Allan R. Bomhard (born July 10 1943) is an American

independent scholar A scholar is a person who is a researcher or has expertise in an academic discipline. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or researcher at a university. An academic usually holds an advanced degree or a terminal ...

writing books and predominantly self-published papers in the field of

comparative linguistics Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness. Genetic relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language and comparative linguistics aim ...

and

Buddhism Buddhism, also known as Buddhadharma and Dharmavinaya, is an Indian religion and List of philosophies, philosophical tradition based on Pre-sectarian Buddhism, teachings attributed to the Buddha, a wandering teacher who lived in the 6th or ...

. He is part of a small group of proponents of the Nostratic hypothesis, according to which the

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. ...

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 ab ...

Afroasiatic languages The Afroasiatic languages (also known as Afro-Asiatic, Afrasian, Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic) are a language family (or "phylum") of about 400 languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of th ...

, and the

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 Japon ...

would all belong to a larger

macrofamily A macrofamily (also called a superfamily or superphylum) is a term often used in historical linguistics to refer to a hypothetical higher order grouping of languages. Metonymically, the term became associated with the practice of trying to group ...

. As a prominent proponent of Nostratic, Bomhard's work has received attention from mainstream linguists and occasionally been discussed in linguistic sources. The majority of his work has been self published or printed thorough vanity presses. Mainstream linguists have dismissed his theories.

Criticism

His theory about Nostratic languages is widely rejected by mainstream linguists as a

fringe theory A fringe theory is an idea or a viewpoint that differs significantly from the accepted scholarship of the time within its field. Fringe theories include the models and proposals of fringe science, as well as similar ideas in other areas of schola ...

. Among Nostratists, he has been described as "a maximalist who casts his nets as widely as possible" among far-flung languages not generally believed to be related. Russian linguists

Georgiy Starostin Georgiy Sergeevich "George" Starostin (; born 4 July 1976) is a Russian linguist. He is the son of the late historical linguist Sergei Starostin (1953–2005), and his work largely continues his father's. He is also known as a self-published mu ...

, Mikhail Zhivlov, and Alexei Kassian have criticized his work as imprecise and "historically unrealistic".

Books

*''Toward Proto-Nostratic: A New Approach to the Comparison of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Afroasiatic''. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1984. *''Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis.'' Charleston: SIGNUM Desktop Publishing, 1996. *''Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic: Comparative Phonology, Morphology, and Vocabulary''. Leiden and Boston: Brill. 2 vols, 2008. *''The Nostratic Hypothesis in 2011: Trends and Issues''. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man, 2011. *''An Introductory Grammar of the Pali Language''. Charleston: Charleston Buddhist Fellowship, 2012. *''A Sketch of Proto-Indo-Anatolian Phonology''. Florence, SC USA, 2024. with John C. Kerns: *''The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship''. Berlin, New York, NY, and Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994. with Arnaud Fournet: *''The Indo-European Elements in Hurrian''. La Garenne Colombes / Charleston, 2010.

References

External links

Allan Bomhard
at Academia.edu
Allan R. Bomhard: Nostratic linguistics is in full agreement with standard, recognized methodologies
2019 interview {{DEFAULTSORT:Bomhard, Allan R. Living people Linguists of Nostratic languages Long-range comparative linguists 20th-century American linguists 21st-century American linguists Year of birth missing (living people)

Criticism

Books

See also

References

External links