Re: THEORY: A possible Proto-World phonology

>From: Oskar Gudlaugsson <hr_oskar@...>

>Lars:
>
>What's Nostratic? Something Pre-IE? I haven't heard of it, so please inform
>me :)
>
>Oskar
Hi, my name is not Lars.  But I'll answer.

Nostratic, from Latin _noster_ "our" (that is, "our language"), is a
theoretical ancestor of several language familes.  The consensus is that it
includes the following:

Afro-Asiatic > Chadic, Omotic, Cushitic, Berber, Egyptian, Semitic

Indo-European > Celtic, Germanic, Italic-Latin, Venetic, Illyrian-Albanian,
Hellenic-Greek, Baltic, Slavonic, Anatolian-Hittite, Thracian-Armenian,
Indo-Iranian (> Indo-Aryan-Sanskrit and Iranian-Avestan) and Tocharian.

Kartvelian > Georgian and three others

Uralic > Finno-Ugric (> Finnic, Ugric-Hungarian), Samoyed, Ket-Yukaghir

Altaic > Turkic, Mongolian, Tungusic, Korean (?)

Dravidian > North, South (> Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam)

Some also include Eskimo-Aleut, Gilyak, Ainu, Basque, Sumerian, Burushaski
and Japanese.  I've even read one who claimed the Penutian languages of
California are Nostratic!

Though proposed by a Dane about 100 years ago, the most work done on the
language, believed to have been spoken 12-15 thousand years ago  after the
last Ice Age, is a work mostly of Soviet/Russian linguists.  The late
Vladimir Ilich-Svitych is most well-known.  He published a list of a couple
thousand reconstructed word roots, which is (as far as I know) only found in
Russian and hard to find anyway.  Allan Bomhard, an American (?), came up
with another list of reconstructions.  A third authority, a Russian-Israeli
named Aharon Dolgopolsky, is working on his own list of root words, which
will probably be published no sooner than 2001 or '02.  (I do have one of
his works, which gives 125 roots which pertain to what the Nostratics were
like geographically, culturally and technologically.)

Dolgopolsky postulated that the origin of the Proto-Nostratic people is
probably lower Mesopotamia.  From there went Afro-Asiatic west and south
(through Egypt and Arabia), Indo-European north to Asia Minor then west
through Greece, and north through the Caucasus, Altaic east and north into
central/eastern Asia including Siberia, and Dravidian east and south into
India.

I think the culture mentioned was New Stone Age, and the people had a basic
understanding of farming, herding and tool use.

Daniel A. Wier  ¶¦¬þ
Lufkin, Texas USA
http://communities.msn.com/DannysDoubleWideontheWeb

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