Talk:Nostratic languages

message: A number of books (some quite convincing, notably Bopp) have been written proposing a very close link between the Indo-European languages and the Austronesian languages.  To wit, the similarities of such fundamental PIE/PAN words as *duaus/*duau, *egos/*aku(s) and others.  Bopp wrote a 600+ page book on the subject, quite in depth.  While Bopp's exuberance might have undermined his credibility, I think a lot of his evidence makes his proposal at least worth mention.  I have, myself, found a striking number of apparent cognates (and I'm not talking about loanwords) to indicate a strong possibility of a relationship between Japanese and the Indo European languages, as well as between Japanese and the Austronesian languages.  I can't testify as to what affect the apparent Austronesian similarities might be due to contact between the two groups/languages, since there are, to this day, three Austronesian languages still spoken in Formosa/Taiwan, which even from ancient times, was in contact with Japan.  
My observations are not unique.  While the primary groups included in Nostratic are invariably (despite what the article seems to indicate to the contrary) are Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Kartvelian, and Afro-Asiatic, a great many linguists include the Manchu-Tungus (Turkic) family (with its loose cognates Korean and Japanese) and the Dravidian languages...some even including the Bantu languages of Africa (although I personally view this as an attempt to include w/in Nostratic the greatest number of languages as conceivably possible).  The problem with the Austronesian languages is that they seem to be anomalous in every way, when it comes to categorization, since the language family seems to have at least three core areas...Thor Heyerdahl's work notwithstanding.  TShilo12 09:05, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposal to add Austronesian languages to list 

message: Moved from "Nostratic language" to "Nostratic languages" for consistency with practice for other language family articles, e.g. Indo-European languages --Tabor 19:02, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move 

message: 'On the other hand, the comparative method has been successfully applied to Australian Aboriginal languages. Even though Australia has been inhabited for about 50 thousand years, and no significant technological changes occurred, aborigines living on seven eighths of Australia use languages belonging to relatively recent Pama-Nyungan language family (estimated to be about five thousand years old).'
:I think this is wrong on one and possibly both counts. Australia did have an archeologically documented technological revolution around 6000 years ago. Also, I have seen Australian languages cited as an area where linguists divide languages geographically or featurally in acknowledgement that genetic relations are not always clear.--JWB 06:02, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think "Australian" is seriously held as a family anymore, but Pama-Nyungan certainly is. The only linguist I'm aware of that disputes its validity is Dixon. He makes some interesting points, but all other Australianists I'm aware of seem comfortable with it as a genetic node. There are speculations, though, that it may have been a cultural revolution with the moeity system, and the rituals that went with them, that spread Pama-Nyungan - or maybe that was caught up in the technological revolution. On the other hand, take a look at PNG, which was settled when Australia was (as the continent of Sahul). The subbranches of the East Papuan "family" have no demonstrable cognates! kwami 07:35, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I wasn't taking a position on genetic unity of Pama-Nyungan, but just disputing the assertion that no significant technological changes occurred, and the suggestion that the comparative (reconstructive) method had been successfully applied to Australia as a whole.--JWB 16:21, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Australia 

message: New name of the language is Borean. The dictionary of Borean roots: --Nixer 12:34, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: That looks broader than Nostratic - it appears to cover all of Eurasia and Americas.--JWB 14:33, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Borean 

message: :"Armenian was not added [to the Indo-European family] until the 1880s (until then, it had been thought to be an aberrant dialect of Iranian)"
Even if Armenian was a member of the Indo-Iranian languages, wouldn't that still make it Indo-European? Or were they not recognized as Indo-European by then? And what exactly is "Iranian" anyways? I've only ever heard the language of Iran called "Persian" or "Farsi".
One more pedantic note: it is not accurate to speak of a language being "added" to a language family. The language always was part of the family; we only recently recognized it as such. — Ливай  16:00, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If you think of IE as being a hypothesis, then it would be correct to speak of adding languages to it. That's common phrasing, anyway. Iranian is the IE family that includes Persian, Kurdish, Ossete, Balochi, etc. The passage should probably say that Armenian was not recognized as a separate IE family until the 1880s. kwami 20:29, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The phrase "aberrant dialect of Iranian" implies that Iranian is a single language with many dialects, rather than a group of languages each with their own dialects. In any case, I don't think it serves as a good analogy in this paragraph, where the question at hand is the very inclusion of language groups into a single family, not the particular classification of languages within the family. — Ливай  00:57, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  ??? 

