Eurasiatic languages: Encyclopedia II - Eurasiatic languages - Prospects for the Eurasiatic hypothesis

Eurasiatic languages - Prospects for the Eurasiatic hypothesis

The principal objection to theories like Greenberg's is that contact between populations often results in exchange of words, so similarities in vocabulary and even in grammatical structure do not necessarily indicate a common origin. For instance, English contains many French words and Persian contains many Turkish and Arabic words. Nevertheless it remains true to say that English is a descendant of Proto-Germanic and Persian is a descendant of Old Persian. Whether similarities between two languages are due to common ancestry or to linguistic borrowing can only be empirically determined. For similarities between language groups classified by Greenberg as Eurasiatic, both explanations seem possible at the present time.

From the point of view of Indo-European studies, the Eurasiatic hypothesis remains intriguing. Recent works by Winfred P. Lehmann and others have argued that Proto-Indo-European descended from an active-stative language. Among the characteristics posited for this "Pre-Indo-European" are Subject-Object-Verb word order, use of agglutinating suffixes, and absence of grammatical gender. These characteristics are very common among languages identified by Greenberg as Eurasiatic, for instance Japanese and Turkish. While it is probably too early for a definitive judgment of the Eurasiatic hypothesis, it is at least typologically compatible with recent work in Indo-European studies.

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