Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!bb3.andrew.cmu.edu!newsfeed.pitt.edu!scramble.lm.com!news.math.psu.edu!news.cac.psu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!nntp.crl.com!pacbell.com!amdahl.com!amd!netcomsv!uu4news.netcom.com!netcomsv!uu3news.netcom.com!netcom.com!alderson
From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Nostratic
In-Reply-To: sah@mscsv1.dl.ac.uk's message of 07 Jun 1996 10:00:00 GMT
Message-ID: <aldersonDsnIMK.Duv@netcom.com>
Reply-To: alderson@netcom.com
Fcc: /u9/alderson/postings
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <SAH.96Jun7110001@mscsv1.dl.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1996 22:32:44 GMT
Lines: 30
Sender: alderson@netcom12.netcom.com

In article <SAH.96Jun7110001@mscsv1.dl.ac.uk> sah@mscsv1.dl.ac.uk
(S.A.T. Haldane) writes:

>I'm not a linguist, merely an interested amateur. I've heard the term
>'nostratic' bandied about but I'm not sure what it means. Can anyone please
>explain it to me? Is it, as I suspect, a common ancestor language to language
>groups such as Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic? If anyone can recommend me
>any good books on the topic (or anything relating to the tracing back of
>language groups to proto-languages really since it's such a fascinating topic)
>I'd be grateful.

Nostratic was first proposed by Holger Pedersen in 1903 as the hypothetical
ancestor of the Indo-European, Hamito-Semitic, Finno-Ugric/Uralic, and Altaic
language families.  It was equated with Proto-Indo-European/Hamito-Semitic by
most scholars in the early part of the century, but some work was done on it by
Albert Cuny.

Interest was revived by Illich-Svitych in the 1960s; his work was continued by
a group of scholars in Moscow, most especially Aharon Dolgopolskij and Vitaly
Shevoroshkin.  Other scholars whose names are associated with Nostratic studies
are Alexis Manaster-Ramer and Alan Bomhard; a similar proposal, Eurasiatic, has
been put forth by Joseph Greenberg.

The name of the proposed superfamily is dreived from the Latin _nostras_
"fellow countryman."
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