message: Why do the so-called mainstream linguists claim that there are no correspondences even if there are?
And why "everyone" thinks Nostratic hypothesis is result of mass-comparing modern words (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Estonian_language#Nostratic_hypothesis )
I think this should be rewritten: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_language#Vocabulary
--85.156.132.81 20:05, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "No regular correspondences have been found"-claims 

message: Were one to collect all the words from the various known Indo-European languages and dialects which have at least one of these 4 meanings, one could easily form a list that would cover any conceivable combination of two consonants and a vowel (of which there are only about 20*20*5=2000).
I don't understand the point of this sentence. Would the author (Taharqa?) please explain it? David Marjanović 22:58, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  From the Criticisms section 

message: Henry Sweet's book "The History of Language" (1900) discusses something very akin to the Nostratic theory in chapter VII "Affinities of Aryan", devoting some twenty pages (pp. 112–132) to assorted evidence of relationships between Aryan (Indo-European), (Finno-)Ugrian, Altaic and Sumerian. (Sweet expresses his conviction that these relationships are valid.)
On page 114 he mentions that (Nikolai) Anderson was the first to investigate the relationship between Aryan and Ugrian (Indo-European and Finno-Ugric) "in a scientific and impartial spirit" (in his bibliography, Sweet lists "Anderson, N. Studien zur Vergleichung der Indogermanischen und Finnisch-ugrischen Sprachen, Dorpat, 1879").
This info could be used to expand the "Origin" section a bit, showing that relationships between a number of these languages had been proposed and discussed prior to 1903. Jayen466 10:19, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Nice one. I'll try to grab a copy but it'll take a while so why not go ahead and expand away. If you're interested in chasing them up, it seems that Delitzsch compared IE and Semitic in 1873 (Stud. üb. indogerm.-sem. Wurzelverwandtsch), and Abel compared IE, Semitic and Egyptian in 1887 (Einl. in ein ägypt-semt.-indoeurop. Wurzelwörterb.). There's also MacCurdy's Aryo-Semitic Speech (1881). I know nothing about any of them beyond a footnote in a journal for Biblical studies dated 1903 (in German). Gnostrat 22:45, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi, thanks for the encouragement; I've had a go. Btw, I've just learnt that a facsimile version of Sweet's book was published quite recently (see ISBN in the footnote). It's also searchable to a limited degree in google books. Jayen466 18:24, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: History of the Nostratic theory (Section "Origin")

message: Hi, I'd love to read more on Nostratic grammar. Judging from the poem at the bottom of the article, Proto-Nostratic must already have been reconstructed to the level of declension and conjunction tables. What kind of language was it? Most language groups included are agglutinative, but Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European are inflecting. And was it absolutive or ergative. I am sure some Nostraticists at least have published guesses or suggestions. Steinbach (fka Caesarion) 11:08, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  More on Nostratic morphology 

message: I see a contradiction in the text. Of the vowels, it says "the phoneme /y/ does not occur in any reconstruction other than Bomhard's". Immediately after, the sound correspondences table is given with the remark that it comes from Kaiser and Shevoroshkin, and this table does include /y/ despite not being attributed to Bomhard. What's the matter? Steinbach (fka Caesarion) 17:14, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, that's the impression it gives, but the exact text (cut and pasted) is "This phoneme does not occur in all non-Bomhard reconstructions of Proto-Nostratic", leaving open the possibility that one or both of the two sources cited for the table does in fact have /y/. The text is not in contradiction with itself but it could perhaps be more explicit. VikSol 18:46, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for your quick reply. Okay, perhaps I was a little fooled by my native language. I understood "this phoneme does not occur in any non-Bomhard reconstruction". I'm not sure if the sentence could be ambiguous in English. Anyway, I would be glad if it were put more clearly. Steinbach (fka Caesarion) 20:21, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

text: Has been done, I see. Thanks! Steinbach (fka Caesarion) 20:25, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vowels 

message: This article has gneral references but not inline citations.  It could be improved with inlines.  Kind Regards SriMesh | talk 01:32, 10 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Inline Citations

message: Well, no language today obviously sounds too similar to this hypothetical reconstructed poem, but I have to say that Finnish would still win if you had to compare any language. I'm really surprised that no one's pointed this out yet. Just look at the poem:
Format: Nostratic = Finnish = English
K̥elHä = kieli = tongue 
:
wet̥ei = vuoden ("year's") = of-time 
:
kähla = kahluu = ford 
:
na = me (but that's already been demonstrated with proto-Uralic) = us
:
wetä = vetää ("pull") = leads
:
ʔälä = älä (imperative mood of the negative verb "ei") = not 
:
ja-k̥o  = joka = which/who
:
pele = pelkää = fears 
:
t̥uba = syvä (affrication, t -> s and b -> v) = deep 
:
wete = vettä = water
--nlitement [talk] 22:27, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Finnish 

message: Nostratic sound correspondences in the Russian School's version [see Kaiser & Shevoroshkin (1988), Kaiser (1989) map glottalized (ejective) stops to PIE voiceless stops and voiceless stops to traditional PIE voiced ones. This view contradicts the PIE glottalic theory (defended by Bomhard), which regards traditional PIE voiced stops as being originary glottalized ones. To achieve the maximum coherence among these conflicting views, I've interchanged the correspondences of glottalized and voiceless stops in Proto-Nostratic in order to correlate them with the PIE ones.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Talskubilos (talk • contribs) 22:07, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: IE-Kartvelian sound correspondences

message: I see a pattern in the article related to Joseph Greenberg. Almost all the paragraphes are "judged" or "criticised" by Joseph Greenberg's opinions as if he is the ultime linguist. There is no argument in the article which is not "assessed" by Joseph Greenberg statements. Why every signle paragraph has a "special section" for the opinions of Joseph Greenberg? As if only after his opinions, tha argument will receive legitimacy. "but Joseph Greenberg says so!"...
I know Wikipedia is run by Jews but this "one-of-us" stance is not the best stance for Wikipedia.--98.199.22.63 (talk) 07:24, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Joseph Greenberg 

message: This section is alphabetic from a to k...it seems obvious that it is cut off in the middle. Could it be extended to the end? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.27.168.226 (talk • contribs) 
: Thank you for noticing this. It seems this list has been added by an unnamed editor beginning in May 2009, and was intended to be continued - it always contained a note for expansion until it was removed by another editor in February 2010, along with a change of the title from "Lexical words" to "Core vocabulary". I am not sure where the justification for calling it a core vocabulary comes from; the Nostratic Dictionary - Third Edition does not mention a "core vocabulary", and the lexicon at http://www.proto-nostratic.ru, which uses that term, does so apparently only because they copied the list from our article. It does not refer to any core vocabulary in its lexicon entries. 
: In conclusion, I would suggest cutting this list down to only a handful of examples, replacing the word "core" in the headline with "example", and referring for anyone who wants to read more to the Nostratic Dictionary. It will also be necessary to explain the notation, so we could maybe select those entries that use the most common symbols. — Sebastian 07:52, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Though perhaps a better link can be found ... that PDF contains the wordlist but also a great deal else; it would be better to link to something smaller. Perhaps it is difficult to find an exact match for the wordlist because the copy we used is now at least 24 years old (and I think much older) and Bomhard has greatly expanded it since then.  In which case, I say that's another reason for us not to post it .... but it seems he has expanded the list so much that it's now 400 pages long. I'm hoping somewhere there's just a list and not a list with a list of all the descendant forms for each reconstructed root, since it'd be likely of more interest to casual readers than the full thing. —Soap— 16:35, 25 April 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  Tables of such extent do not belong in a WP article and often border on WP:copyvios, so I support your removal. A small, well-sourced illustrative selecion will always do, and readers who want to know more about it can get the whole straight from the source. –Austronesier (talk) 09:51, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you.  Im still looking to find a suitable page we can link to, ... I managed to find an updated version of the dictionary, and it has a key explaining all of the weird symbols.  Only problem is, umm .... well, it's 3100 pages long, and a  lot of people, especially on mobile, are going to be literally unable to read that. In fact the key is on page 2693.  So Im still looking.  If I cant find anything more concise, though, the link is  here and it seems to be direct download only, no option to read it in the browser.  —Soap— 22:31, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, the first link I found was just a blind link to the PDF.  Now that I've found that there is in fact a web interface, I looked at our article again and noticed that the link is already there.  So Im going to say this is probably as good as we're going to get, but if I find something more concise, say, a list of roots *without* all the cognates, I will still add that link because I think it would be the most reader-friendly way to present the data.  —Soap— 22:39, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Core vocabulary 

message: I don't know if it could be useful but I found an archived copy of Nostratica on Internet Archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20120311211525/http://www.nostratic.ru/index.php?lang=en Seems then the English version is off but the Russian version is still online. --Sd-100 (talk) 19:35, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nostratica 

message: Has to be said and if you are a researcher you should be angry at universities and professors who promoted this, not myself for pointing out the obvious.  Arutun (talk) 15:08, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: @Arutun: And that statement by you is based on what reliable sources? —C.Fred (talk) 18:29, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not science 

message: Is it a common practice in Wikipedia to modify the presented data according to private views of Wikipedia authors? Isn’t such an act a violate of neutral point of view? Isn’t it an original research of the Wiki authors?
If Wikipedia presents facts, not personal invetions of its redactors, such a practice should be strongly prohibited. But what do we read in the article?
The following table is compiled from data given by Kaiser and Shevoroshkin (1988) and Starostin. - followed by a link to the source. It sounds great! But what does it follow? [...] correlate Nostratic voiceless and glottalized stops with PIE ones, so this is done in the table.
Either the table presents the view of Kaiser, Sheveroshkin and Starostin and is based on the cited sources, or it follows Bomhard’s view. Please decide! If it is based on the Russian authors, please STOP MODIFYING their views!!! This is ORIGINAL RESEARCH, and I have tagged it with OR.
Bomhard’s sound correspondences are NOT any “upgrade” of the Moscow School (by the way: “Muscovite School” is a derogatory term and should not be used at all, especially in encyclopaedias). It is just a different point of view, based on the glottalic hypothesis which is not proved, criticised, and which has little followers now. This is why Bomhard’s reconstuction is not “modern” - it is implausible. The cross-correspondence of Nostratic and Kartvelian ejectives is the most obvious proof (Nostratic tʼ = Kartvelian t, while Nostratic t = Kartvelian tʼ). In his newest publication Bomhard himself does not respond the strong critique of the glottalic hypothesis, and instead of answering to serious arguments he tries to discuss old and less important counterarguments as if he did not know the bibliography of the subject (including Barrack’s work). Having considering it, I do not think that presenting his glottalic view as the best one, the most modern one or as an upgrade to the classical view - is nothing but making an advertisement of his view, contrary to common practice among scholars. It should never happen in an encyclopaedia! It is a real example of OR.
Please remove all changes to Kaiser, Sheveroshkin and Starostin view, and present it as is, without all this glottalic stuff. Wikipedia should present scholars’ views and not private judgement of Bomhard’s fans. And if you love so much the glottalic hypothesis, why not to make another table, based on Bomhard’s implausible view?
You suggest to readers that Bomhard has made an improvement to Starostin and others. THIS IS NOT TRUE. Why do you present such a view? Is it based on some independent judgement of authors who do not follow either Starostin or Bomhard?
Please do not remove my OR tag as long as the table presents the true, original view of Kaiser, Sheveroshkin and Starostin, exactly as it is it presented in the cited work.
178.235.146.5 (talk) 08:55, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  The table of sound correspondences - OR 

message: An "edit war" has been happening for years on this article regarding the terms "controversial" and "widely rejected". As I said in the edsum, most linguists are indeed agnostic because evidence are insufficient to conclude that these languages are either related or unrelated. If the Nostradic family is described as "controversial" and "widely rejected" on Wikipedia, then it should be the same for most language families. As Kallio & Koivulehto put it in "Beyond Proto-Indo-European" (2017):  Alcaios (talk) 13:53, 26 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi . The latter is literally the definition of Nostratic. Neither Indo-Uralic nor its slightly extended version has to be relevant to Nostratic and Nostratic is certainly not limited to Indo-Uralic. See the relevant discussion here. Puduḫepa 14:59, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Controversial" and "widely rejected" 

message: The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:
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Participate in the deletion discussion at the . —Community Tech bot (talk) 00:36, 14 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion 

message: The redirect Proto-Nostratic has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at  until a consensus is reached.  – John M Wolfson (talk • contribs) 21:22, 16 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  "[[:Proto-Nostratic]]" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]] 

message: Warren:  Please restore the original version of this article.  The current version contains errors.  Thanks. Arbomhard (talk) 16:37, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: @Arbomhard What errors? If you can provide credible, widely accepted sources that meet Wikipedia’s standards for inclusion I’d be happy to help you work on improving the article. Restoring the old version isn’t happening, per WP:PROFRINGE. Warrenmck (talk) 16:31, 24 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry, Warren, I do not mean to be rude, but you do not appear to have the requisite academic or professional credentials to be making the edits to this and several other Wikipedia articles.  If I am mistaken here, please provide proof to the contrary.  Being an outsider, you do not have a clear understanding of the dynamics involved.  Again, you are trying to throw up meaningless procedural roadblocks instead of approaching the matter objectively and cooperatively.  The current version is both incomplete and contains errors.  I am probably one of the few people in the world who is qualified to make this statement.  The original version of the entry on Nostratic was far superior and should be restored.  Thank you. Arbomhard (talk) 16:16, 28 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: By "outsider" do you mean not a Nostraticist? —Tamfang (talk) 06:59, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

text: Warren: The statement "the truth is that at present Nostratic is functionally wholly rejected by mainstream linguists and the article on Wikipedia should reflect that case" is a bit extreme, to say the least, though it does apply, for the most part, to the work of Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky. The truth is far more nuanced. Please stop pontificating, please stop expressing your biased personal opinions, and familiarize yourself with the facts.  You can start, for example, by reading the reviews of my own work on the topic posted on academia.edu.  You will see that these reviews range from enthusiastic support (Igor M. Diakonoff) to criticism (Eugene Helimski) to everything between these two poles -- all from "mainstream linguists".  I have included everything, even when it was less than complimentary. I have also prepared detailed reviews of the work of Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky, which are really required reading -- you can also download these reviews from academia.edu.  For one thing, these reviews will give you a better understanding of the dynamics involved.  And, just for fun, read the review of my book Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic on amazon.com. And, for goodness sakes, read and seriously ponder the previous comments made by other Wikipedia contributors. Some of them make very valid points. Arbomhard (talk) 17:43, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

text: This paragraph does not help bystanders know which assertions are biased. —Tamfang (talk) 07:02, 6 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Errors