Historical linguistics

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  Languages change over time. Eventually, they change so much that there is no similarity to the original. Estimates vary, but if a group of Americans were sent to a distant galaxy, after 10,000 years they would be speaking a language that would be no more similar to English than to Chinese, or Arabic.

  Historical linguists like to construct family trees. A well-known one would be for the Romance languages. Latin separated into dialects, which evolved into different languages, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Rumanian.

  Latin itself was a branch of Italic. Italic included other languages, long dead, such as Oscan.

  Italic was a branch of Indo-European.

  Indo-European was a branch of Nostratic.

  Nostratic was a branch of Dené-Caucasian.

  Dené-Caucasian was a branch of Proto-World.

  Or was it? It appears to some linguists that all the languages of the world must have a common ancestor. Others disagree.

It is difficult to reconcile a Proto-World

language with what we know about prehistory. Pat Ryan and Joseph Greenberg suggested that people coming out of northeast Africa around 50,000 BC spoke Proto-World. But that would violate the rule that no relationships would be recognizable after 10,000 years. If all the languages of the world are related, this relationship must have somehow formed more recently. 

  Dené-Caucasian has also been postulated to include Na-Dené (North America), Sino-Tibetan, Ket (Siberia), Burushashki (Pakistan), Caucasian (Chechen, Dagestan languages), and Basque.

  Nostratic included Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, Altaic, Sumerian, Elamo-Dravidian, and Kartvelian. Some have speculated that the Nostratics were refugees from a Black Sea Flood of around 5600 BC. Some think this is the orgin of the Noah's Flood Myth.

  Afro-Asiatic included Semitic languages, Egyptian, Berber, and various languages spoken around the Sahel of Africa such as Chadic, Hausa, Somali, and Fulani.

  Uralic includes Finnish, Hungarian, and some languages around the Ural mountains such as Bashkir.

  Altaic includes Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu, Kazakh, Uzbek, and other languages mostly spoken in Central Asia.

  Elamo-Dravidian includes the extinct Elamite language of ancient southwestern Iran. Dravidian was probaly spoken in the Indus Valley Civilization. Today it is mostly spoken in South India.

  It is hard to believe that all of the above languages are related, but they clearly are. Dolgopolsky and Bomhard have written two excellent books showing how the Nostratic languages are all related. Joseph Greenberg wrote one too, although he calls his family Eurasiatic, and he adds Eskimo and some Siberian languages to Nostratic. It may sound surprising, but Eskimo is almost certainly related to European languages. Ancestors of the Eskimos (or Inuit) migrated across Asia and into America rougly 8,000 years ago.

  Numerous links and articles on Nostratic, Indo-European and other historical linguistic issues can be found at * [ http://forums.delphiforums.com/paleolinguistic ]

• and

• [ http://forums.delphiforms.com/indoeuropean ]

  There are also quotations from Bomhard, Greenberg, and Dolgopolsky.

  Nostratic was discovered and named by a Dane named Holger Pedersen, around 1870.