Talk:Nostratic languages

General

Yikes! Learn Tamil in 30 Days as a piece of evidence? Identifying Colin Renfrew and other professional linguists as teaching a 'liberal theory' is a little wacko, too, but that's a matter of content. Oh, well, I'm not participating in this entry, other than to point out to whoever just inserted all the pro-Nostratic parts that if you start a new line with a space on the left margin the formatting will be all messed up. Another pointer - titles in English are usually not printed in all capitals, but in italics, which wikipedia supports. Your lists of words would be better in indented lists. You might go look at How does one edit a page to see how things work. --MichaelTinkler

Well, I'm just going to put my money where my mouth was and see if this entry fixes itself again without my participation. A quick hint: the new additions just go to show that if you look hard enough and spread your definitions wide enough (i.e. thinking "barley" and "gravel" have similar enough meanings to count as cognates), you can find cognates for short syllables almost anywhere. Even Sir William Jones didn't rely on single words, and he did his thing more than 200 years ago when this stuff was pretty primitive. This is what I meant when I included the anecdote about English being pigeon-holed into a Central American Indian language family by using this technique, and why modern linguists have moved on to grammatical structures as a more reliable way to figure out what's related to what. -- Paul Drye

Paul, that's a great anecdote about the "demonstration" that English was a member of a Central American language family. But could you please give us more information. Ideal would be a citation to some journal in which this spoof demonstration appeared. Failing that, could you at least mention the name of the person(s) who did this. Thanks Interlingua 14:20, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Yep, I thought barley/gravel was a beautiful example. Of course where I come from gravel is rather coarser than barley, but then I'm sure that's just cultural relativism. The entry seems to have self-healed, except that in the reversion someone cut the talk. I'm going to put it back. --MichaelTinkler

Across some 15,000 years, the possibility that "barley" and "gravel" are related is not so big a jump. Don't forget that in English, we use the same word for a single piece of barley and a single piece of sand - viz. grain! One root in Proto-Northwest Caucasian has already differentiated into the meanings acid and sharp in Abkhaz and Ubykh respectively (and I'm not talking about sharp of taste, either, but sharp of knives, needles, et cetera). The point is that two words don't have to be perfect semantic or phonetic cognates in the present, but semantic and phonetic evolution from a common ancestor, with not too much semantic deviation, must exist. Don't forget that English wheel and Sanskrit cakra are cognates. But look at English and Georgian mama - the English means "mother", but the Georgian means "father". Also, Manx beg means "little"! Paul is correct - phonetic cognates aren't much good, but cognates on more than one level - eg. grammatical AND semantic, or semantic and phonetic - are quite useful. - thefamouseccles

Remember that the word gay once meant happy but now homosexual. "Nice" comes from Latin nescius, ignorant. For example "night", "to sleep", "dark", "death" and "black" are more closely related meanings: People sleep during night. Sleeping can be considered an euphemism for death. During night there is dark. Black is a dark colour. --85.156.128.119 18:53, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

Arabic/Hebrew and Japanese

'You' in Arabic/Hebrew is 'Anta'. In Japanese it is 'Anata'.
                                 Jondel | Talk

The above is a good example of the coincidental look-alikes you can find between any two languages. I have no idea what the ancestral Japonic 2SG pronoun was (if it had one: Japanese, like many East and Southeast Asian languages, doesn't have personal pronouns in the Indo-European sense), but it wasn't anata, which is a distal demonstrative (in a set with medial sonata and proximal konata) and historically a compound. --kwami 06:00, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I've studied several Uralic, Indo-European, and Semitic languages, as well as Sumerian - and I could build an "Ur-language" out of any two of these well enough to convince laymen. Historical comparative theories are all very nice, but as they leave too much room for imagination, they're not very reliable - and definitely not the latest word in general linguistics. While it could be argued that the closeness of Uralic, Semitic and Indo-European languages is quite well-grounded, the others proposed members of Nostratic family are much more dubious, and even the exact nature of the relationship between these "core" languages is most likely much more complicated than a "language tree" - consider the diffusional effects, at least. Even in USSR, Nostratic theory was not the official version, but a (possibly attractive) alternative, advocated by Illich-Svitych etc. Still, while I suppose it often hovers on the edge of the "academical" science, the basic ideas behind Nostratism are considerable, at least, and I doubt we've seen the last of it yet. So, don't kick it too hard. --Oop 22:56, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)

Proposal to add Austronesian languages to list

A number of books (some quite convincing, notably Bopp) have been written proposing a very close link between the Indo-European languages and the Austronesian languages. To wit, the similarities of such fundamental PIE/PAN words as *duaus/*duau, *egos/*aku(s) and others. Bopp wrote a 600+ page book on the subject, quite in depth. While Bopp's exuberance might have undermined his credibility, I think a lot of his evidence makes his proposal at least worth mention. I have, myself, found a striking number of apparent cognates (and I'm not talking about loanwords) to indicate a strong possibility of a relationship between Japanese and the Indo European languages, as well as between Japanese and the Austronesian languages. I can't testify as to what affect the apparent Austronesian similarities might be due to contact between the two groups/languages, since there are, to this day, three Austronesian languages still spoken in Formosa/Taiwan, which even from ancient times, was in contact with Japan.

