Nostratic languages
The hypothesis has fallen out of favour since the latter half of the 20th century and has limited degrees of acceptance, predominantly among a minority of Russian linguists.
[11] Proposed alternative names such as Mitian, formed from the characteristic Nostratic first- and second-person pronouns mi 'I' and ti 'you' (more accurately 'thee'),[12] have not attained the same currency.
An early supporter was the French linguist Albert Cuny—better known for his role in the development of the laryngeal theory[13]—who published his Recherches sur le vocalisme, le consonantisme et la formation des racines en « nostratique », ancêtre de l'indo-européen et du chamito-sémitique ('Researches on the Vocalism, Consonantism, and Formation of Roots in "Nostratic", Ancestor of Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic') in 1943.
In Trombetti's time, a widely held view on classifying languages was that similarity in inflections is the surest proof of genetic relationship.
[17] Following Pedersen, Illich-Svitych, and Dolgopolsky, most advocates of the theory have included Afroasiatic, though criticisms by Joseph Greenberg and others from the late 1980s onward suggested a reassessment of this position.
At about this time Russian Nostraticists, notably Sergei Starostin, constructed a revised version of Nostratic which was slightly broader than Greenberg's grouping but which similarly left out Afroasiatic.
Greenberg basically agreed with the Nostratic concept, though he stressed a deep internal division between its northern 'tier' (his Eurasiatic) and a southern 'tier' (principally Afroasiatic and Dravidian).
Georgiy Starostin (2002) arrives at a tripartite overall grouping: he considers Afroasiatic, Nostratic and Elamite to be roughly equidistant and more closely related to each other than to anything else.
[19] Sergei Starostin's school has now re-included Afroasiatic in a broadly defined Nostratic, while reserving the term Eurasiatic to designate the narrower subgrouping which comprises the rest of the macrofamily.
The following table summarizes the constituent language families of Nostratic, as described by Holger Pedersen, Vladislav Illich-Svitych, Sergei Starostin, and Aharon Dolgopolsky.
Defenders of the Nostratic theory argue that were this to be true, it would remain that in classifying languages genetically, positives count for vastly more than negatives (Ruhlen 1994).
Pedersen's original Nostratic proposal synthesized earlier macrofamilies, some of which, including Indo-Uralic, involved extensive comparison of inflections.
Critics argue that were one to collect all the words from the various known Indo-European languages and dialects which have at least one of any four meanings, one could easily form a list that would cover any conceivable combination of two consonants and a vowel (of which there are only about 20×20×5 = 2000).
[28] In summary, Campbell and Poser reject the Nostratic hypothesis and, as a parting shot, state that they "seriously doubt that further research will result in any significant support for this hypothesized macro-family.
Much of the IE agricultural lexicon is not shared among all branches and seems to have been borrowed, thus supporting the view that the expansion of IE languages was post-Neolithic rather than a Neolithic one as postulated by Renfrew's theory.
