10 Facts About Nostratic

Nostratic is a controversial hypothetical macrofamily, which includes many of the indigenous language families of Eurasia, although its exact composition and structure vary among proponents.

The name "Nostratic" is due to Pedersen, derived from the Latin nostrates "fellow countrymen".

Name Nostratic derives from the Latin word nostras, meaning 'our fellow-countryman' and has been defined, since Pedersen, as consisting of those language families that are related to Indo-European.

Nostratic words were either equal to roots or built by adding endings or suffixes.

Therefore the many correspondences between Nostratic pronouns are rather strong evidence for the existence of a Proto-Nostratic language.

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The difficulty of finding Afroasiatic cognates is taken by some as evidence that Nostratic has two or three branches, Afroasiatic and Eurasiatic, and that most or all of the pronouns in the following table can only be traced to Proto-Eurasiatic.

Defenders of the Nostratic theory argue that were this to be true, it would remain that in classifying languages genetically, positives count for vastly more than negatives .

Pedersen's original Nostratic proposal synthesized earlier macrofamilies, some of which, including Indo-Uralic, involved extensive comparison of inflections.

Campbell and Poser argue that Nostratic, as reconstructed by Illich-Svitych and others, is "typologically flawed".

For instance, they point out that, surprisingly, very few Nostratic roots contain two voiceless stops, which are less marked and should therefore occur more frequently, and where such roots do occur, in almost all cases the second stop occurs after a sonorant.