Eurasiatic languages

Eurasiatic
(controversial)
Geographic distribution:	northern Eurasia
Linguistic classification:	Nostratic (?) Eurasiatic
Subdivisions:	Indo-European Uralic–Yukaghir Altaic Chukotko-Kamchatkan Eskimo–Aleut Korean-Japanese-Ainu Gilyak Etruscan

Eurasiatic is a language macrofamily proposed by Joseph Greenberg that includes many language families historically spoken in northern Eurasia. The eight branches of Eurasiatic are Etruscan, Indo-European, Uralic–Yukaghir, Altaic, Korean-Japanese-Ainu, Gilyak, Chukotian, and Eskimo–Aleut, spoken in northernmost North America and Greenland with a toehold in easternmost Siberia.

Some proposals would group Eurasiatic with even larger macrofamilies such as Nostratic or Borean, but neither they nor Eurasiatic itself have been widely accepted, since they are not seen by the linguistic profession as being based on valid methodologies. The mass comparison method used by Greenberg remains controversial. Merritt Ruhlen and other supporters of the Eurasiatic proposal have held that the language families it includes have a distinctive grammatical pattern involving the use of a -t suffix to form plurals and a -k suffix to form duals.

Reception

The Eurasiatic hypothesis is dismissed by many linguists, often on the ground that Greenberg relies in his research on mass comparison, a method he developed in the 1950s that remains extremely controversial and sometimes attracted considerable criticism (i.a. by Stefan Georg and Alexander Vovin). Others, citing the wide acceptance of his classification of African languages (cf. Nichols 1992:5), withhold judgment. Greenberg also has his supporters, among them the American linguists Merritt Ruhlen and Allan Bomhard and the Dutch linguist Frederik Kortlandt.

Grammatical evidence

Merritt Ruhlen writes that Eurasiatic is supported by the existence of a grammatical pattern "whereby plurals of nouns are formed by suffixing -t to the noun root...whereas duals of nouns are formed by suffixing -k." Rasmus Rask noted this grammatical pattern in the groups now called Uralic and Eskimo–Aleut as early as 1818, but it can also be found in Altaic, Ainu, Gilyak, and Chukchi–Kamchatkan, all of which Greenberg placed in Eurasiatic. According to Ruhlen, this pattern is not found in language families or languages outside Eurasiatic.

Roots

Ruhlen presents the following roots for Eurasiatic: kʷi (what?), mi (what?), pälä (two), akʷā (water), tik (one or finger), konV (arm 1), bhāghu(s) (arm 2), bük(ä) (bend or knee), punče (hair), p'ut'V (vagina or vulva), snā (smell or nose), kamu (seize or squeeze), and parV (the verb to fly).

External classification

According to Greenberg, the language family that Eurasiatic is most closely connected to is Amerind. He states that "[t]he Eurasiatic-Amerind family represents a relatively recent expansion (circa 15,000 BP) into territory opened up by the melting of the Arctic ice cap" (2002:2). In contrast, "Eurasiatic-Amerind stands apart from the other families of the Old World, among which the differences are much greater and represent deeper chronological groupings" (ib.). Like Eurasiatic, Amerind is not a generally accepted proposal.

Eurasiatic and Nostratic include many of the same language families. Vladislav Illich-Svitych's Nostratic dictionary did not include the smaller Siberian language families listed in Eurasiatic, but this was only because protolanguages had not been reconstructed for them; Nostraticists have not attempted to exclude these languages from Nostratic. Most recently, Nostraticists have accepted Eurasiatic as a subgroup within Nostratic (2005:331) with Afroasiatic, Kartvelian, and Dravidian forming the rest of Nostratic. There continues to be disagreement over details of classification. Murray Gell-Mann, Ilia Peiros, and Georgiy Starostin (2009) group Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Nivkh with Almosan instead of Eurasiatic.

The Nostratic family is not endorsed by the mainstream of comparative linguistics.

Harold C. Fleming includes Eurasiatic as a subgroup of the hypothetical Borean family, but this group does not have widespread acceptance in scholarship.

Subdivision

As laid out by Greenberg (2000:279-81), the branches of Eurasiatic are:

• Etruscan
• Indo-European
• Uralic–Yukaghir
• Altaic
• Korean-Japanese-Ainu
• Gilyak (= Nivkh)
• Chukotian (= Chukotko-Kamchatkan)
• Eskimo–Aleut

These groupings, except for the first two, are the native languages in various parts of northeast Asia. Eskimo–Aleut is spoken across the subarctic region from northeast Asia to Greenland, and the Uralic languages are also spoken westward as far as Scandinavia and Hungary.

Geographical distribution

Merritt Ruhlen suggests that the geographical distribution of Eurasiatic shows that it and the Dené–Caucasian family are the result of separate migrations. Dené–Caucasian is the older of the two groups, with the emergence of Eurasiatic being more recent. The Eurasiatic expansion overwhelmed Dené–Caucasian, leaving speakers of the latter restricted mainly to isolated pockets (the Basques in the Pyrenees mountains, Caucasian peoples in the Caucasus mountains, and the Burushaski in the Hindu Kush mountains) surrounded by Eurasiatic speakers. Dené–Caucasian survived in these areas because they were difficult to access and therefore easy to defend; the reasons for its survival elsewhere are unclear. Ruhlen argues that Eurasiatic is supported by stronger and clearer evidence than Dené–Caucasian, and that this also indicates that the spread of Dené–Caucasian occurred before that of Eurasiatic.

The existence of a Dené–Caucasian family is disputed or rejected by some linguists, including Lyle Campbell, Ives Goddard, and Larry Trask.

See also

• Indo-Uralic languages
• Indo-Semitic languages
• Proto-Human language
• Ural–Altaic languages
• Uralo-Siberian languages

References

• Campbell, Lyle. 1997. American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Goddard, Ives. 1996. "The classification of native languages of North America", in Ives Goddard, editor, Languages 290–323 = Handbook of North American Indians, volume 17. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
• Greenberg, Joseph H. 1957. Essays in Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Greenberg, Joseph H. 2000. Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family. Volume 1, Grammar. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Greenberg, Joseph H. 2002. Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family. Volume 2, Lexicon. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Greenberg, Joseph H. 2005. Genetic Linguistics: Essays on Theory and Method, edited by William Croft. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Nichols, Johanna. 1992. Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Georg, Stefan and Alexander Vovin. "From mass comparison to mess comparison: Greenberg's 'Eurasiatic' theory", Diachronica 20.2, 331–362.
• Mithun, Marianne. 1999. The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Ruhlen, Merritt. The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994.

External links

• "Indo-Uralic and Altaic" by Frederik Kortlandt (2006)
• Regions Based on Social Structure: A Reconsideration