Nostratic languages facts for kids

A phylogenetic representation of Nostratic proposed by Allan Bomhard in 2008.

Nostratic is a big idea in linguistics, which is the study of language. It suggests that many language families across Europe and Asia might have come from one very old, common ancestor language. Think of it like a giant family tree for languages!

This idea was first suggested in 1903. While it's an important historical proposal, most language experts today don't fully agree with it. It's often seen as a "fringe theory," meaning it's not widely accepted by the main group of scientists.

The exact languages included in the Nostratic family can change depending on who is talking about it. But it usually includes language families like Kartvelian, Indo-European, and Uralic. It also often includes some languages from the Altaic family, Afroasiatic languages, and Dravidian languages.

The idea of Nostratic began with a linguist named Holger Pedersen in the early 1900s. He chose the name "Nostratic" from a Latin word meaning "fellow countrymen." Later, in the 1960s, linguists in the Soviet Union, especially Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky, greatly expanded on this idea.

Today, the Nostratic hypothesis is not as popular as it once was. Most linguists around the world don't accept it. However, a small number of linguists, especially in Russia, still support it.

History of the Nostratic Idea

How the Idea Started

In the late 1800s, many linguists started to notice similarities between different language families. They wondered if languages like Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, and Altaic might be connected.

In 1903, Holger Pedersen took these ideas further. He proposed "Nostratic" as a common ancestor for many language families. These included Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Samoyed, Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu, Yukaghir, Eskimo, Semitic, and Hamitic languages. He even thought other languages might join the group later.

The name Nostratic comes from the Latin word nostrās, which means 'our fellow-countryman'. Since Pedersen, it has been used to describe language families that are thought to be related to Indo-European. Some people have suggested other names, but "Nostratic" is the one that stuck.

An early supporter of the Nostratic idea was the French linguist Albert Cuny. He published his research on Nostratic in 1943. Even though Cuny was a respected linguist, his work on Nostratic wasn't well-received at the time.

The Moscow School of Linguistics

While the Nostratic idea didn't gain much support in Western countries, it became quite popular in the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, two linguists, Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky, worked on the hypothesis. They added more language families to the group.

Illich-Svitych also started creating the first dictionary of this ancient, hypothetical Nostratic language. Dolgopolsky later published his own Nostratic Dictionary in 2008, which is considered the most up-to-date attempt to list Nostratic words.

Language Families in Nostratic

The exact list of language families included in Nostratic can change. However, most supporters of the theory agree on a main group of families.

The three groups almost always included are Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic. Even though many linguists don't agree that Altaic itself is a single family, Nostratic supporters usually include it. Most also include the Kartvelian and Dravidian language families.

Following the ideas of Pedersen, Illich-Svitych, and Dolgopolsky, many supporters have also included Afroasiatic. However, some newer ideas have suggested rethinking this.

Some linguists think that the Sumerian and Etruscan languages, which are usually seen as "language isolates" (meaning they don't seem related to any other known language), might also be part of Nostratic. Other linguists believe these languages belong to a different large family called Dené–Caucasian. The Elamite language is another isolate that sometimes appears in Nostratic classifications.

In 1987, Joseph Greenberg suggested a similar large language family called Eurasiatic. It included the main "Euraltaic" group (Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic) but left out some families like Afroasiatic. Around the same time, Russian Nostratic linguists, like Sergei Starostin, created a slightly broader version of Nostratic that also didn't include Afroasiatic.

More recently, some Nostratic supporters have started to agree more. Greenberg generally accepted the Nostratic idea, but he saw a big difference between its northern languages (his Eurasiatic) and southern languages (like Afroasiatic and Dravidian). Today, some linguists like Georgiy Starostin see Afroasiatic, Nostratic, and Elamite as being related to each other. Sergei Starostin's group has now put Afroasiatic back into a broader Nostratic family.

How Proto-Nostratic Might Have Been

According to Dolgopolsky, the very old, original Proto-Nostratic language might have had a simple structure. This means words didn't change much based on their role in a sentence.

Dolgopolsky suggests that Proto-Nostratic had three main types of words:

• Regular words (like nouns and verbs)
• Pronouns (like 'I', 'you')
• Helper words (like prepositions or postpositions)

The word order in sentences was usually subject–object–verb when the subject was a noun. But if the subject was a pronoun, the order might have been object–verb–subject. Helper words were likely placed after the noun they described.

Why Experts Don't Agree

Most mainstream language experts do not support the Nostratic hypothesis.

One reason for this is that Nostratic supporters often only include language families for which an "ancestor language" (called a proto-language) has already been rebuilt. Some critics argue that you should first figure out if languages are related before trying to rebuild their common ancestor.

Another criticism is that the information used for Nostratic comparisons sometimes has errors. For example, some experts have shown mistakes in the Uralic data used. However, supporters of Nostratic argue that even with some errors, if there are enough strong similarities between languages, it's still very likely they are related. This is because it's mathematically very unlikely for so many similar sounds and meanings to appear by chance.

Critics also say that Nostratic, as rebuilt by some linguists, seems "typologically flawed." This means it doesn't quite fit the patterns usually seen in real languages. For example, they point out that very few Nostratic "roots" (basic word parts) have two voiceless sounds, which are common in many languages. In short, many experts seriously doubt that more research will strongly support this proposed super-family of languages.

See also