Here are some references on some interesting recent work on Indo-European, Nostratic, and related subjects: [(C) Loren Petrich] *** Indo-European: Mallory, J.P., 1989, _In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archeology, and Myth_. -- A comprehensive discussion of the IE question, touching on linguistics and archeology, and giving several examples of text in various IE languages and a very short story written in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European (PIE). He supports the Kurgan hypothesis, according to which PIE was spread by horsemen going outwards from a homeland in the eastern Ukraine, just north of the Black Sea. Diamond, Jared "Of Horses and Hittites" in _The Third Chimpanzee_. -- A brief discussion of IE origins that roughly agrees with Mallory. Scientific American, December 1992(?), an article on the domestication of the horse. -- A posthumous dental exam on a horse in an early Kurgan site at Dereivka ca. 4000 BCE revealed that it had had a metal bit in its mouth, indicating that it had been ridden. Gimbutas, Marija, _The Journal of Indo-European Studies_ (several articles over the years) and _The Civilization of the Goddess_ -- An abundance of work on the archeology of the Kurgans (she was the first to propose the Kurgan -- IE link), as well as reconstructions of their culture. She has also come up with some speculative proposals about the culture of the pre-IE peoples of Europe, proposals that some critics have derided as "Mommy Goddess" tales. Scientific American, March 1990, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, "The Early History of Indo-European Languages" -- A departure from the Kurgan hypothesis; the IE homeland was in the Kura-Araxes area. It also presents some proposed revisions of PIE phonology (see below for some others, courtesy of V. Shevoroshkin et al.). Scientific American, October 1989, Colin Renfrew, "The Origins of Indo-European Languages" -- presenting the hypothesis discussed in more detail in his book, see below. Renfrew, Colin, 1988 _Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins_ -- an alternative proposal: a much earlier departure from the Indo-European homeland than the standard (Kurgan) picture would allow. I personally think that the evidence he presents most likely fits an earlier, pre-Indo-European, dispersal; the "Old Europeans" of Marija Gimbutas. His knowledge of linguistics also seems rather weak. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Language" -- a good article on IE, including a comparison of some vocabulary items across most of the families. The American Heritage Dictionary -- a good intro to a good part of the reconstructed IE vocabulary: it includes about 1500 Indo-European roots (about all those that are ancestral to English words listed in it) and a guide to what can be reconstructed of the culture of the Indo-European speakers, judging from what they had words for, such as their worship of a god named "Father Sky". Different editions vary a bit in what they include; a good feature of it is that it is available on CD-ROM for both Macintosh and DOS/Windows. Buck, _Dictionary of Synonyms_. -- This book gives a lot of fundamental vocabulary in many of the Indo-European languages, ancient and modern. It is a valuable resource for seeing what the unsifted vocabulary data really looks like. Pokorny, Julius, _Indogermanische Wo"rterbuch_ ["Indo-European Dictionary"; the German word for IE literally means "Indo-Germanic"] -- This is a fairly comprehensive list of reconstructed IE roots, with descendants in many of the IE languages listed. In German, though one will probably not need much more than a basic knowledge and a good paperback dictionary :-) Baldi, Philip, _An Introduction to the Indo-European Languages_ -- a bit technical, but a good comparative discussion of the older members of the various Indo-European subfamilies. * One interesting linguistic novelty that nobody seems to have bothered to write is some simple textbook of it, perhaps to be called "Teach Yourself Proto-Indo-European" (title inspired by the numerous "Teach Yourself " books). However, there are a range of pitfalls: Pronunciation uncertainties. We don't know for sure exactly how PIE was pronounced, and some linguists even dismiss this sort of question as irrelevant. Vocabulary incompleteness. We don't have complete recovery of the vocabulary. Some words, like "lightning", tend to suffer