Евразийские макросемьи языков: гипотезы и дискуссии.

Proposed language macrofamily

Eurasiatic is a hypothetical and controversial language macrofamily proposal that would include many language families historically spoken in northern, western, and southern Eurasia. The idea of a Eurasiatic superfamily dates back more than 100 years. Joseph Greenberg's proposal, dating to the 1990s, is the most widely discussed version. In 2013, Mark Pagel and three colleagues published what they believe to be statistical evidence for a Eurasiatic language family. The branches of Eurasiatic vary between proposals, but typically include the widely rejected Altaic macrofamily (comprised in part of Mongolic, Tungusic and Turkic), Chukchi Kamchatkan, Eskimo–Aleut, Indo European, and Uralic—although Greenberg uses the controversial Uralic Yukaghir classification instead. Other branches sometimes included are the Kartvelian and Dravidian families, as proposed by Pagel et al., in addition to the language isolates Nivkh, Etruscan and Greenberg's "Korean–Japanese–Ainu". Some proposals group Eurasiatic with even larger macrofamilies, such as Nostratic; again, many other professional linguists regard the methods used as invalid. The hypothesis has fallen out of favour and has limited degrees of acceptance, predominantly among a minority of Russian linguists. Linguists worldwide reject Eurasiatic and many other macrofamily hypotheses such as Nostratic, with the exception of Dené–Yeniseian languages, which has been met with some degree of acceptance.

In 1994 Merritt Ruhlen claimed Eurasiatic is supported by the existence of a grammatical pattern "whereby plurals of nouns are formed by suffixing t to the noun root whereas duals of nouns are formed by suffixing k." Rasmus Rask noted this grammatical pattern in the groups now called Uralic and Eskimo–Aleut as early as 1818, but it can also be found in Tungusic, Nivkh (also called Gilyak) and Chukchi–Kamchatkan—all of which Greenberg placed in Eurasiatic. According to Ruhlen, this pattern is not found in language families or languages outside Eurasiatic. In 1998, Joseph Greenberg extended his work in mass comparison, a methodology he first proposed in the 1950s to categorize the languages of Africa, to suggest a Eurasiatic language. In 2000, he expanded his argument for Eurasiatic into a full length book, Indo European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, in which he outlines both phonetic and grammatical evidence that he feels demonstrate the validity of language family. The heart of his argument is 72 morphological features that he judges as common across the various language families he examines. Of the many variant proposals, Greenberg's has attracted the most academic attention. Stefan Georg and Alexander Vovin, who, unlike many of their colleagues, do not stipulate a priori that attempts to find ancient relationships are bound to fail, examined Greenberg's claims in detail. They state that Greenberg's morphological arguments are the correct approach to determining families, but doubt his conclusions. They write "[Greenberg's] 72 morphemes look like massive evidence in favour of Eurasiatic at first glance. If valid, few linguists would have the right to doubt that a point has been made  [ ] However, closer inspection  [ ] shows too many misinterpretations, errors and wrong analyses  [ ] these allow no other judgement than that [Greenberg's] attempt to demonstrate the validity of his Eurasiatic has failed." In the 1980s, Russian linguist Андреев, Николай Дмитриевич's Бореальный язык hypothesis (Бореальный язык) linking the Indo European, Uralic, and Altaic (including Korean in his later papers) language families. Andreev also proposed 203 lexical roots for his hypothesized Boreal macrofamily. After Andreev's death in 1997, the Boreal hypothesis was further expanded by Sorin Paliga (2003, 2007).

According to Greenberg, the language family that Eurasiatic is most closely connected to is Amerind. He states that "the Eurasiatic Amerind family represents a relatively recent expansion (circa 15,000 years ago) into territory opened up by the melting of the Arctic ice cap". In contrast, "Eurasiatic Amerind stands apart from the other families of the Old World, among which the differences are much greater and represent deeper chronological groupings". Like Eurasiatic, Amerind is not a generally accepted proposal. Eurasiatic and another proposed macrofamily, Nostratic, often include many of the same language families. Vladislav Illich Svitych's Nostratic dictionary did not include the smaller Siberian language families listed in Eurasiatic, but this was only because protolanguages had not been reconstructed for them; Nostraticists have not attempted to exclude these languages from Nostratic. Many Nostratic theorists have accepted Eurasiatic as a subgroup within Nostratic alongside Afroasiatic, Kartvelian, and Dravidian. LWED likewise views Eurasiatic as a subfamily of Nostratic.

Ruhlen presents the following roots for Eurasiatic: kʷi (who? ), mi (what? ), pälä (two), akʷā (water), tik (one or finger), konV (arm 1), bhāghu(s) (arm 2), bük(ä) (bend or knee), punče (hair), p'ut'V (vagina or vulva), snā (smell or nose), kamu (seize or squeeze), and parV (the verb to fly). The existence of a Dené–Caucasian family is disputed or rejected by most linguists, including Lyle Campbell, Ives Goddard, and Larry Trask. The last common ancestor of the family was estimated by phylogenetic analysis of ultraconserved words at roughly 15,000 years old, suggesting that these languages spread from a "refuge" area at the Last Glacial Maximum.