My observations are not unique. While the primary groups included in Nostratic are invariably (despite what the article seems to indicate to the contrary) are Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Kartvelian, and Afro-Asiatic, a great many linguists include the Manchu-Tungus (Turkic) family (with its loose cognates Korean and Japanese) and the Dravidian languages...some even including the Bantu languages of Africa (although I personally view this as an attempt to include w/in Nostratic the greatest number of languages as conceivably possible). The problem with the Austronesian languages is that they seem to be anomalous in every way, when it comes to categorization, since the language family seems to have at least three core areas...Thor Heyerdahl's work notwithstanding. TShilo12 09:05, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Move

Moved from "Nostratic language" to "Nostratic languages" for consistency with practice for other language family articles, e.g. Indo-European languages --Tabor 19:02, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Australia

'On the other hand, the comparative method has been successfully applied to Australian Aboriginal languages. Even though Australia has been inhabited for about 50 thousand years, and no significant technological changes occurred, aborigines living on seven eighths of Australia use languages belonging to relatively recent Pama-Nyungan language family (estimated to be about five thousand years old).'

I think this is wrong on one and possibly both counts. Australia did have an archeologically documented technological revolution around 6000 years ago. Also, I have seen Australian languages cited as an area where linguists divide languages geographically or featurally in acknowledgement that genetic relations are not always clear.--JWB 06:02, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't think "Australian" is seriously held as a family anymore, but Pama-Nyungan certainly is. The only linguist I'm aware of that disputes its validity is Dixon. He makes some interesting points, but all other Australianists I'm aware of seem comfortable with it as a genetic node. There are speculations, though, that it may have been a cultural revolution with the moeity system, and the rituals that went with them, that spread Pama-Nyungan - or maybe that was caught up in the technological revolution. On the other hand, take a look at PNG, which was settled when Australia was (as the continent of Sahul). The subbranches of the East Papuan "family" have no demonstrable cognates! kwami 07:35, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

I wasn't taking a position on genetic unity of Pama-Nyungan, but just disputing the assertion that no significant technological changes occurred, and the suggestion that the comparative (reconstructive) method had been successfully applied to Australia as a whole.--JWB 16:21, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Borean

New name of the language is Borean. The dictionary of Borean roots: [1]--Nixer 12:34, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

That looks broader than Nostratic - it appears to cover all of Eurasia and Americas.--JWB 14:33, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

???

"Armenian was not added [to the Indo-European family] until the 1880s (until then, it had been thought to be an aberrant dialect of Iranian)"

Even if Armenian was a member of the Indo-Iranian languages, wouldn't that still make it Indo-European? Or were they not recognized as Indo-European by then? And what exactly is "Iranian" anyways? I've only ever heard the language of Iran called "Persian" or "Farsi".

One more pedantic note: it is not accurate to speak of a language being "added" to a language family. The language always was part of the family; we only recently recognized it as such. — Ливай 16:00, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

If you think of IE as being a hypothesis, then it would be correct to speak of adding languages to it. That's common phrasing, anyway. Iranian is the IE family that includes Persian, Kurdish, Ossete, Balochi, etc. The passage should probably say that Armenian was not recognized as a separate IE family until the 1880s. kwami 20:29, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

The phrase "aberrant dialect of Iranian" implies that Iranian is a single language with many dialects, rather than a group of languages each with their own dialects. In any case, I don't think it serves as a good analogy in this paragraph, where the question at hand is the very inclusion of language groups into a single family, not the particular classification of languages within the family. — Ливай 00:57, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

"Defense" of Nostratic theory

This section looks to me like it's a pro-Nostraticist apologia. The author of this takes the previous section on criticisms of Nostratic, and shoots it down point by point. This, and the slim amount of references provided, suggests to me that it's original research. Also, some of the arguments are specious at best - for example, "Had linguists followed this advice, they would not have succeeded in establishing the existence of Indo-European.". Indo-European is one of few families with long written history, so it's a lot easier to compare languages diachronically, and splits between languages of the family are often directly attested in the written record; this partially obviates the need to establish regular sound correspondences, because they're often established already. So, until such time as the author provides references, I'm removing this part to the talk page for discussion. Thefamouseccles 02:10, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Defense of the Nostratic theory

Note: this section includes numbered replies to criticisms made above.

1. "Almost all modern linguists express considerable skepticism of the data put forward to demonstrate interrelationships between the various language families under the Nostratic umbrella. The main criticism of Nostratic holds that the methodology used leads people to see patterns that actually result from coincidences. In reconstructing Nostratic, supporters do not use the techniques that linguists have established to prevent false positives, such as insisting on examining only regular sound shifts."