numerous replacements, so while the PIE speakers must have had a word for it, we may never know what it was. Semantic uncertainties. Some of the reconstructed roots are listed as having rather vague meanings; this is because the descendants of some roots have rather variable semantics. Grammatical uncertainties. Independent innovations. Dialect variations. There is no good reason to believe that PIE was a homogeneous language. It may have been more like a continuum of dialects, where innovations can spread in waves (compare the early history of the Germanic languages for a similar example). Dialect variations can also contribute to the previous pitfalls. So one might have to settle for some sort of "consensus" dialect. * Schleicher's Fable: [This is taken from the version in Jared Diamond's _The Third Chimpanzee_, though with a bit of re-spelling] Owis Ek'wooskwe Gwrreei owis, kwesyo wl@naa ne eest, ek'woons espeket, oinom ghe gwrrum woghom weghontm, oinomkwe megam bhorom, oinomkwe ghmmenm ooku bherontm. Owis nu ek'womos ewewkwet: "Keer aghnutoi moi ek'woons agontm nerm widntei". Ek'woos tu ewewkwont: "Kludhi, owei, keer ghe aghnutoi nsmei widntmos: neer, potis, owioom r wl@naam sebhi gwhermom westrom kwrnneuti. Neghi owioom wl@naa esti". Tod kekluwoos owis agrom ebhuget. [The] Sheep and [the] Horses On [a] hill, [a] sheep that had no wool saw horses, one [of them] pulling [a] heavy wagon, one carrying [a] big load, and one carrying [a] man quickly. [The] sheep said to [the] horses: "[My] heart pains me, seeing [a] man driving horses". [The] horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see [this]: [a] man, [the] master, makes [the] wool of [the] sheep into [a] warm garment for himself. And [the] sheep has no wool". Having heard this, [the] sheep fled into [the] plain. [Here, @ = schwa, the "uh" sound, usually represented by an upside-down e; also, long vowels are written double] And now, on beyond Indo-European. There are several proposals for macro-families that contain several of the well-established families, and which cover wide areas. *** Proposed members of Nostratic: * Indo-European * Kartvelian (S Caucasian) * Afro-Asiatic Semitic Egyptian Berber Cushitic Chadic * Uralic (with Yukaghir) * Dravidian (with Elamite) * Altaic Turkic Mongolian Manchu-Tungus Korean Ryukyu Japanese * Chukchi-Kamchatkan * Eskimo-Aleut Joseph Greenberg's Eurasiatic includes all of Nostratic except Kartvelian, Afro-Asiatic, and Dravidian, but includes: * Ainu * Gilyak a.k.a. Nivkh NOTE: Afro-Asiatic could well be a group comparable to the rest of Nostratic and to Sino-Caucasian, as some Nostraticists have concluded. Discrepancies in proposed schemes like this are probably not fatal; similar problems have existed for a long time in well-known language families. *** Proposed members of Sino-Caucasian (or Dene-Caucasian): * North Caucasian NE Caucasian (incl. Hurrian-Urartian and Etruscan) Abkhazo-Adyghian (incl. Hattic) * Burushaski * Basque * Yeniseian * Sino-Tibetan * Sumerian * Na-Dene * "Iberian" [pre-IE in Spain/Portugal] * "Pelasgian" [pre-IE in Greece] * Nahali (?) * Chukchi-Kamchatkan (?) * Some other Native American languages (?) There are other big groupings proposed, such as Amerind (most Native American languages), Austric (Austro-Thai and Austro-Asiatic), and Congo-Saharan (Niger-Congo, Kordofanian, and Nilo-Saharan). *** Comments The evidence proposed for these macro-families is of varying quality. Nostratic/Eurasiatic would seem to be the best supported, since the Nostraticists propose a sizable number of roots and grammatical affixes, all related by reasonably regular sound correspondences. This methodology is simply that which Indo-Europeanists and other mainstream linguists use. The same is true of Sino-Caucasian, though there is the problem that much of the work on the North Caucasian languages has been unpublished outside of the xUSSR (they have complicated consonant systems, which makes comparison _very_ difficult). However, Joseph Greenberg's methods for classifying the New World languages are rather far from mainstream -- he collects big word lists and then does eyeball comparisons of them -- and he has been seriously criticized for subjectivity and lack of exactitude. Even the Nostraticist Shevoroshkin has criticized him. Archeological correlations? For the most part, there seems no clear correlation between the archeological evidence and macro-linguistic grouping, with the possibile exception of the Americas, where there is evidence of three migrations from the Old World which correspond rather roughly to the Amerind, Na-Dene, and Eskimo-Aleut families. But to me, the most interesting is the possibility of resolving the question of the pre-Indo-European languages of Europe. Basque and a lot of European "substratum" vocabulary would appear to be Sino-Caucasian, and the estimated date of Sino-Caucasian's breakup is approximately that of the beginning of the European Neolithic dispersion. So we might conclude that the European Neolithic farmers spoke SC languages before the IE speakers arrived. Likewise, it has been proposed that the early-Neolithic Natufians of Syria-Palestine were speakers of the ancestral Afro-Asiatic language. The ultimate in large-scale groupings is all of humanity's languages, whose hypothetical ancestor has been named Proto-World. However, this last subject has been a natural magnet for an assortment of enthusiasts and crackpots, and some Nostraticists would prefer not to make too big an issue out of Proto-World for that very reason. Although any current or historically attested language can confidently be ruled out, due to the inevitability of linguistic change, the list of proposed candidates does include such languages, including Phrygian Hebrew Arabic Irish Dutch Sanskrit Japanese Turkish The hypothesis of Punctuated Equilibrium and the "Out of Africa" hypothesis both suggest that humanity originated in some relatively small population somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. According to Punc-Eq, the genetic innovations that define our species can most easily spread in some relatively small population. However, language is a human universal and this initial group of people would have had language. Since it would have been fairly small, and successfully interbreeding, it would very likely have been linguistically homogeneous or nearly so. Thus, one can conclude that Proto-World almost certainly existed. Whether or not any of it is recoverable is another question entirely, since this initial group lived somewhere around 100,000 -- 200,000 years ago, and most mainstream linguists think that there is too much opportunity for Proto-World to have become garbled beyond recognition in all of its descendants. Incidentally, a lower limit to this initial group's size is provided by the diversity of Human Leukocyte Antigen molecules, which provide an Identification, Friend or Foe system for immune-system cells. They are selected for diversity; if a bug escapes one host's immune system by looking like one version, it will not escape the immune system of another host with a different version. This diversity suggests a minimum population-bottleneck size significantly greater than two (I forget the precise number). *** Nostratic and Other Macro-Linguistic References: The New York Times, November 24, 1987, p. C1, "Linguists Dig Deeper into the Origins of Language" Joseph Greenberg, 1987(?), _Language in the Americas_ -- His controversial work on Native American language classification; it also contains attempts to justify his methodology by doing some Indo-European examples. Natural History, March 1987, The First Americans series: "Voices from the Past", by Merritt Ruhlen. Presents Greenberg's views. I.M. Diakonov and S.A. Starostin, 1986, _Hurro_Urartian as an Eastern Caucasian language_ -- peripherally mentions other such comparisons, for example, with Hattic, Etruscan, and the non-Indo-European component of the Greek vocabulary. Brown, R.A., 1985, _Pre-Greek Speech on Crete from Greek Alphabetic Sources_ -- attempt to find features of (a) pre-Indo-European language(s) there, using borrowings in Greek, Cretan place names, and Eteo-Cretan inscriptions. Etruscan and various borrowings elsewhere are also discussed in it; the author proposes an "Aegeo-Asianic" family, which survived in the languages discussed. Sorin Paliga 1989 and Martin Huld 1990, _The Journal of Indo-European Studies_ -- two articles on attempts to reconstruct some pre-Indo-European roots from European languages. Sydney M. Lamb and E. Douglas Mitchell 1991, _Sprung from some Common Source: Investigations into the Prehistory of Language_ -- Papers for the 200th anniversary of that famous statement by Sir William Jones about the Indo-European languages; topics include his career as a linguist, Indo-European religious vocabulary and possible