Origin of the Nostratic hypothesis The last quarter of the 19th century saw various linguists putting forward proposals linking the
Indo-European languages to other language families, such as
Finno-Ugric and
Altaic. These proposals were taken much further in 1903 when
Holger Pedersen proposed "Nostratic", a common ancestor for the
Indo-European,
Finno-Ugric,
Samoyed,
Turkish,
Mongolian,
Manchu,
Yukaghir,
Eskimo,
Semitic, and
Hamitic languages, with the door left open to the eventual inclusion of others. The name
Nostratic derives from the
Latin word
nostrās, meaning 'our fellow-countryman' (plural:
nostrates) and has been defined, since Pedersen, as consisting of those language families that are related to Indo-European.
Merritt Ruhlen notes that this definition is not properly taxonomic but amorphous, since there are broader and narrower degrees of relatedness, and moreover, some linguists who broadly accept the concept (such as Greenberg and Ruhlen himself) have criticised the name as reflecting the
ethnocentrism frequent among Europeans at the time.
Martin Bernal has described the term as distasteful because it implies that speakers of other language families are excluded from academic discussion. However, some people like Pedersen's older contemporary
Henry Sweet attributed some of the resistance by Indo-European specialists to hypotheses of wider genetic relationships as "prejudice against dethroning [Indo-European] from its proud isolation and affiliating it to the languages of yellow races". Proposed alternative names such as
Mitian, formed from the characteristic Nostratic first- and second-person pronouns
mi 'I' and
ti 'you' (more accurately '
thee'), 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—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. Although Cuny enjoyed a high reputation as a linguist, the work was coldly received.
Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics While Pedersen's Nostratic hypothesis did not make much headway in the West, it became quite popular in the
Soviet Union. Working independently at first,
Vladislav Illich-Svitych and
Aharon Dolgopolsky elaborated the first version of the contemporary form of the hypothesis during the 1960s. They expanded it to include additional language families. Illich-Svitych also prepared the first dictionary of the hypothetical language. Dolgopolsky's most recent
Nostratic Dictionary was published in 2008, and is considered the most up-to-date attempt at a Nostratic lexicon. A principal source for the items in Illich-Svitych's dictionary was the earlier work of
Alfredo Trombetti (1866–1929), an Italian linguist who had developed a classification scheme for all the world's languages, widely reviled at the time and subsequently ignored by almost all linguists. In Trombetti's time, a widely held view on classifying languages was that similarity in inflections is the surest proof of
genetic relationship. In the interim, the view had taken hold that the
comparative method—previously used as a means of studying languages already known to be related and without any thought of classification—is the most effective means to establish genetic relationship, eventually hardening into the conviction that it is the only legitimate means to do so. This view was basic to the outlook of the new Nostraticists. Although Illich-Svitych adopted many of Trombetti's etymologies, he sought to validate them by a systematic comparison of the sound systems of the languages concerned. ==Constituent language families==