Nostratic languages: Encyclopedia II - Nostratic languages - History: Indo-European to Nostratic

Nostratic languages - History: Indo-European to Nostratic

The concept of the Nostratic languages is best understood in the context of the discovery, methods of investigation, and application of the Indo-European family of languages. When Sir William Jones first suggested the Indo-European hypothesis, he backed up his idea with a systematic examination of what might be termed "phono-semantic sets" -- words which, in different languages, had both similar sounds and meanings. Jones essentially argued that there were too many of these sets for their existence to be mere coincidence, laying particular emphasis on the resemblance between morphological patterns: declensions and conjugations. He proposed that the languages in question must have stemmed from one language at some time in the past, and that they diverged from one another due to geographical separation and the passage of time. The idea of a "root language" thus took hold, a concept to which the evolution of the Romance languages from Latin offered itself as a clear parallel.

The second major concept to keep in mind is that, starting with Jacob Grimm, it was argued that languages would not evolve in a haphazard manner, but rather that they evolved according to certain rules. Using these rules, one could theoretically run the evolutionary process backwards and reconstruct the root language. This has been done, and parts of the hypothetical language, named Proto-Indo-European, have been produced.

The third concept is that, by analysing the words in the Proto-Indo-European language, one can to some extent examine the time and place of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Words for concepts and objects that were not familiar to these people would be named essentially randomly after the time when the languages began to split; only things they knew would produce phono-semantic sets in their successor languages. Proto-Indo-European is rich in words related to agriculture, animal husbandry, and plains-like landscape. From this, it has been plausibly argued that Proto-Indo-European was a living language some time from 6000 BC to 4000 BC, in the plains to the north of the Black Sea. (A measure of the difficulty of this task is indicated by the fact that some argue the reconstructed vocabulary of Proto-Indo-European, together with other known information about migrations, indicates a northern Anatolian landscape, although this is notably lacking in flat ground).

Altogether, the Indo-European hypothesis has been wildly successful, and naturally linguists have tried to apply the same general theory to a wide variety of other languages. Many languages, though not all, have been shown to be related to other languages, forming large families similar to Indo-European. These families have been only as "high-level" as the connections which have plausibly been made. Superficially, though, it is logical that the family tree could converge further, and that some or all language families could be related to one another.

In 1903, the Danish linguist Holger Pedersen proposed Nostratian, a proto-language for the proto-languages of the Indo-European, Uralic, Afro-Asiatic, and Eskimo-Aleut language families. The name derives from the Latin word noster, meaning "our". While the hypothesis did not make much headway in the West, it became quite popular in the former Soviet Union, and under the slightly modified name Nostratic was expanded to include other language families. The modern Nostratic theory was elaborated by Vladislav Illich-Svitych (1934-66) who also published a comprehensive dictionary of the hypothetical language.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History: Indo-European to Nostratic", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki