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Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence
The "Nostratic" hypothesis -- positing a common linguistic ancestor for a wide range of language families including Indo-European, Uralic, and Afro-Asiatic -- has produced one of the most enduring and often intense controversies in linguistics. Overwhelmingly, though, both supporters of the hypothesis and those who reject it have not dealt directly with one another's arguments. This volume brings together selected representatives of both sides, as well as a number of agnostic historical linguists, with the aim of examining the evidence for this particular hypothesis in the context of distant genetic relationships generally.The volume contains discussion of variants of the Nostratic hypothesis (A. Bomhard; J. Greenberg; A. Manaster-Ramer, K. Baertsch, K. Adams, & P. Michalove), the mathematics of chance in determining the relationships posited for Nostratic (R. Oswalt; D. Ringe), and the evidence from particular branches posited in Nostratic (L. Campbell; C. Hodge; A. Vovin), with responses and additional discussion by E. Hamp, B. Vine, W. Baxter and B. Comrie.
298 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
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May 9, 2016
The collection Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence grew out of the Second Workshop on Comparative Linguistics, held at Eastern Michigan University in the fall of 1993. It sets up a dialogue between figures who favour the idea of a macrofamily including the Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic etc. languages and those mainstream linguists who feel that these long-range comparisons are not convincing. While Allan R. Bomhard's contributes a paper representing the author's very individual Nostratic views, Nostratic is usually treated here as the Moscow School stemming from the work of Illich-Svitych.
The main points against Nostratic proposals are generally the same across the papers contributed by the critics. Perhaps the most devastating is that some Nostraticists stick to obsolete reconstructions (e.g. PIE roots without laryngeals) because to update the reconstructions would undo all the sound correspondences they established. This basically challenges Nostraticists to explain how they are not being academically dishonest. There are also the problems that Nostratic seems a moving target, with the exact families that make it up changing often; that Nostraticists are too willing to accept wide semantic latitude and irregular sound correspondences; and that many of the sound changes proposed violate typological universals (such as Illich-Svitych's claim that glottalic obstruents were unmarked).
For me, a graduate student of Finno-Ugrian linguistics, the most important paper may be that of Lyle Campbell. In "Nostratic: A Personal Assessment" the Uralic and Native American linguist shows how Illych-Svitych's Uralic data is completely without foundation, full of purported Uralic roots that no Uralicist recognizes, many of which even violate well-established phonotactic rules. The paper should help settle that no attempts to link Uralic to other language families work, and that similarities in lexicon between the Uralic proto-language and Proto-Indo-European are best explained as contact phenomena. Alexander Vovin's paper "Nostratic and Altaic" makes the remarkable argument that what Nostraticists consider one of their strongest points--the similarity of personal pronouns across these languages--actually stands against Nostratic when one begins to build sound correspondences: one simply can't reconcile the initial b- in the Turkic 1 sg. pronoun against *m in the other languages.
While this collection is too academic to itself counter the frequent sensationalism of Nostratic or Proto-World ideas in the popular press, it can provide linguists with effective rebuttals that they can assimilate and then explain more appropriately to whatever audience.
The main points against Nostratic proposals are generally the same across the papers contributed by the critics. Perhaps the most devastating is that some Nostraticists stick to obsolete reconstructions (e.g. PIE roots without laryngeals) because to update the reconstructions would undo all the sound correspondences they established. This basically challenges Nostraticists to explain how they are not being academically dishonest. There are also the problems that Nostratic seems a moving target, with the exact families that make it up changing often; that Nostraticists are too willing to accept wide semantic latitude and irregular sound correspondences; and that many of the sound changes proposed violate typological universals (such as Illich-Svitych's claim that glottalic obstruents were unmarked).
For me, a graduate student of Finno-Ugrian linguistics, the most important paper may be that of Lyle Campbell. In "Nostratic: A Personal Assessment" the Uralic and Native American linguist shows how Illych-Svitych's Uralic data is completely without foundation, full of purported Uralic roots that no Uralicist recognizes, many of which even violate well-established phonotactic rules. The paper should help settle that no attempts to link Uralic to other language families work, and that similarities in lexicon between the Uralic proto-language and Proto-Indo-European are best explained as contact phenomena. Alexander Vovin's paper "Nostratic and Altaic" makes the remarkable argument that what Nostraticists consider one of their strongest points--the similarity of personal pronouns across these languages--actually stands against Nostratic when one begins to build sound correspondences: one simply can't reconcile the initial b- in the Turkic 1 sg. pronoun against *m in the other languages.
While this collection is too academic to itself counter the frequent sensationalism of Nostratic or Proto-World ideas in the popular press, it can provide linguists with effective rebuttals that they can assimilate and then explain more appropriately to whatever audience.
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