Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!petrich
From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Re: Derivation of "nostratic"
Message-ID: <petrichD256Ho.MG3@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <3en7ke$10d@arc.electriciti.com>
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 1995 14:20:11 GMT
Lines: 22

In article <3en7ke$10d@arc.electriciti.com>,
Ted Bear  <tbear@powergrid.electriciti.com> wrote:
>Can anyone tell me what "nostratic" comes from?  Romance "our"?  
>Thanks.

	It was coined by the Danish linguist Holgar Pedersen from Latin 
_noster_ ("our" -- "our language"), so Romance is not too far off :-)

	It's a proposed language macro-family containing Indo-European, 
Uralic/Yukaghir, Altaic, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut, Dravidian, 
Kartvelian, and Afro-Asiatic.

	I have a whole list of references on Nostratic that I'll probably 
repost some time (after some rewriting), but for starters, check out 
Vitaly Shevoroshkin's works. He gives, among other things, a lot of 
reconstructed Nostratic vocabulary.

-- 
Loren Petrich, the Master Blaster
petrich@netcom.com                   Happiness is a fast Macintosh
lip@s1.gov                           And a fast train

