Draft:Para-Indo-European languages
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Para-Indo-European (or Macro-Indo-European)[1][2] is a term used to refer to those languages and/or language families that may be distantly related to the Indo-European languages.[3][4][5]
In a broader sense it is used designate languages and language groups that, if ultimately proven to be related, would have diverged before the Late Indo-European/Nuclear-Indo-European period (e.g.; before the Anatolian split) rather than those proposed to fit within pre-established clades/daughter groups which emerged after such as Hunnic,[6][7] Ligurian[8] and Tartessian.[9][10]
The following list categorizes proposed macrofamilies including Indo-European and "adjacent" languages based on whether or not the hypothesis is plausible and still controversial/debated upon, credible but largely unsubstantiated if not ultimately proven to be false (obsolete) and/or put forward not out of genuine intellectual curiosity thus constituting fringe theories often motivated by religious and or ethno-national reasons.
Plausible/Controversial
[edit]- Uralic - The Indo-Uralic
- Northwest Caucasian - Pontic is a proposed macrofamily, comprising the Indo-European and Northwest Caucasian language families. The internal reconstruction of the Indo-European proto-language done by Émile Benveniste and Winfred P. Lehmann has set Proto-Indo-European (PIE) typologically quite apart from its daughters. In 1960, Aert Kuipers noticed the parallels between a Northwest Caucasian language, Kabardian, and PIE. It was Paul Friedrich in 1964, however, who first suggested that PIE might be phylogenetically related to Proto-Caucasian. In 1981, John Colarusso examined typological parallels involving consonantism, focusing on the so-called laryngeals of PIE and in 1989, he published his reconstruction of Proto-Northwest Caucasian (PNWC). Eight years later, the first results of his comparative work on PNWC and PIE were published in his article Proto-Pontic: Phyletic Links Between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Northwest Caucasian
- Kartvelian -
Obsolete/Unsubstantied
[edit]- Nostratic -
- Eurasian -
- Basque/Vasconic - Indo-Euskarian or Indo-Vasconic is a
- Tyrsenian - Indo-Tyrrhenian is the name of a hypothetical language family consisting of the Indo-European and Tyrrhenian language families (the latter is the family consisting of the extinct Etruscan, Lemnian and Rhaetian languages).[11] A relation with the Anatolian languages within Indo-European has been proposed,[a][13] but is not accepted for historical, archaeological, genetic, and linguistic reasons.[14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] If these languages are an early Indo-European stratum rather than pre-Indo-European, they would be associated with Krahe's Old European hydronymy and would date back to a Kurganization during the early Bronze Age.
- Proto-World - The Proto-Human language, also known as Proto-Sapiens or Proto-World, is the hypothetical direct genetic predecessor of all human languages.[22] The concept is speculative and not amenable to analysis in historical linguistics. It presupposes a monogenetic origin of language, i.e. the derivation of all natural languages from a single origin, presumably at some time in the Middle Paleolithic period.
Fringe/Spurious
[edit]- Sumerian - Attempts have been made without success to link Sumerian with a range of widely disparate groups but at one time it was widely held to be an Indo-European language, but that view has been almost universally rejected.[23] Since decipherment began in the early 20th century, scholars have tried to relate Sumerian to a wide variety of languages. Because of its prestige as the first attested written language, proposals for linguistic affinity often have a nationalistic flavour.
- Proto-Euphratean - Proto-Euphratean is a hypothetical unclassified language or languages which was considered by some Assyriologists (such as Samuel Noah Kramer) to be the substratum language of the people who introduced farming into Southern Iraq in the Early Ubaid period (5300–4700 BC). Gordon Whittaker argued that the language of the proto-literary texts from the Late Uruk period (c. 3350–3100 BC) is an early Indo-European language that he terms "Euphratic", although this does not have mainstream support.[24]
- Semitic/Hebrew - Due to its prestige, the Hebrew language has often been claimed as being related to wildly different language groups. Indo-Semitic is a once popular but now largely abandoned hypothesis that the Indo-European languages form a family with the Semitic languages. The main problem with this is that Semitic is now widely accepted as belonging to a larger linguistic unit - the Afro-Asiatic family - with the Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic and Omotic languages of northern Africa. This does not exclude the possibility of a relationship between Indo-European and Afroasiatic, but there are no significant grammatical similarities between the two language groups, and lexical resemblances between Indo-European and Semitic are better explained as false cognates/coincidences or early contact/borrowing.[25]
- Sun Language/Pan-Turkic Descendancy - The Sun Language Theory was a Turkish pseudolinguistic,[26] pseudoscientific[27] quasi-hypothesis developed in Turkey in the 1930s that proposed that all human languages (and Indo-European by extent) are descendants of one proto-Turkic primal language.
