It isn’t often that Nostratic makes its way into the pages of the Washington Post. Starting in the 16th century people bagan to notice the similarities among the languages spoken from Ireland to India. By the 19th century it was suggested that languages as different as Irish Gaelic and Armenian were all actually members of one large family of languages, the Indo-European language family.
When you get right down to it there are only a couple of likely theories for how languages developed in the first place. Either human beings developed languages many, many times which resulted in who knows how many completely distinct language families, human beings developed languages a few times and that’s reflected in a few language superfamilies, or that human beings developed language just once and all languages are ultimately related. Some scholars have identified three language superfamilies: Nostratic (which includes the Indo-European language family, the Uralic languages—Finnish, Hungarian, and others, and the Afroasiatic languges—those include the Semitic languages, Berber, Chadic, Egyptian, etc.), the Dené–Caucasian language superfamily (which includes the Sino-Tibetan languages, Basque, the North Caucasian languages, and the Na-Dené languages—the Athabaskan, Tlingit, and Haida languages), and the Austric superfamily (languages spoken in East Asia and the Pacific).
The process generally used for identifying these language relationships is one of searching for cognates and applying principles of phonemic change, i.e. what might be a “p” in a Romance language becomes an “f” in Germanic languages. For example, Italian pesce is cognate with German Fisch.
It’s not a mainstream view in linguistics. Many linguists think that the people constructing these hypothetical superfamilies are extending the process much too far. That brings us to the Washington Post article:
A new study, however, suggests that’s not always true.
A team of researchers has come up with a list of two dozen “ultraconserved words†that have survived 150 centuries. It includes some predictable entries: “mother,†“not,†“what,†“to hear†and “man.†It also contains surprises: “to flow,†“ashes†and “worm.â€
The existence of the long-lived words suggests there was a “proto-Eurasiatic†language that was the common ancestor to about 700 contemporary languages that are the native tongues of more than half the world’s people.
I first learned about language families while paging through an old copy of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary nearly 50 years ago (I used to read the dictionary). I was first exposed to the idea of language superfamilies through the works of Merritt Ruhlen—I have several of his books on my shelf.
To be honest I have my doubts even about the old family tree structure proposed for the Indo-European languages and, possibly, about language families themselves. I think a more complex network model is probably more realistic.
The guys (actually a girl this time) over at Language Log don’t think much of either the linguistics or the statistics of this.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4612
The only thing I would add to the comments there, John, are that I suspect the linguists of 100 years from now would be as horrified at the bogus reconstructions of today as the commenters are at those of a century ago.
I was going to mention the same site as Burgess, notice a few comments to the effect that the study relies about selective data from an etymological dictionary circa 1928-1932, which must have been much older than Dave’s Webster’s.
Probably not by much. The edition that I read had been my dad’s in college.
I have a 1939 edition of Webster’s on my bookshelf right now. I just looked through it and there is a section on etymology but it just covers the basics.
As a cutting edge publication for its day, it has technical dictionaries for naval terms, radio words, wireless words, photography, aviation, the automobile, boxing, baseball, basketball, football, golf, tennis, lacrosse, polo, yachting and “Americanisms.” It also has a handy dictionary of “forms of address” so that if there’s ever another “Lord Lieutenant of Ireland” I’ll know the proper way to pen a letter to him. Finally a “dictionary of everyday errors” contains many entries we’d be familiar with today.
Try looking up “Indo-European”.
The 1939 Webster dictionary gives this definition: “pertaining to the family of Aryan languages extending from India over Europe.”