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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Derivation of "nostratic"
In-Reply-To: petrich@netcom.com's message of Mon, 9 Jan 1995 14:20:11 GMT
Message-ID: <aldersonD25MFp.Bwy@netcom.com>
Reply-To: alderson@netcom.com
Fcc: /u52/alderson/postings
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <3en7ke$10d@arc.electriciti.com> <petrichD256Ho.MG3@netcom.com>
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 1995 20:04:37 GMT
Lines: 22

In article <petrichD256Ho.MG3@netcom.com> petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
writes:

>In article <3en7ke$10d@arc.electriciti.com>,
>Ted Bear  <tbear@powergrid.electriciti.com> wrote:

>>Can anyone tell me what "nostratic" comes from?  Romance "our"?  

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

Close, but not quite right.

Holger Pedersen coined the term Nostratic from the Latin _nostras_ "countryman"
(that is, "one from the same country").  As far as I can tell, he first used it
in an article from 1903 on Old Turkic inscriptions (cited in his _The Discovery
of Language:  Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century_).
-- 
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_