connections with other language families, the question of the relatedness of the Altaic languages, Japanese, and Korean, and mathematical methods for constructing family trees and for long-distance comparison. Annual Reviews of Anthropology, 1988, Mark Kaiser and Vitaly Shevoroshkin, "Nostratic" -- A detailed discussion of the results of the Soviet Nostratic school; it includes some vocabulary and a lot of sound correspondences. Vitaly Shevoroshkin and T.L. Markey, eds., 1986, _Typology, Relationship, and Time; A Collection of Papers on Language Change and Relationship by Soviet Linguists_ -- A rather technical collection, but it does feature an interesting statistical study by Dolgopolsky of what words are least replaced in languages over time. Vitaly Shevoroshkin and M. Kaiser, late 1980's, _The Journal of Indo-European Studies_ (The Journal of Indo-European Studies: v13, n3/4, p377, 1985 and v14, n3/4, p365, 1986) -- Some discussions of Indo-European phonology in the light of Nostratic comparisons. Vitaly Shevoroshkin, ed., 1988, _Reconstructing Languages and Cultures_ -- Several papers on Nostratic and other such protolanguages, including Proto-World, most by known advocates. It includes 600 Nostratic roots. Vitaly Shevoroshkin, ed., 1989, _Explorations in Language Macrofamilies_ -- More such papers; though mostly on details of comparison. Vitaly Shevoroshkin, ed., 1990, _Proto-Languages and Proto-Cultures_ -- Still more such papers, on such subjects as Etruscan as a Northeast Caucasian language, Uralic-Dravidian comparisons, and Greenberg's Eurasiatic. Vitaly Shevoroshkin, ed., 1991, _Dene-Sino-Caucasian Languages_ -- Papers on that subject, covering primarily North Caucasian, Burushaski, Basque, Sino-Tibetan, and Na-Dene. It contains a list of North Caucasian roots and proposals of DSC ancestor of some European subtratum words, including some Germanic ones. Vitaly Shevoroshkin, ed., 1992, _Nostratic, Dene-Caucasian, Austric, and Amerind_ -- Papers on all of these, covering such subjects as Cushitic, Chadic and Egyptian relationships, Dravidian relationships to Afro-Asiatic and Australian, Hokan (an American Indian language family), and a bit on Proto-World. At the end, there is a comprehensive bibliography of Nostratic and related subjects, and also a cumulative index to this series. The Sciences (NY Academy of Sciences), May-June 1990, Vitaly Shevoroshkin, "The Mother Tongue". -- A good introduction to Nostratic and Proto-World, from the point of view of an advocate. Scientific American, April 1991 -- A rather brief discussion of the controversy that speculation about Nostratic and Proto-World have started. The Atlantic, April 1991 -- A more detailed discussion of this controversy. Ruhlen, Merritt, 1994 _The Origin of Language(s)_ -- a pair of books, one relatively technical, and one nontechnical, putting forth proposals by him and Greenberg for long-range comparisons, including the ultimate, Proto-World. In the nontechnical one, you get to do some Greenbergian eyeball comparisons. Here is a poem in reconstructed Nostratic composed by the late Nostraticist Vladislav Illich-Svitych: K'elHa" wet'e-i `aK'u-n ka"hla Tongue time-of water-of path/ford k'ala-i palhV-k'V na wete gone-of dwelling-to us lead(s) s'a da 'a-k'V 'ejV 'a"la" he but there-to come(s) no(t) ja-k'o pele t'uba wete which-who fear(s) deep water Language is a ford through the river of time It leads us to the dwelling of the ancestors But he does not arrive there Who is afraid of deep water Note: V is an uncertain vowel, K is k/q, a" is a with " on top, and s' is s with ' on top. The ' after a stop consonant (t, k, etc.) denotes a glottalized consonant (with a stricture in the throat). Several of these words have Indo-European cognates; I give them both in the traditional transcription and a modified one closer to Nostratic due to Shevoroshkin et al, following a /, when it is different. I will give only the more common offshoots; the Latin and Greek words should be familiar from borrowings. You may have fun looking for other offshoot words. `aK'u IE akwa- / akwha- Latin: aqua, "water" palhV IE pelH- / phelH- Greek: polis, "city" na IE nes, nos English: us; Latin: nos wete IE wedh- / wed(h)- English: wed k'o IE kw(o/i)- / kwh(o/i)- English: who, what, other wh's; Latin: qu- t'uba IE dheub- / d(h)eup- English: deep wete IE wed- / wet- English: water, wet; Greek: hudor, hudr-, "water"; Russian: voda, "water"