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Nostratic
Nostratic is a hypothetical language macrofamily including many of the language families of northern Eurasia first proposed in 1903. Though a historically important proposal, it is now generally considered a fringe theory. Its exact composition varies based on proponent; it typically includes the Kartvelian, Indo-European, and Uralic languages; some languages from the similarly controversial Altaic family, the Afroasiatic languages, and the Dravidian languages (also referred to as Elamo-Dravidian). The Nostratic hypothesis originates with Holger Pedersen in the early 20th century. The name "Nostratic" is due to Pedersen (1903), derived from the Latin '' nostrates'' "fellow countrymen". The hypothesis was significantly expanded in the 1960s by Soviet linguists, notably Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky. The hypothesis has fallen out of favour since the latter half of the 20th century and has limited degrees of acceptance, predominantly among a minority of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Holger Pedersen (linguist)
Holger Pedersen (; 7 April 1867 – 25 October 1953) was a Danish linguist who made significant contributions to language science and wrote about thirty authoritative works concerning several languages. He was born in Gelballe, Denmark, and died in Hellerup, next to Copenhagen. Education and academic career ''(Principal source: Koerner 1983)'' Pedersen studied at the University of Copenhagen with Karl Verner, Vilhelm Thomsen, and Hermann Möller. He subsequently studied at the University of Leipzig with Karl Brugmann, Eduard Sievers, Ernst Windisch, and August Leskien. In the fall of 1893, Pedersen enrolled at the University of Berlin, where he studied with Johannes Schmidt. The following year he studied Celtic languages and Sanskrit with Heinrich Zimmer at the University of Greifswald. In 1895 he spent several months in the Aran Islands in Ireland to study the conservative form of Irish spoken there. Pedersen submitted his doctoral dissertation to the Universit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vladislav Illich-Svitych
Vladislav Markovich Illich-Svitych (, also transliterated as Illič-Svityč; 12 September 1934 – 22 August 1966) was a Soviet linguist and accentologist. He was a founding father of comparative Nostratic linguistics and the Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics. Biography Of Polish Jewish descent, Illich-Svitych was born in Kyiv. In 1941, he and his parents moved to Chkalov and later to Moscow. His father, Mark Vladislavovich Illich-Svitych (1886–1963), worked as a bookkeeper. His mother, Klara Moiseevna Desner (1901–1955), was chief director of puppet theater in Orenburg. He resuscitated the long-forgotten Nostratic hypothesis, originally proposed by Holger Pedersen in 1903. While embarking on a field trip to collect data on the Hungarian dialects of the Carpathians, he died in an automobile accident on August 22, 1966, near Moscow. His death prevented him from completing the ''Comparative Dictionary of Nostratic Languages'', but the ambitious work was continu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aharon Dolgopolsky
Aharon Dolgopolsky, also spelled Aron (, ; 18 November 1930 – 20 July 2012) was a Russian-Israeli linguist who is known as one of the modern founders of comparative Nostratic linguistics. Biography Born in Moscow, he arrived at the long-forgotten Nostratic hypothesis in the 1960s, at around the same time but independently of Vladislav Illich-Svitych. Together with Illich-Svitych, he was the first to undertake a multilateral comparison of the supposed daughter languages of Nostratic. Teaching Nostratics at Moscow University for 8 years, Dolgopolsky moved to Israel in 1976, and taught at the University of Haifa. Dolgopolsky was featured in the NOVA documentary, ''In search of the first language''. He died on 20 July 2012 in Haifa. See also * Dolgopolsky list *Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics The Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics (also called the Nostratic languages, Nostratic School) is a school of linguistics based in Moscow, Russia that is known for its wo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Uralic Languages
The Uralic languages ( ), sometimes called the Uralian languages ( ), are spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with speakers above 100,000 are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt and Komi spoken in the European parts of the Russian Federation. Still smaller minority languages are Sámi languages of the northern Fennoscandia; other members of the Finnic languages, ranging from Livonian in northern Latvia to Karelian in northwesternmost Russia; the Samoyedic languages and the others of members of the Ugric languages, Mansi and Khanty spoken in Western Siberia. The name ''Uralic'' derives from the family's purported "original homeland" (''Urheimat'') hypothesized to have been somewhere in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, and was first proposed by Julius Klaproth in ''Asia Polyglotta'' (1823). Finno-Ugric is sometimes used as a synonym for Uralic but more accu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elamite Language
Elamite, also known as Hatamtite and formerly as Scythic, Median, Amardian, Anshanian and Susian, is an extinct language that was spoken by the ancient Elamites. It was recorded in what is now southwestern Iran from 2600 BC to 330 BC. Elamite is generally thought to have no demonstrable relatives and is usually considered a language isolate. The lack of established relatives makes its interpretation difficult. A sizeable number of Elamite lexemes are known from the Achaemenid royal inscriptions – trilingual inscriptions of the Achaemenid Empire, in which Elamite was written using Elamite cuneiform (circa 5th century BC), which is fully deciphered. An important dictionary of the Elamite language, the ''Elamisches Wörterbuch'' was published in 1987 by W. Hinz and H. Koch. The Linear Elamite script however, one of the scripts used to write the Elamite language circa 2000 BC, has remained elusive until recently. in Writing system The following scripts are known or assumed to h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dravidian Languages
