Eurasiatic is a hypothetical macro-family proposed by Joseph Greenberg that groups together several language families of Europe, Asia, and North America.
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The branches of Eurasiatic
As laid out by Greenberg (2000:279-81), the branches of Eurasiatic are:
- Etruscan
- Indo-European
- Uralic-Yukaghir
- Altaic
- Korean-Japanese-Ainu
- Nivkh (Gilyak)
- Chukotian
- Eskimo-Aleut
These groupings, except for the first two, are the native languages in various parts of northeast Asia. Eskimo-Aleut is moreover spoken across the subArctic region from northeast Asia to Greenland, and the Uralic languages are also spoken westward as far as into Scandinavia and Hungary.
Relation to other language families
Greenberg concluded that the language family that Eurasiatic is most closely connected to is Amerind. He speculated that "[t]he Eurasiatic-Amerind family represents a relatively recent expansion (circa 15,000 BP) into territory opened up by the melting of the Arctic ice cap" (2002:2).
Reception by linguists
The Eurasiatic hypothesis is dismissed by many linguists, often on the ground that Greenberg relies in his research on mass comparison, a method he developed in the 1950s that remains controversial. Others, citing what is said to be the wide acceptance of his classification of African languages, are taking more of a wait-and-see attitude. Greenberg also has his supporters, among them the American linguists Merritt Ruhlen and Allan Bomhard. One of the basic difficulties to proving a genetic relationship between two languages is that contact between populations often results in exchange of words, so that similarities in vocabulary and even in grammatical structure do not necessarily indicate a common origin.
The Eurasiatic claim and Lehmann's claim about a possible ancestor of Proto-Indo-European
Winfred P. Lehmann and others have recently argued that Proto-Indo-European descended from a language characterized by active-stativeness, Subject-Object-Verb word order, use of agglutination, and absence of grammatical gender. These characteristics are very common among languages identified by Greenberg as Eurasiatic.
See also
References
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 2000. Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family. Volume 1, Grammar. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 2002. Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family. Volume 2, Lexicon. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- Lehmann, Winfred P. 2002. Pre-Indo-European. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man.
- Jolkesky, M. 2004. "Uralisches Substrat im Deutsch – oder gibt es eigentlich die indo-uralische Sprachfamilie?"
