Eurasiatic is a hypothetical macro-family proposed by the late Joseph Greenberg that groups together several language families of Europe, Asia, and North America. Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915–May 7, 2001) was a prominent and controversial linguist, known for his work in both language classification and typology. ...

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
• Chukotian
• Eskimo-Aleut

Etruscan was spoken in Tuscany and nearby areas of Italy up to the first century A.D. It may have been brought to Italy by emigrants from Anatolia. Etruscan was a language spoken and written in the ancient region of Etruria (current Tuscany) and in parts of what are now Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna (where the Etruscans were displaced by Gauls), in Italy. ... The Indo-European languages comprise a family of several hundred related languages and dialects [1], including most of the major languages of Europe, as well as many spoken in the Indian subcontinent (South Asia), the Iranian plateau (Southwest Asia), and Central Asia. ... Uralic-Yukaghir (or Uralo-Yukaghir) is a hypothetical language family that attempts to relate Yukaghir, a group of dialects spoken in Siberia, with Uralic, a much larger and popular language family to which Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian belong. ... Altaic is a proposed language family which includes 66 languages [1] spoken by about 348 million people, mostly in and around Central Asia and northeast Asia. ... The Ainu language (Ainu: , aynu itak; Japanese: ainu-go) is spoken by the Ainu ethnic group on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaidō. It was once spoken in the Kurile Islands, the northern part of HonshÅ«, and the southern half of Sakhalin. ... Nivkh or Gilyak (ethnonym: Nivxi) (language, нивхгу - Nivxgu) is a language spoken in Outer Manchuria, in the basin of the Amgun, a tributary of the Amur, along the lower reaches of the Amur and on the northern half of Sakhalin. ... The Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages (commonly also Chukchi-Kamchatkan) are a language family of northeastern Siberia. ... Eskimo-Aleut languages Eskimo-Aleut is a language family native to Greenland, the Canadian Arctic, Alaska, and parts of Siberia. ... Etruscan was a language spoken and written in the ancient region of Etruria (current Tuscany) and in parts of what are now Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna (where the Etruscans were displaced by Gauls), in Italy. ... Tuscany (Italian: ) is one of the 20 Regions of Italy. ... Anatolia lies east of the Bosphorus, between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Anatolia is a peninsula of Western Asia which forms the greater part of the Asian portion of Turkey, as opposed to the European portion (Thrace, or traditionally Rumelia). ...

Indo-European is a language family encompassing most of the languages of Europe and many of the languages of Asia. The Indo-European languages comprise a family of several hundred related languages and dialects [1], including most of the major languages of Europe, as well as many spoken in the Indian subcontinent (South Asia), the Iranian plateau (Southwest Asia), and Central Asia. ...

Uralic-Yukaghir associates Yukaghir, a language spoken in Siberia that has several dialects, with the large family of Uralic languages, which are divided into Samoyed and Finno-Ugric. The best-known Ugric language is Hungarian. Some of the well-known Finnic languages are Finnish, Estonian, and Saami (Lapp). Geographical distribution of Samoyedic, Finnic, Ugric and Yukaghir languages  Yukaghir  Samoyedic  Ugric  Finnic The Uralic languages (pronounced: ) form a language family of about 30 languages spoken by approximately 20 million people. ... Geographical distribution of Yukaghir, Finnic, Ugric and Samoyedic languages The Yukaghir languages are a family of related languages spoken in Russia by the Yukaghir, a Siberian people, living in the basin of the Kolyma River. ... Geographical distribution of Samoyedic, Finnic, Ugric and Yukaghir languages The Samoyedic languages are spoken on both sides of the Ural mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by perhaps 30,000 speakers altogether. ... Approximate geographical distribution of areas where indigenous Finno-Ugric languages are spoken. ... Sami is a general name for a group of Finno-Ugric languages spoken in parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, in Northern Europe. ...

Altaic, in Greenberg's view, includes Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic, but not Korean, Ainu, or Japanese. Altaic is a proposed language family which includes 66 languages [1] spoken by about 348 million people, mostly in and around Central Asia and northeast Asia. ... The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken across a vast area from Eastern Europe to Siberia and Western China with an estimated 140 million native speakers and tens of millions of second-language speakers. ... Tungusic languages (or Manchu-Tungus languages) are spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria. ...

Korean-Japanese-Ainu, as construed by Greenberg, forms a single group, and also includes Ryukyuan, which is closely related to Japanese. The Ainu language (Ainu: , aynu itak; Japanese: ainu-go) is spoken by the Ainu ethnic group on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaidō. It was once spoken in the Kurile Islands, the northern part of Honshū, and the southern half of Sakhalin. ... The Ryukyuan languages are spoken in the Ryūkyū Islands and make up a subfamily of the Japonic family. ...

Gilyak, also called Nivkh, is spoken in the northern half of the island of Sakhalin and on the Asian mainland opposite. Nivkh or Gilyak (ethnonym: Nivxi) (language, нивхгу - Nivxgu) is a language spoken in Outer Manchuria, in the basin of the Amgun, a tributary of the Amur, along the lower reaches of the Amur and on the northern half of Sakhalin. ... Location of Sakhalin in the Western Pacific Sakhalin, GOST transliteration Sahalin, (Russian: , Korean: Traditional Chinese: 庫頁島; Simplified Chinese: 库页岛; pinyin: kùyèdÇŽo Japanese: 樺太 romaji: karafuto), also Saghalien, is a large elongated island in the North Pacific, lying between 45° 50 and 54° 24 N. It is part of the Russian...