The phrase "almost all modern linguists" mainly applies to American linguistics. In Russia, Nostratic theory has more adherents.

2. The demand that investigators admit "only regular sound shifts" ignores the fact that linguists typically identify sound laws long after the discipline has established relationships between languages through lexical and morphological correspondences. Had linguists followed this advice, they would not have succeeded in establishing the existence of Indo-European.

3. "The more recently introduced technique of comparing grammatical structures (as opposed to words) has suggested to some that the Nostratic candidates lack interrelatedness."

However, recent work by Joseph Greenberg (and Allan R. Bomhard, forthcoming) has done a lot to dispel doubts in this area.

One cannot claim "comparing grammatical structures, as opposed to words" as a "recently introduced technique". Compare Sir William Jones's famous remarks of 1786 (bold emphasis added):

"The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek; more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident."

Nor can one speak as if proponents of higher-order classification of languages relied on lexical as opposed to morphological data. For instance, much of Bomhard and Kerns (1994) attempts to reconstruct Nostratic morphology and syntax. Likewise, function-words and morphological elements form the subject matter of the first and longest volume of Joseph Greenberg's Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives (2000).

So, whatever valid arguments critics may launch against Nostratic, this is not one of them.

4. "The proposed Nostratic language "super-family" hypothesis suggests links between many Eurasian language families. The precise nature of the links remains the subject of debate, however, as proponents have not agreed on the set of families to include."

In some respects, however, the situation somewhat resembles that which occurred within Indo-European studies in the early stages of research. At first, researchers did not definitively identify the Celtic languages as part of the Indo-European language family, while they did not admit Armenian until the 1880s (until then, expert opinion regarded it as an aberrant dialect of Iranian). Lycian and Lydian did not gain definitive recognition as Indo-European languages until the middle of the twentieth century. Even today, uncertainties linger about the subgrouping of the Finno-Ugric languages, not to mention Afro-Asiatic.

5. "Many mainstream linguists have dismissed claims (by Aharon Dolgopolsky, among others) that the words reconstructed for Proto-Nostratic point to a pre-agricultural society in the Middle East (as one might expect for a language pre-dating Proto-Indo-European). Critics see the notion as wishful thinking exacerbated by that very expectation shaping the results."

However, one cannot lightly dismiss the possibility that Natufian and Zarzian Proto-Nostratic speakers helped spread the cultures involved in the post-glacial "broad spectrum revolution", using new bow-and-arrow hunting technologies and domesticating the dog.

6. "Some linguists also object to the assumption that languages must ultimately all stem from one reconstructable root. Linguists know that unrelated languages in close geographical proximity can trade vocabulary, syntax, and other features, and some suggest that the present-day "family" structure of languages may simply exemplify an aberration."

Advancing technology might allow one language to rapidly expand in geographic scope, as the people speaking it conquered their neighbours. This would then allow that one language to evolve into a family (in fact, some have argued that Indo-European languages have spread as far as they have because of the war-making advantages that the domestication of the horse gave to one small group of Proto-Indo-European speakers).

Prospects for the Nostratic theory

I've put an original research tag on this section, since the content is unsourced and seems argumentative. Some of the points verge on the nonsensical, in any case. Citations would be welcome, and preferably a little more balance. On the other hand, it could be deleted without significantly damaging the article.--Chris 06:23, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

I'd say its faults are that it is very general and stating the obvious. It hardly even makes assertions that would require sources for backup. It does seem to try for balance and mention the various viewpoints though. --JWB 11:26, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

The whole article is rife with unsupported assertions; given the lack of footnotes, that's hardly surprising. The tone is also rather argumentative, that is, it seems to consciencely making a case against N., rather than simply presenting evidence. That's largely a matter of style. [See following comment]

Let me quote the whole section with comments.

As the foregoing arguments demonstrate, strongly-held opinions separate proponents and opponents of Nostratic studies. It seems unlikely the two sides will agree any time soon or even agree to disagree.

"Demonstrate" = argumentative = orginal research. "It seems unlikely..." = unascribed opinion.

Against the Nostratic theory, note that consensus opinion among professional linguists strongly opposes it, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world. In favor of Nostratics, note that scientific innovations usually begin with a few individuals and that the academic establishment resists until the case for them proves overwhelming (this argument can generically "validate" all pseudo-science).

"Note" = argumentative turn of phrase. "Anglo-Saxon world": dubious logic - are non-Anglo-Saxon linguists ipso facto incompetent? "In favour of Nostratics..." - without a citation this sentence amounts to original research. "Pseudo-science" - POV, and irrelevant to Nostratic, which, however wrong it may be, is not pseudo-science, given its espousal by serious linguists.

Again, one can point out the lack of intellectual credentials of some of the persons advocating the Nostratic hypothesis. Contrariwise, one could point out that some of the most distinguished linguists of the twentieth century (such as Holger Pedersen and Joseph Greenberg) favored Nostratic or similar theories.

"Again" = argumentative turn of phrase. "Lack of intellectual credentials..." - nonsensical argument: any theory may be supported by non-credentialed amateurs - the critical point is whether some credentialed professionals support it, which they do in the case of Nostratic, as the following sentence concedes. Amounts to a smear, ergo POV.

Only one comfort remains for those perplexed by the ongoing furor: that science has a way of eventually correcting itself. Time will tell whether the Nostratic theory resembles the grain of sand that produces the pearl, or just resembles a grain of sand.

Highly rhetorical, unencyclopediac. As a quotation from a Reliable Source, this might OK, but not from a Wikipedia author.

I admit that the shortcomings I've pointed out are not restricted to this section, but could serve as a basis for tightening up the whole article.None of the foregoing means, by the way, that I think Nostratic is a winner - I have no qualifications to judge that - just that if the facts are as clear as people say, they should be able to speak for themselves.--Chris 16:11, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

I think the statements are describing arguments of proponents and opponents of Nostratic (and reasonably accurate as such), not being stated as unqualified fact or as the author's opinion. Describing the various points of view and their arguments is completely appropriate to WP:NPOV, although the tone and phrasing could use improvement, and more specific and sourced statements would of course be better.. --JWB 18:00, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

I think we're close to agreement here. What I'm thinking of doing is getting hold of a couple general linguistics texts - the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language comes to mind, but I'm sure there are introductory textbooks and so on that are suitable - and summarize their take on the controversy. Not that I will do this today. I might also want to change Prospects to Status, since discussing the prospects of a theory seems inherently speculative.--Chris 18:07, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

The truth about Nostratic is that hardly any linguists in the world accept it as valid. Now, whether it actually is valid or not it a different matter from what the overwhelming academic opinion of its veracity is. As Wikipedia is not meant to be proposing what is "right," but instead presenting the viewpoints on what it "right"--giving more emphasis on views held by the majority of specialists--the proper stance to take in this article, in my opinion, is one that makes it much clearer than the present version that hardly any linguists accept Nostratic or the methods used by its proponents, but give the pro-Nostratic side their fair say (it's obvious where my bias lies--but I will do my best to let them have their fair say). Anyway. What I'm getting at is, I don't at all see how this section is even marginally encyclopedic. All of your points, Chris, are good. This is pro-Nostratic arguments, with weird poetry-like rhetorical stuff mixed in, but it doesn't actually present any evidence at all in favor of the hypothesis, since it's trying to pretend it's neutral. Pro-Nostratic arguments should have substance to them--there are a number of valid defenses of the hypothesis. I can't see the point of this section. It adds nothing to the article, at least at this point. A rewritten version, which reasonably and accurately and fairly presents both sides of the debate, would of course be fantastic. I...hope I did't just rant. Crud. Well, whatever. Take care, both of you, --Red Newt 09:18, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Follow-up - Reading the article over again, I find it's pretty good on the whole. The "Prospects" section is the only one I would criticise at all harshly.--Chris 18:22, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

Tik/pal challenge

Who added all those languages? Was it a serious linguist, or a Wikipedian? It doesn't seem too serious to me. 32.106.193.203 18:33, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Tricky question, given the general esteem with which expertise is regarded here. The two etymologies here come from On the Origin of Languages by Merritt Ruhlen. Chapter 14, "Global Etymologies," by John D. Bengtson and Ruhlen. They're good examples of the technique of mass lexical comparison (a rough triangulation of phonological and semantic similarities without regular phonological correspondence rules, validated by massing examples against chance rather than by predictable form). Now, whether that amounts to the work of a "serious linguist" is precisely the point on which linguists themselves seem to be divided. 66.142.229.12

Thanks, but what's 'given the general esteem with which expertise is regarded here' supposed to mean? I hold expertise in high regard. It's just that I've just come up with about 45 examples for why *tik is two and *pal is one. I'll show them to my professors, and then get back to y'all. 32.106.193.203 21:21, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

For Wikipedians, the gold standard of expertise is peer-reviewed publications in recognised journals or from recognized academic presses. Pretty simple, really. Several pro-Nostratic publications meet this standard, so that makes the views expressed in them Wikipediable. Naturally, you can cite critical opinions from other experts. What you can't do is cite your own independent research.

I know that :). But perhaps I can get it published, or have them publish it.32.106.193.203 10:25, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Now, on another topic, what's this supposed to mean?

...but well-studied families show forms hardly recognizable as related to *tik (such as French /dwa/, doigt) (Trask 1996:394-5).

As far as I know, French doigt 'finger' comes from Latin digitus, which, on the surface at least, seems a very plausible cognate of *tik. So what's the objection? If anti-Nostraticists are as querelouos as Trask seems to be here, maybe Nostratics deserves a break.--Chris 22:44, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Right, that's his point, actually. Since we have written records of French's history, we know that /dwa/ was once digitus, which looks a heck of a lot more like *tik than /dwa/. If French and Latin had been unwritten until the last century or two (as many or most of the languages used in the *tik reconstruction were), we would have no way of knowing that /dwa/ "should" be regarded as a reflex of *tik. Salmons' (Trask is just summarizing his arguments) point is that in unwritten languages, we end up with all these forms virtually identical to *tik, or at least clearly recognizable as "cognates", but in well-studied languages with long written records or well-studied families with good reconstructions, we end up with all these forms that look very little like *tik, but we "know" they're cognates because the ancestral forms did look like *tik. This is unlikely to be some sort of weird coincidence, where all languages that have long written records suddenly underwent changes that obscured the form of *tik just after they were written down (or just after they split up into various daughter languages), while all unwritten languages never underwent such changes. What IS likely is that for families with known histories, proponents of Mass Comparison go back as far as can be reconstructed and THEN look for cognates--and the fact that it is in the oldest recoverable forms of well-studied languages that "cognates" look most like *tik, while for poorly-studied languages it's the present-day forms, suggests that what the method does is find words that LOOK similar to *tik in WHATEVER language it is applied to, rather than finding COGNATES of *tik. Which if true is a very serious problem, because though the method is designed to find words that look alike, this is supposed to be because they ARE cognates; if they're not, the mass comparison method falls apart. --Red Newt 04:20, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Ah, that makes sense. But surely the article needs some expansion around that point.--Chris 05:48, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

The mass comparison argument is that even if in most cases cognates have changed enough to be unrecognizable, there will still be a few cases where they haven't, and that when you compare a large number of words and languages, you may be able to see statistically significant connections even if the good cases are only a few percent, especially if the nonrelated cases can be assumed be random.

Also, some mass comparison studies have used as little as the first consonant, or even just the point of articulation of the first consonant, as the data for comparison. For some of these loose criteria, /tik/ and /dwa/ would be considered a match. Relaxed criteria also increase the number of random matches, but again, if the noise signal is filtered out, it may still be possible to recover useful data. --JWB 20:13, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

POV

I've tried to revise what seemed to me some recently accumulated POV stuff. "Vast majority"? We'd need a headcount for that to be meaningful. The only actual reversion was to restore Ed Finnegan's take -- he's a linguist of stature, his formulation is simple and direct, a relevant remark by a competent authority. Adamdavis

Whoops, sorry about that. And looking it over, it was too POV. A number of serious linguists do agree with the Nostratic hypothesis, and many try to use the comparative method (although they tend to be somewhat laxer in its application than most). Thanks for the changes! Take care, --Red Newt 04:27, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

I've noticed that the late Larry Trask - a fierce critic of Ruhlen's World hypothesis and some of Greenberg's hypothetical families - is actually fairly respectful of Nostratic. Perhaps the article should mention some of these more positive evalutions.

I'm going to strike the reference to World, since it seems like guilt by association.--Chris 18:43, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

That's true. He mentions in his book on historical linguistics that although the Nostratic hypothesis certainly needs a lot more investigation, linguists should be open-minded about it. The whole *tik/*pal section, now that you mention it, doesn't belong here at all; it's a demonstration of mass comparison and Proto-World claims, so it could be referenced there, but Nostraticists generally try to use the comparative method, although it's often claimed they use somewhat laxer criteria than mainstream linguists. I'm going to remove it, if no one objects. --Red Newt 22:12, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

---

Nice to see that people are starting to recognize the difference between Nostratic and Proto-World. No they aren't the same thing despite a persistent popular view that they are on the same level. --Glengordon01 11:18, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

---

Phonology, IPA

I just added the reconstructed sound system, taken from the Kaiser & Shevoroshkin reference, and transcribed the poem into IPA. I hope I haven't misunderstood Illich-Svitych's transcription – it is similar but not identical to that Kaiser & Shevoroshkin use. *wince*

I will later insert sound correspondences between Proto-Nostratic, Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Kartvelian, Proto-Afro-Asiatic, Proto-Uralic, Proto-Altaic, Proto-Turkic, Proto-Mongolic, Proto-Tungusic, and Proto-Dravidian; they are explained in the same reference. Maybe I'll add a couple of etymologies; the paper contains a respectable amount.

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 1:41 CEST | 2006/9/20

Added sound correspondences between Proto-Nostratic plosives and their derivatives according to Kaiser & Shevoroshkin (1988).

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 0:40 CEST | 2006/10/7

Can you add the etymologies of the words in the poem? --85.156.128.119 11:45, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

At least for some of them. Thank you for the idea! I won't be able to do it soon, however; I'm ill, and an exam is approaching (I'm a university student... not of linguistics).

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 15:37 CEST | 2006/10/11

Finished the sound correspondences as far as possible. I'll try to plug a few holes by scouring through the etymologies, but help would be greatly appreciated! I also wonder what the reconstruction of Proto-Uralic Kaiser & Shevoroshkin used looked like... it contains at least /ʁ/ and /ɬ/, while the one at Proto-Uralic language has only one "x"!

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 00:48 CEST | 2006/10/14

Update: I wondered if that reconstruction includes Yukaghir data. It clearly does not: Yukaghir has a /ʁ/, but also a /q/.

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 00:55 CEST | 2006/10/23

Added the vowels – for the most part from the etymologies, because Kaiser & Shevoroshkin only give a table that compares Proto-Nostratic, Uralic, Altaic, and Dravidian. Also fixed the supernumerary ejective in the poem. Etymologies next!

Most of the Criticisms section will have to be deleted (for being bullshit – follow that link!) or thoroughly revised.

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 00:51 CEST | 2006/10/18

Removed Proto-Turkic, -Mongolic and -Tungusic because Blažek has now published a complete correspondence table of phonemes within Altaic, including Korean and Japanese – see link at the bottom of the Altaic languages page. I suppose I'll have to copy that table to the Altaic languages page…

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 00:55 CEST | 2006/10/23

Spot on about the Criticisms section. There are 'criticisms' in that list which no linguists would ever make, such as that Nostratics - 'mainstream' Nostratics anyway - doesn't employ only regular sound correspondences! (Non-criticisms like this could only come from people who are under the misapprehension that Nostratic is one of Greenberg's mass-comparison speculations.) There used to be a section of replies to the criticisms but it got removed because a contributor thought it looked pro-Nostraticist (but it's not a matter of being pro- or anti-Nostratic; largely, it's a matter of not criticising what people aren't actually doing or claiming). Perhaps parts of this should be put back and integrated with the Criticisms section to give a balanced perspective on each of the valid points? I'll leave it to you 'cos I'm concentrating on the early sections and Urheimat when I get the chance. There's a fair bit still to do there.

Andrew Huckerby a.k.a. 172.141.153.188 19:30, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Much of the replies will probably end up in the rewritten criticisms section… but anyway I'll complete the table first. The (new) link to the Starling database has a correspondence table of affricates, so I'll add that. If you want to see really ludicrous "criticisms", go to Altaic languages – I mean, did anyone ever really claim that the Altaic languages were related because they lack grammatical gender!?! Either it's a weird 19^th-century phenomenon or the most embarrassing strawman ever.

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 21:45 CEST | 2006/10/23

Just added the affricates and voiceless fricatives from [2]. For the time being, I've ignored the voiced fricatives and the clusters with /w/ because the "Nostratic" on that page may just be Eurasiatic. Someone who actually understands that matter should check that.

Etymologies next! :-)

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 19:15 CEST | 2006/10/24

Can you translate the poem to proto-Uralic and Indo-European? --Muhaha 17:19, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Who, me? That would be interesting to do, but I can't do it.

BTW, the grammar of the poem is probably wrong (the word order, that is), and some etymologies can be found in the papers listed in the external links.

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 22:34 CET | 2006/10/31

Problems with the recent edits

It is good that there has been some extensive work on this article recently. Even so, I also perceive some problems in the way it has been edited, and I'd like to make some suggestions.

First, the extensive table of proposed sound correspondences does not serve a purpose in this article. It breaks the text and is only distracting. The article should present basic information about the Nostratic theory in a clear style; a good encyclopedia article should be a coherent and easy-to-follow text. Now the text almost gets buried under the numbered lists, huge tables with footnotes, etc. Therefore, I think that the table along with its explanations should moved to a separate article titled Nostratic sound correspondences or something similar, and only a brief description plus a link to it kept in the main article.

Second, the section on critcism should be converted into normal text instead of a numbered list. Moreover, some of the criticisms seem inexact or peripheral, while central issues concerning methodology and data should be explained in more detail. It should also be made more clear in the article that the majority of comparative linguists have not accepted the Nostratic hypothesis. As for references to the criticism section, I could try dig some up. --AAikio 14:46, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not going to register soon. If you want to make a separate article, maybe Proto-Nostratic language (as exists for Proto-Indo-European language and Proto-Semitic language), please go ahead! I agree that the long, unweildy table doesn't make for easy reading.

The criticism section needs to be entirely reworked. Many of the points in there are flat-out wrong, such as the claim that Nostraticists don't insist on regular sound correspondences.

References are, of course, always good.

Your friendly neighborhood armchair linguist :o)

