Eurasiatic languages
Eurasiatic is a hypothetical macro-family proposed by the late
Joseph Greenberg that groups together several language families of Europe, Asia, and North America.
As laid out by Greenberg (2000:279-81), the branches of Eurasiatic are:
*
Aegean (
Etruscan)
*
Indo-European*
Uralic-Yukaghir*
Altaic*
Korean-
Japanese-
Ainu*
Gilyak*
Chukotian*
Eskimo-AleutAegean 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
Russia, 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.
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).
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.
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.
*
Nostratic languages*
Indo-Uralic languages*
Uralo-Siberian languages*
Ural-Altaic languages*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.