Chukotian comprises a group of languages spoken in Chukotka, at the extreme northeast of Russia, and to its south on the Kamchatka Peninsula. The Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages (commonly also Chukchi-Kamchatkan) are a language family of northeastern Siberia. ... Chukotka Autonomous Okrug (Russian: , transliteration: Chukotsky avtonomny okrug; Chukchi: Чукоткакэн автономныкэн округ), or Chukotka (), is a federal subject of Russia (an autonomous okrug) located in the Far Eastern Federal District. ... Kamchatka is the home of many volcanoes. ...

Eskimo-Aleut is a group of languages spoken from the Aleutian Islands across northern Canada to Greenland. Eskimo-Aleut languages Eskimo-Aleut is a language family native to Greenland, the Canadian Arctic, Alaska, and parts of Siberia. ... Looking down the Aleutians from an airplane. ...

Relation to other language families

Somewhat surprisingly, Greenberg concludes that the language family that Eurasiatic is most closely connected to is Amerind. He speculates 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 addition to its use by social scientists to refer (broadly) to the various indigenous languages of The Americas, the term Amerind languages may controversially refer to one of the three families in Joseph H. Greenbergs classification of all Native American languages—the other two being Na-Dene...

Reception by linguists

The Eurasiatic hypothesis is dismissed by many linguists, often on the ground that Greenberg relies in his research on mass lexical comparison, a method he developed in the 1950s that remains controversial. Others, mindful of past successes of Greenberg's, such as his widely accepted classification of African languages, are taking more of a wait-and-see attitude. Greenberg also has his supporters, among them the American linguists Merritt Ruhlen and Allan Bomhard. Mass lexical comparison or mass comparison is a highly controversial method developed by the well-known linguist Joseph Greenberg to find genetic relationships among languages in the remote past, beyond the limits of the traditional comparative method, or in situations where there are too many languages to practically apply the... Map showing the distribution of African language families and some major African languages. ... Merritt Ruhlen is a lecturer in Anthropological Sciences and Human Biology at Stanford, and a co-director of the Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages. ... Allan R. Bomhard was born in 1943. ...

Prospects for the Eurasiatic hypothesis

The principal objection to theories like Greenberg's is that contact between populations often results in exchange of words, so similarities in vocabulary and even in grammatical structure do not necessarily indicate a common origin. For instance, English contains many French words and Persian contains many Turkish and Arabic words. Nevertheless it remains true to say that English is a descendant of Proto-Germanic and Persian is a descendant of Old Persian. Whether similarities between two languages are due to common ancestry or to linguistic borrowing can only be empirically determined, that is to say, on a case-by-case basis. For similarities between language groups classified by Greenberg as Eurasiatic, both explanations seem possible at the present time. The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Persian, (local name: Fārsī or Pārsī), is an Indo-European language spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and by minorities in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Southern Russia, neighboring countries, and elsewhere. ... Map of the Pre-Roman Iron Age culture(s) associated with Proto-Germanic, c. ... Sketch of the first column of the Behistun Inscription Old Persian is the oldest attested Persid language. ...

From the point of view of Indo-European studies, the Eurasiatic hypothesis remains intriguing. Recent works by Winfred P. Lehmann and others have argued that Proto-Indo-European descended from an active-stative language. Among the characteristics posited for this language are Subject-Object-Verb word order, use of agglutinating suffixes, and absence of grammatical gender. These characteristics are very common among languages identified by Greenberg as Eurasiatic, for instance Japanese and Turkish. While it is probably too early for a definitive judgment of the Eurasiatic hypothesis, it is at least typologically compatible with recent work in Indo-European studies. Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics, dealing with the Indo-European languages. ... Winfred P. Lehmann (born 23 June 1916 in Surprise, Nebraska) is a historical linguist who has served as the director of the Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas at Austin since 1961. ... The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the hypothetical common ancestor of the Indo-European languages. ... An active language is one where the only argument of an intransitive verb (that is, the subject) is marked sometimes in the same way as the subject of a transitive verb, and some other times in the same way as the direct object of a transitive verb. ... It has been suggested that Agglutination be merged into this article or section. ... Linguistic typology is the typology that classifies languages by their features. ...

See also

• Nostratic languages (note: the Nostratic hypothesis is not a result of mass lexical comparison)
• Indo-Uralic languages
• Uralo-Siberian languages
• Ural-Altaic languages

To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Mass lexical comparison or mass comparison is a highly controversial method developed by the well-known linguist Joseph Greenberg to find genetic relationships among languages in the remote past, beyond the limits of the traditional comparative method, or in situations where there are too many languages to practically apply the... Indo-Uralic is a hypothetical language family consisting of Indo-European and Uralic (and maybe further related languages). ... Uralo-Siberian is a hypothetical language family proposed by Michael Fortescue in his book Language Relations across Bering Strait in 1998. ... It has been suggested that Altaic hypothesis be merged into this article or section. ...

References

• Joseph H. Greenberg, Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 1, Grammar. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-8047-3812-2
• Joseph H. Greenberg, Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 2, Lexicon. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-8047-4624-9
• Winfred P. Lehmann, Pre-Indo-European. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man, 2002. ISBN 0-941694-82-8.