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 16:09 CET | 2006/11/2

A couple of (comparatively) minor points to David Marjanovic: (1) There are a couple of problems with your addition on Elamite. First, it reads as if G. Starostin is the first to include Elamite in Nostratic and I'm certain that's not the case. Greenberg effectively included Elamite in Nostratic - although of course he didn't use the name - and he wasn't the first either. (I suspect it might have bveen Dolgopolsky; I'd say more, except most of my files and notes are at my other address.) Secondly, the AA/Elamite/Nostratic tripartition anticipates a separation between AA and 'Micro-Nostratic' that has barely been touched on at this stage in the article: it is not properly discussed until the following two paragraphs and seems out of place here. Moreover, the connection most frequently made (Blazek & Starostin dissenting) is still between Elamite & Dravidian, so if any subgrouping hypothesis deserves a brief mention in connection with Elamite it is that one. Your short insertion on G. Starostin's view is really not so much about Elamite as about the overall coherence of Nostratic & its internal subgrouping and as such, belongs naturally with the AA/Eurasiatic discussion. For all these reasons, I've taken the liberty of moving it and inserting a new sentence on Elamite; I hope youi don't mind. 217.23.229.250 14:37, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't mind; you put it exactly in the right place! :-) I just stumbled over that pdf, found that it seems to do a good job of arguing against Elamo-Dravidian (a hypothesis which I had liked for geographical reasons), and tried to put into the article what it says about Nostratic, just like how I gathered the pronoun table, without caring about the overall layout or readability of the whole thing (which is still not breathtaking).

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 17:50 CET | 2006/11/4

Oh, and (2): the external links you've put in the text result in the printed version getting bloated out with long unwieldy internet addresses, several of which just duplicate the ones in References & External Links. Most of it may be moved into the proposed new article but the same problem will recur there. Personally I'd just state the author & date in the text where possible and leave the other details to References and Links.

Right. I'll see what I can do. (Even though I can hardly imagine people using the printed version. What for?)

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 17:52 CET | 2006/11/4

Not everybody has a laptop; more importantly, some of us still like stuff that we can read behind a newspaper in the pub.

217.23.229.250 14:31, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Having said all that - and despite the problem with the Correspondences as pointed out by Ante Aikio - I've a lot of respect for what you've been trying to do with this article. I wish we saw the same enthusiasm from some of the previous contributors who left it in a mess. 217.23.229.250 14:44, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Even more so because at least some of the previous contributors were actual linguists who really had access to literature! Most of my information comes from that paper from 1988! I look at the Dravidian roots in the Starling database and am baffled because they contain /d/ and /g/!

Update: That's because newer reconstructions of Proto-Dravidian, mentioned and used by Starostin (1998), assume a voice constrast instead of a length contrast for plosives. This seems to make good sense, so I just changed the correspondence table. However, they also find a contrast between dental and alveolar plosives, and I don't know how to relate this to anything in Kaiser & Shevoroshkin. Are there any Dravidianists out there?

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 13:33 CET | 2006/11/11

The only reason I'm working on this article is that I find myself able to steal enough time, apparently unlike just about anyone else. Do you happen to know if Mother Tongue is available online anywhere (except the TOCs)?

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 17:58 CET | 2006/11/4

Don't I wish! All I know is that, apart from that issue 31, it seems to be unavailable anywhere that I've looked. There are MT articles on Borean and 'Afro-Eurasian' (i.e. a postulated grouping of Nostratic with Dene-Caucasian) that I've been stalking for years, although it's only fair to point out that my researches have also been stalled for years through personal circumstances, and I've not been online for long, so I wouldn't be surprised if I've missed something somewhere. Wish I could be of help. Maybe someone in the know, a friendly neighbourhood professional linguist, say, can point us amateurs in the right direction?

Andrew Huckerby 217.23.229.250 14:31, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Added date & provenance of Elamite article. It is actually from Mother Tongue; my source [3] supplies the date (2002) and volume number (VII) but not the edition, and I can't be certain that the page numbering belongs to the original MT article. Since the Bengtson & Norquest references are from 1998, MT 31 should be an edition from an earlier volume, so MT '7' AND '31' in the refs. are not on the same level. The numbering will have to be completed by somebody familiar with the journal. 217.23.229.250 16:09, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, there's the journal, and there's the newsletter (later renamed "The Long Ranger"). The "volume 31" that is online belongs to the newsletter, not to the journal.

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 13:36 CET | 2006/11/11

Cognates

Compiled the pronoun table from the cited sources. There's much to explain about it, but it's too late for "today".

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 00:29 CET | 2006/11/3

Added most footnotes.

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 00:25 CET | 2006/11/4

Finished the footnotes and removed some mistakes from the table. Also added Etruscan.

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 17:34 CET | 2006/11/5

What part of the Nostratic hypothesis is considered the least controversial?--Muhaha 20:48, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Probably none. What do you mean exactly? Strictly speaking the hypothesis only consists of the idea that the language families in question are related.

You might say that it's controversial whether Sumerian is Nostratic or Dené-Caucasian – but the long-range people don't quarrel much among themselves (sometimes the same people work on both, like the late S. Starostin), and there seems to be very, very little research on the affinities of Sumerian.

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 21:34 CET | 2006/11/9

The "Criticisms" section

I have removed the following paragraphs:

1. Many modern linguists express considerable skepticism of the data put forward to demonstrate interrelationships between the various language families under the Nostratic umbrella. The main criticism of Nostratic holds that the methodology used leads people to see patterns that actually result from coincidences. In reconstructing Nostratic, supporters do not use the techniques that linguists have established to prevent false positives, such as insisting on examining only regular sound shifts.

