Eurasiatic languages

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Eurasiatic is a hypothetical macro-family proposed by the late Joseph Greenberg that groups together several language families of Europe, Asia, and North America.

Contents

1 The branches of Eurasiatic
2 Relation to other language families
3 Reception by linguists
4 Prospects for the Eurasiatic hypothesis
5 See also
6 References

The branches of Eurasiatic

As laid out by Greenberg (2000:279-81), the branches of Eurasiatic are:

Aegean languages were originally spoken in Greece, the Aegean islands, and Western Anatolia. Of this family, Etruscan is the most documented, spoken in Tuscany and nearby areas of Italy up to the first century A.D. It may have been brought to Italy by Lydian emigrants during the Hellenic Dark Ages.

Indo-European is a language family encompassing most of the languages of Europe and many of the languages of Asia.

Uralic-Yukaghir associates Yukaghir, a language spoken in Siberia that has several dialects, with the large family of Uralic languages, which are divided into Samoyed and Finno-Ugric. The best-known Ugric language is Hungarian. Some of the well-known Finnic languages are Finnish, Estonian, and Saami (Lapp).

Altaic, in Greenberg's view, includes Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic, but not Korean, Ainu, or Japanese.

Korean-Japanese-Ainu, as construed by Greenberg, forms a single group, and also includes Ryukyuan, which is closely related to Japanese. In conventional theories, these languages are thought to be unrelated.

Gilyak, also called Nivkh, is spoken in the northern half of the island of Sakhalin and on the Asian mainland opposite.

Chukotian comprises a group of languages spoken in Chukotka, at the extreme northeast of the Russian Federation, and to its south on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

Eskimo-Aleut is a group of languages spoken from the Aleutian Islands across northern Canada to Greenland.

Relation to other language families

Somewhat surprisingly, Greenberg concludes that the language family that Eurasiatic is most closely connected to is Amerind. He speculates 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 lexical comparison, a method he developed in the 1950s that remains controversial. Others, mindful of past successes of Greenberg's, such as his widely accepted 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.

Prospects for the Eurasiatic hypothesis

The principal objection to theories like Greenberg's is that contact between populations often results in exchange of words, so similarities in vocabulary and even in grammatical structure do not necessarily indicate a common origin. For instance, English contains many French words and Persian contains many Turkish and Arabic words. Nevertheless it remains true to say that English is a descendant of Proto-Germanic and Persian is a descendant of Old Persian. Whether similarities between two languages are due to common ancestry or to linguistic borrowing can only be empirically determined, that is to say, on a case-by-case basis. For similarities between language groups classified by Greenberg as Eurasiatic, both explanations seem possible at the present time.

From the point of view of Indo-European studies, the Eurasiatic hypothesis remains intriguing. Recent works by Winfred P. Lehmann and others have argued that Proto-Indo-European descended from an active-stative language. Among the characteristics posited for this language are Subject-Object-Verb word order, use of agglutinating suffixes, and absence of grammatical gender. These characteristics are very common among languages identified by Greenberg as Eurasiatic, for instance Japanese and Turkish. It is also interesting that the group identified by Greenberg as Eurasiatic also has a number of similarties with the Boreal sub-group of the equally controversial Nostratic hypothesis. While it is probably too early for a definitive judgment of the Eurasiatic hypothesis, it is at least typologically compatible with recent work in Indo-European studies.

References

Joseph H. Greenberg, Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 1, Grammar. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. ISBN 0804738122
Joseph H. Greenberg, Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 2, Lexicon. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. ISBN 0804746249

Winfred P. Lehmann, Pre-Indo-European. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man, 2002. ISBN 0941694828.