I began to see when I lined these up that there is a whole group of languages through northern Asia. I must have noticed this 20 years ago. Thirteen years later, Dr. Greenberg has now classified most of the languages of Europe and Asia into the superfamily he calls Eurasiatic. His concept of Eurasiatic was derived independently but overlaps with the proposed Nostratic superfamily, the theory of which has been developed in the last 30 years by Russian linguists. At first sight it may seem hard to believe that languages as different as English and Japanese, say, share any commonalities.
Every branch uses 'k' sounds to indicate a question.
In Finnish, - ko is added to a verb to indicate a question. In Japanese the same role is played by - ka . If Dr. Greenberg's Eurasiatic proposal is at first no more favorably received than his Amerindian classification, he will not be surprised. Meanwhile, Dr. Ruhlen believes that if the Eurasiatic grouping is accepted, the world's 5,000 languages can be seen to fall into just 12 superfamilies. How these in turn might be related to a single mother tongue remains to be seen.