The Dravidian languages are a language family, family of languages spoken by 250 million people, primarily in South India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia. The most commonly spoken Dravidian languages are (in descending order) Telugu language, Telugu, Tamil language, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam, all of which Classical languages of India, have long literary traditions. Smaller literary languages are Tulu language, Tulu and Kodava language, Kodava. Together with several smaller languages such as Gondi language, Gondi, these languages cover the southern part of India and the northeast of Sri Lanka, and account for the overwhelming majority of speakers of Dravidian languages. Malto language, Malto and Kurukh language, Kurukh are spoken in isolated pockets in eastern India. Kurukh is also spoken in parts of Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. Brahui language, Brahui is mostly spoken in the Balochistan region of Pakistan, Sistan and Baluc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indo-European Languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia (e.g., Tajikistan and Afghanistan), Armenia, and areas of southern India. Historically, Indo-European languages were also spoken in Anatolia. Some European languages of this family—English language, English, French language, French, Portuguese language, Portuguese, Russian language, Russian, Spanish language, Spanish, and Dutch language, Dutch—have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, including Albanian language, Albanian, Armenian language, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic languages, Celtic, Germanic languages, Germanic, Hellenic languages, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian languages, Indo-Iranian, and Italic languages, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Altaic Languages
The Altaic () languages are a group of languages comprising the Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic and Tungusic languages, Tungusic language families, with some linguists including the Koreanic languages, Koreanic and Japonic languages, Japonic families. These languages share agglutinative language, agglutinative morphology, head-final word order and some vocabulary. The once-popular theory attributing these similarities to a common ancestry has long been rejected by most Comparative linguistics, comparative linguists in favor of language contact, although it continues to be supported by a small but stable scholarly minority. Like the Uralic languages, Uralic language family, which is named after the Ural Mountains, the group is named after the Altai Mountains, Altai mountain range in the center of Asia. The core grouping of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic is sometimes called "Micro-Altaic", with the expanded group including Koreanic and Japonic labelled as "Ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chukotko-Kamchatkan Languages
The Chukotko-Kamchatkan or Chukchi–Kamchatkan languages are a Language families and languages, language family of extreme northeastern Siberia. Its speakers traditionally were indigenous hunter-gatherers and reindeer-herders. Chukotko-Kamchatkan is endangered language, endangered. The Kamchatkan branch is moribund language, moribund, represented only by Western Itelmen, with less than a hundred speakers left. The Chukotkan branch had close to 7,000 speakers left (as of 2010, the majority being speakers of Chukchi language, Chukchi), with a reported total ethnic population of 25,000. While the family is sometimes grouped Typology (linguistics), typologically and geographically as Paleosiberian languages, Paleosiberian, no external genetic relationship has been widely accepted as proven. The most popular such proposals have been for links with Eskimo–Aleut, either alone or in the context of a wider grouping. Alternative names Less commonly encountered names for the family are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kartvelian Languages
The Kartvelian languages ( ; ka, ქართველური ენები, tr; also known as South Caucasian or Kartvelic languages Boeder (2002), p. 3) are a language family indigenous to the South Caucasus and spoken primarily in Georgia. There are approximately 5 million Georgian language speakers worldwide, with large groups in Russia, Iran, the United States, the European Union, Israel, and northeastern Turkey. The Kartvelian family has no known relation to any other language family, making it one of the world's primary language families. The most widely spoken of these languages is Georgian. The earliest literary source in any Kartvelian language is the Old Georgian Bir el Qutt inscriptions, written in ancient Georgian Asomtavruli script at the once-existing Georgian monastery near Bethlehem,Lang (1966), p. 154 dated to . Georgian scripts are used to write all Kartvelian languages. Status Georgian is the official language of Georgia (spoken by 90% of the p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Koreanic Languages
Koreanic is a small language family consisting of the Korean and Jeju languages. The latter is often described as a dialect of Korean but is mutually unintelligible with mainland Korean varieties. Alexander Vovin suggested that the Yukjin dialect of the far northeast should be similarly distinguished. Yukjin also makes up a large component of Koryo-mar, the forms of Korean spoken by the descendants of people deported from the Russian Far East to Central Asia by Stalin. Korean has been richly documented since the introduction of the Hangul alphabet in the 15th century. Earlier renditions of Korean using Chinese characters are much more difficult to interpret. All modern varieties are descended from the Old Korean of the state of Unified Silla, which unified the Three Kingdoms of Korea. What little is known of other languages spoken on the peninsula before the late 7th-century Sillan unification comes largely from placenames. Some of these languages are believed to have been ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
