Nostratic

Book excerpt: The “Nostratic” hypothesis — positing a common linguistic ancestor for a wide range of language families including Indo-European, Uralic, and Afro-Asiatic — has produced one of the most enduring and often intense controversies in linguistics. Overwhelmingly, though, both supporters of the hypothesis and those who reject it have not dealt directly with one another’s arguments. This volume brings together selected representatives of both sides, as well as a number of agnostic historical linguists, with the aim of examining the evidence for this particular hypothesis in the context of distant genetic relationships generally. The volume contains discussion of variants of the Nostratic hypothesis (A. Bomhard; J. Greenberg; A. Manaster-Ramer, K. Baertsch, K. Adams, & P. Michalove), the mathematics of chance in determining the relationships posited for Nostratic (R. Oswalt; D. Ringe), and the evidence from particular branches posited in Nostratic (L. Campbell; C. Hodge; A. Vovin), with responses and additional discussion by E. Hamp, B. Vine, W. Baxter and B. Comrie.