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 Kartvelian Dravidian Gilyak Etruscan

Eurasiatic is a proposed language macrofamily that includes many language families historically spoken in northern Eurasia. It was first proposed by Joseph Greenberg in the 1990s. Greenberg's theory failed to gain widespread support as many linguists questioned his methodology, in particular his use of mass comparison. In 2013, Mark Pagel and three colleagues published what they believe is independent statistical evidence for a Eurasiatic language family. Their research was able to date a group of core words back roughly 15,000 years.

The proposed branches of Eurasiatic vary slightly by proposal, but generally include Indo-European, Altaic, Chukchi-Kamchatkan and most groups of Eskimo–Aleut. Uralic-Yukaghir and Japonic-Korean are considered to be independent branches under Eurasiatic theory, but are sometimes subsumed under Altaic in other classification systems.

Some proposals would group Eurasiatic with even larger macrofamilies such as Nostratic. Like, Eurasiatic these larger groupings are not well accepted in mainstream linguistics.

History

In the 1990s, Joseph Greenberg proposed the Eurasiatic language family, building upon his earlier work.

In 1994 Merritt Ruhlen, claimed 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.

Greenberg's Eurasiatic hypothesis has been 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. The primary criticism of comparative methods is that cognates are assumed to have a common origin on the basis of similar sounds and word meanings. It is generally assumed that semantic and phonetic corruption destroys any trace of original sound and meaning within 5,000 to 9,000 years making the application of comparative methods to ancient superfamilies highly questionable. Additionally, apparent cognates can arise by chance or from loan words. Without the existence of statistical estimates of chance collisions, conclusions based on comparison alone are thus viewed as doubtful.

Pagel et al.

In 2013, Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, and Andrew Meadea published statistic evidence that attempts to overcome these objections. According to their earlier work, most words exhibit a "half-life" of between 2,000 and 4,000 years, consistent with existing theories of linguistic replacement. However, they also identified some words – numerals, pronouns, and certain adverbs – exhibit a such slower rate of replacement with half-lives of 10,000 to 20,000 or more years. Drawing from research in a diverse group of modern language, the authors were able show the same slow replacement rates for key words regardless of current pronunciation. They conclude that a stable core of largely unchanging words is a common feature of all human discourse, and model replacement as inversely proportional to usage frequency.

Pagel et al. used hypothesized reconstructions of proto-words from seven language families listed in the Languages of the World Etymological Database (LWED). They limited their search to the 200 most common words as described by the Swadesh fundamental vocabulary list. Twelve words were excluded because proto-words had been proposed for two or less language families. The remaining 188 words yielded 3804 different reconstructions (sometimes with multiple constructions for a given family). In contrast to traditional comparative linguistics, the researchers did not attempt to "prove" any given pairing as cognates (based on similar sounds), but rather treat each pairing as treated as a binary random variable subject to error. The set of possible cognate pairings was then analyzed as a whole for predictable regularities.

Words were separated by into groupings based on how many language families appeared to be cognate for the word. Among the 188 words, cognate groups ranged from 1 (no cognates) to 7 (all languages cognate) with a mean of 2.3 ± 1.1.

On the basis of these "ultraconserved" words, Pagel et al. conclude that there is positive evidence for Eurastic independent of current cognate status. Using their statistical simulation, the team estimated that Eurastic dates to approximately 15,000 years ago.

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 years ago) into territory opened up by the melting of the Arctic ice cap". 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 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 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

Greenberg enumerates eight branches of Eurasiatic, as follows: Altaic, , Chukotian, Eskimo–Aleut, Etruscan, Indo-European, "Korean-Japanese-Ainu", Gilyak, and Uralic–Yukaghir.

Pagel et al. propose a slightly different branching, listing seven language families: Altaic, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Dravidia, the LWED grouping of Inuit (Eskimo) languages that does not include Aleut, Indo-European, Kartvelian, and Uralic.

Either list covers the languages spoken in most of Europe, Central and Northern Asia and (in the case of Eskimo-Aleut) on either side of the Bering strait.

Not all of the sub-groups listed by Greenberg are themselves accepted phylogenetic groupings. The structure of "Eurasiatic" broken down to widely-accepted groups is, then:

• Indo-European (widely recognized family)
• Uralic (widely recognized family)
• Macro-Altaic (controversial; Roy Andrew Miller 1971, Gustaf John Ramstedt 1952, Matthias Castrén 1844); "Macro-Altaic" has less scholarly acceptance than "Micro-Altaic" or Altaic proper, uniting only Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic
  • Micro-Altaic (not widely recognized)
    • Turkic (widely recognized family)
    • Mongolic (widely recognized family)
    • Tungusic (widely recognized family)
  • "Korean-Japanese-Ainu" (see classification of Japonic)
    • Korean (language isolate)
    • Japonic (widely recognized family)
  • Yukaghir (sometimes grouped under Paleosiberian)
• Paleosiberian (phylogenetic unity widely rejected)
  • Gilyak (Nivkh) (a language isolate; placed under Palaeo-Siberian by Starostin, not always included even within Nostratic)
  • Eskimo–Aleut (widely recognized family)
  • Chukotko-Kamchatkan (Chukotian) (widely recognized family)
• Tyrsenian (proposed grouping of three extinct languages
  • Etruscan (extinct)
  • Raetic (extinct)
  • Lemnian (extinct)

Roots

Ruhlen presents the following roots for Eurasiatic: kʷi (who?), 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).

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.

The last common ancestor of the family was estimated by phylogenetic analysis of ultraconserved words at roughly 15,000 years old, suggesting that these languages spread from a "refuge" area at the Last Glacial Maximum.

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. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Gell-Mann, Murray; Ilia Peiros; George Starostin (2009). "Distant Language Relationship: The Current Perspective" (PDF). Journal of Language Relationship (01).
• Harold Fleming. "Afrasian and Its Closest Relatives: the Borean Hypothesis".
• Georg, Stefan and Alexander Vovin. "From mass comparison to mess comparison: Greenberg's 'Eurasiatic' theory", Diachronica 20.2, 331–362.
• Goddard, Ives (1996). ""The Classification of the Native Languages of North America"". In William Sturtevant (ed.). Languages (Handbook of North American Indians Vol. 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.
• Mithun, Marianne. 1999. The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Nichols, Johanna. 1992. Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Pagel, Mark; Quentin D. Atkinson; Andreea S. Calude; Andrew Meadea (May 6, 2013). "Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia". PNAS. Retrieved May 8, 2013.
• Ruhlen, Merritt (1994). The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
• Trask, Larry (2000). The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

External links

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