See also
[edit]- Eurasian
- Indo-Hittite
- Indo-Uralic
- Jewish Indian theory
- Language family
- List of language families
- List of proposed language families
- Para-Mongolic languages
- Urheimat
Notes
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ Hans Krahe, Unsere ältesten Flussnamen, Wiesbaden Edition Otto Harrassowiitz (1964)
- ^ Vennemann, Theo; Aziz Hanna, Patrizia Noel (2003). Europa Vasconica, Europa Semitica. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 9783110170542.
- ^ David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Oxford, 2010)
- ^ Haarmann, Harald. Pre-Indo-European Writing in Old Europe as a Challenge to the Indo-European Intruders Indogermanische Forschungen; Strassburg Vol. 96, (Jan 1, 1991): 1
- ^ Roger Blench, Matthew Spriggs (eds.) Archaeology and Language III: Artefacts, Languages and Texts, (2012, Routledge)
- ^ Ball 2021, p. 170.
- ^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, pp. 424–426.
- ^ de Hoz 2005, p. 175; Delamarre 2007, pp. 36–37; Untermann 2006, pp. 1762–1766; de Bernardo Stempel & Arenas Esteban 2011, pp. 129–130; Rubat Borel 2008; see Mees 2024, pp. 203–204, 209 for an overview of scholarly opinions on the classification of Ligurian.
- ^ Haarmann 2014, pp. 22–23.
- ^ Ringe 2013.
- ^ "Indo-Tyrrhenian - FrathWiki". www.frathwiki.com. Retrieved 27 February 2025.
This article incorporates text from this source, which is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
- ^ Steinbauer 1999.
- ^ Palmer 1965.
- ^ Wallace 2010.
- ^ Posth, Zaro & Spyrou 2021.
- ^ Barker & Rasmussen 2000, p. 44.
- ^ MacIntosh Turfa 2017.
- ^ De Grummond 2014.
- ^ Shipley 2017.
- ^ Penney, John H. W. (2009). "The Etruscan language and its Italic context". Etruscan by definition: the cultural, regional and personal identity of the Etruscans. Papers in honour of Sybille Haynes. London: British Museum Press. pp. 88–94.
- ^ Bellelli & Benelli 2018.
- ^ McWhorter, John (4 September 2020). "How are the Various Proto-World Families Linked?". Archived from the original on 16 December 2021. Retrieved 16 December 2021.
The Proto-World language, also known as the Proto-Human or Proto-Sapiens, is believed to be the single source of origin of all the world's languages.
- ^ Dewart, Leslie (1989). Evolution and Consciousness: The Role of Speech in the Origin and Development of Human Nature. p. 260.
- ^ Whittaker, Gordon (2008). "The Case for Euphratic" (PDF). Bulletin of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences. 2 (3). Tbilisi: 156–168. Retrieved 11 December 2012.
- ^ "Indo-Semitic - FrathWiki". www.frathwiki.com. This article incorporates text from this source, which is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
- ^ Asher, R. E.; Simpson, J. M. Y. (1994). The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Vol. 6. Pergamon Press. p. 3391. ISBN 978-0-08-035943-4.
- ^ Hintz, Lisel (2018). Identity Politics Inside Out: National Identity Contestation and Foreign Policy in Turkey. Oxford University Press. pp. 63–64. ISBN 978-0-19-065599-0.
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