present-day "family" structure of languages may be an aberration. Advancing technology might allow one language to rapidly expand in geographic scope, as the people speaking it conquered their neighbours. This would then allow that one language to evolve into a family (in fact, it has been argued that Indo-European languages have spread as far as they have because of the war-making advantages that the domestication of the horse gave to one small group of Proto-Indo-European speakers).

It is suggested, that in the absence of rapid technological change, as was the case prior to about the 8th millennium BC, the tendency of languages to evolve would be drowned out by the tendency for languages to trade features between each other. If this were so, the axiom that languages change in a manner that can be reversed is not true before a certain point in the past, and it will not be possible to reconstruct older proto-languages, Nostratic or otherwise, using the techniques used to reconstruct the proto-languages of the accepted major language families (all of which are believed to post-date the invention of agriculture). On the other hand, the comparative method has been successfully applied to Australian Aboriginal languages. Even though Australia has been inhabited for about 50 thousand years, and no significant technological changes occurred, aborigines living on seven eighths of Australia use languages belonging to relatively recent Pama-Nyungan language family (estimated to be about five thousand years old).

Regardless, the concept of Nostratic languages still has some influence on the fringes of linguistics. A further level of the "language family tree", which weds Nostratic with all other language families into what is called Proto-World, has been proposed. Most of the objections raised to the Nostratic hypothesis apply equally to this idea, and the Proto-World concept has little currency among linguists.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Criticism", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki