Eurasiatic is a hypothetical language family proposed by Joseph Greenberg that groups all of the language families historically spoken in northern Eurasia into a single higher-order family, with the sole exception of the Yeniseian languages, spoken in part of Siberia, but including the Eskimo-Aleut languages, spoken in northernmost North America and Greenland with a toehold in easternmost Siberia.
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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
- Gilyak (= Nivkh)
- Chukotian (= Chukotko-Kamchatkan)
- 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
According to Greenberg, the language family that Eurasiatic is most closely connected to is Amerind. He states 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). In contrast, "Eurasiatic-Amerind stands apart from the other families of the Old World, among which the differences are much greater and represent deeper chronological groupings" (ib.).
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 extremely controversial. Others, citing the wide acceptance of his classification of African languages (cf. Nichols 1992:5), 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 do not necessarily indicate a common origin. Greenberg addressed this question in his Essays in Linguistics (1957:39).
Morphosyntax
Winfred P. Lehmann (2002) 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.
References
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 1957. Essays in Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- 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.
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 2005. Genetic Linguistics: Essays on Theory and Method, edited by William Croft. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Lehmann, Winfred P. 2002. Pre-Indo-European. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man.
- Nichols, Johanna. 1992. Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
See also
External links
- "Indo-Uralic and Altaic" by Frederik Kortlandt (2006)
- Regions Based on Social Structure: A Reconsideration
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