That's simply wrong. There are reconstructions of regular sound correspondences and a reconstruction of the Proto-Nostratic language, as I hope the table I inserted makes clear. Nostratic is not a result of mass lexical comparison (scare words: Amerind, Greenberg, Ruhlen). Whoever inserted that paragraph must have confused ignorance with knowledge.

1. Most of the proposed phono-semantic sets appear much more speculative than those used to group languages into the accepted families — one technique used to support a similar super-family famously "demonstrated" in the 1960s that English belonged to a proposed Central-American language family.

I don't quite understand this, but it's probably a critique of mass lexical comparison and therefore does not apply. To me, what the Nostraticists do looks like the good old comparative method. Could someone clarify that?

1. The proposed Nostratic language "super-family" hypothesis suggests links between many Eurasian language families. The precise nature of the links remains the subject of debate, however, as proponents have not agreed on the set of families to include.

Yeah, so what? Was Indo-European "wrong" before everyone agreed to include the Anatolian languages? I consider it relevant that, to the contrary, everyone seems to agree on not including Basque, (North) Caucasian, Burushaski, Yeniseian, and Sino-Tibetan in Nostratic (see Bengtson 1998), showing that, whatever the merits of the Nostratic hypothesis, it does not consist of merely sweeping up everything into a geographical grouping.

1. Many mainstream linguists have dismissed claims (by Aharon Dolgopolsky, among others) that the words reconstructed for Proto-Nostratic point to a pre-agricultural society in the Middle East (as one might expect for a language pre-dating Proto-Indo-European).

While I don't have an opinion about that, it simply doesn't matter. It is not a criticism of the Nostratic hypothesis, it's a criticism of Dolgopolsky's interpretation of his own particular reconstruction of Proto-Nostratic. Where and when that language was spoken has no bearing on the question whether it ever existed in the first place. Nobody claims Indo-European is fictitious just because the Kurgan folks and the Anatolian folks can't agree.

1. Some linguists also object to the assumption that languages must ultimately all stem from one reconstructable root. Linguists know that unrelated languages in close geographical proximity can trade vocabulary, syntax, and other features, and some suggest that the present-day "family" structure of languages may simply exemplify an aberration.

This, too, is irrelevant. Monogenesis of all languages of the world is not a necessary assumption for the Nostratic hypothesis. Why should it be? Please. (That said, I don't understand why monogenesis isn't the default assumption and the burden of evidence on any dissenters. Or is it?)

1. Certain linguists suggest that in the absence of rapid technological change (which did not occur prior to about the 8th millennium BC) the tendency for languages to trade features with each other would drown out the tendency of languages to evolve. In such circumstances, the axiom that languages change in a manner that can be reversed does not hold before a certain point in the past, and one thus cannot reconstruct older proto-languages (Nostratic or otherwise) using the techniques used to reconstruct the proto-languages of the accepted major language families (all of which, linguists believe, post-date the invention of agriculture).

Clearly this is backwards. If we can reconstruct a language that was spoken before whatever arbitrary date happens to be put forth, then the hypothesis of that particular limit is disproven, not the other way around. – BTW, why should "rapid technological change" have anything to do with language evolution? Shouldn't it be assumed that borrowings are more likely to occur when there's more trade, and that there's more trade when there is more stuff and technology to trade? Isn't the most common case of lexical borrowing when a word is imported along with the thing it describes?

I have kept the following paragraphs in:

1. Certain critiques have pointed out that the data from individual, established language families that is cited in Nostratic comparisons often involves a high degree of errors; Campbell (1998) demonstrates this for Uralic data.

If true – and I'm definitely not in a position to judge that – it's a perfectly valid criticism. Does someone happen to have a pdf of Campbell (1998)? After all, most of the data I've used to expand the article is ten years older (Kaiser & Shevoroshkin 1988) and therefore runs a high risk of containing all those errors!

1. The technique of comparing grammatical structures (as opposed to words) has suggested to some that the Nostratic candidates lack interrelatedness.

I only added the template. I don't quite understand the criticism, though. Several grammatical suffixes have been reconstructed for Proto-Nostratic (I hope to put a table into the article later today). More importantly, how can you ever show that two languages are not related? Can't one only show a negative here – that there's no evidence to consider them related?

The criticism section is now very short, maybe shorter than it deserves. (After all, Nostratic is not as plain obvious as Indo-European or Algonquian or Athabaskan.) Therefore I encourage everyone to expand it – but please not by putting plain falsehoods and obvious logical fallacies in again.

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 12:10 CET | 2006/11/13

Everything else

I've tried to clean up the introduction, but I can't get much beyond that. The Background section still needs a cleanup. For example, does PIE really have so many words for flat, open landscapes? Gamq'relidze & Ivanov, at least, claim it has a lot of words for mountains, mountain lakes, and the like – even one for "snow leopard"!

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 13:05 CET | 2006/11/13

Added the morphology.

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 20:36 CET | 2006/11/17

Added more on grammar.

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 21:18 CET | 2006/11/17