Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence. Edited by JOSEPH C. SALMONS and BRIAN D. JOSEPH.

Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Series IV, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 142. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997. Pp. 292. $75.00 (hardback). Reviewed by Stefan Georg, University of Leiden

It seems to be spring-time for Nostratic. The question whether the well-established and well-explored Indo-European family of languages might after all form part of a greater linguistic phylum, with relatives scattered all over Eurasia and parts of Africa, seems to be attracting more attention than ever before. The famous observations, made at the end of the 18th century, which led to the establishment of first the Finno-Ugric and shortly afterwards the Indo-European language families mark the end of the times where haphazard comparisons of superficial similarities between virtually all known languages of the planet dominated the scene, and the beginning of an era characterized by the scientific study of language relationship. This was based on the observation that certain languages but not others are tied together by resemblances (and differences) which can be described in terms of regularity and recurrency. Language families, taken as sets of languages which are changed forms of a common ancestor, long lost but partly reconstructable, could thus be set up and distinguished from other such alignments. Claims of genetic relatedness had thus become testable, and testing one such claim is what the volume under review is devoted to. There is certainly no dearth of books and articles today arguing for the existence of the Nostratic (macro-)family of languages, nor of attempts to refute it. However, most of the literature devoted to this highly controversial topic tends to be written by scholars who have already made up their minds on the issue and defend their respective positions firmly, sometimes fiercely, against the members of the opposite camp. Polemical language and often an outright refusal to consider the opposite position as having any

merits, or, for that matter, as being a scientifically justifyable position in the first place, have been typical for the debate for quite some time now, and this deplorable state of affairs has certainly led many linguists with a potential interest in questions of language classification to turn their backs on this particular debate. It thus seemed high time to bring prominent proponents of the theory together with some of their most prominent critics, and to see whether some kind of consensus, if not on the Nostratic theory itself, then at least on criteria for a proper evaluation of its claims and methodological base could be reached. In doing this, the collection of papers under review (and the conference from which it is taken, held at Eastern Michigan University in October 1993) is an innovative and welcome endeavor, which could mark the beginning of a new phase of the Nostratic controversy. That it will not be able to actually settle the controversy will not come as surprise to anyone familiar with the debate, nor do the editors of this well-produced and well-indexed volume suggest anything to this effect. On the contrary, they see its main purpose in assembling enough arguments, pro and contra Nostratic, to let readers sift the evidence and decide for themselves.To this end, the different authors have made ample use of the opportunity to react directly to points raised by their colleagues, which led to a sizable number of cross-references within the volume itself. Thus, the reader will find a remarkable degree of internal coherency and often the atmosphere of a true debate (and it certainly deserves mention that it is remarkably free from the over-polemic tone, which has poisened so much of the debate in other fora), rather than having to wade through a mere compilation of isolated statements of positions (one paper, by William Baxter, is explicitly labeled as Response to (Robert) Oswalt and (Don) Ringe, two contributions on mathematical approaches to the question of relationship). The range of opinions expressed includes positive and sometimes ardent support for (some variant of) Nostratic (Alan Bomhard, Joseph Greenberg, Carleton Hodge), as well as any degree of reservation, from agnosticism (Eric Hamp, Bernard Comrie), and critical sympathy

(Alexis Manaster Ramer et. al., Alexander Vovin) to the unmistakable statement that I personally reject the Nostratic hypothesis (Lyle Campbell, p. 145). But what is (the) Nostratic (hypothesis) ? This question is certainly justified, since one of the reasons for the difficulty in reaching any kind of consensus in this debate is that it still remains to be worked out precisely which language families the theory is really about. Theories, we should say, and at least two of them (discounting minor differences) are represented in this volume. One of these, often referred to as the classical theory, is the one brought forward by the late Moscow-based Indo-Europeanist and Slavicist Vladislav Illich-Svitych in the 60s of the 20th century (cf., inter alia Illich-Svitych 1971), hence also dubbed the Muscovite School, the other one being mostly connected with the name of Alan Bomhard (cf. Bomhard/Kerns 1994). These two approaches not only differ (sometimes widely) in the details of the sets of correspondences held to be valid between the Nostratic languages, and of course in the set of lexical comparisons seen as evidencing these correspondences, but also regarding the number and identity of the language families themselves, which sprung from (the) common source of ProtoNostratic. The Muscovite school has always regarded six Old World families as Nostratic, viz. Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, Kartvelian, Dravidian and Altaic (the latter itself a grouping of languages always comprising Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic, sometimes also Korean and/or Japanese the genetic status of which is itself the object of a long-standing and still basically unsettled debate). In Bomhards approach, Dravidian is expanded to include the extinct Elamite language (a proposal still controversial with Dravidianists), Uralic is expanded to Uralo-Yukaghir (which seems to gain acceptance in specialist circles), his Altaic excludes Japanese and Korean (like the classical Illi-Svity theory, but unlike that of modern Muscovite nostraticists), and he adds further Chukchi-Kamchatkan (another controversial grouping), Nivkh (or Gilyak, often viewed as an isolate) and, entering the New World, Eskimo-Aleut to his version of Nostratic. The situation is further complicated by the fact that some nostraticists consider

Afro-Asiatic an integral and indispensable part of the family (the classical theory, and Hodges, whose paper is on Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic only, his Lislakh), others view it as coordinate with it. Other points of disagreement are connected with the position of Kartvelian and/or Dravidian within the phylum, and so on. Judging from the present volume, the majority view among Nostraticists so far seems to be that at least Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic are seen as the indispensable core of the family, and, with the exception of Hodges paper, it is these families which are mostly discussed in this book. Most papers address the question of the criteria which have to be fulfilled by a given set of languages before they can be called a family, and it is already here, that we find a great deal of dissent. Every one seems to require the languages to display a certain (though mostly unspecified) number of common vocabulary, every one also is aware of the danger that undetected borrowings among the compared lexical sets will disturb the picture, so measures against them should be taken (Oswalt, however, does not seem to be aware of this), the most notorious of which is, of course, the use of a limited word-list of basic vocabulary as the starting point. However, though the terms on the Swadesh list may really be basic enough to reduce the likelihood of being subject to borrowing, borrowings in the domain of basic vocabulary can hardly be excluded. Real-life experience tells us that, given a language-contact situation intimate enough, everything can be borrowed, so any theory of genetic relationship can surely not rest on the comparison of word-lists, however basic, alone. It is thus disturbing to see how marginal the role of paradigmatic morphology is in Nostratic studies, both in general and in this book. It is occasionally discussed, and the morphological parallels between IndoEuropean and Uralic are of the kind which may give the most stubborn sceptic something to think about, but in some contributions morphology as a heuristic device for language relationship is either ignored or plainly rejected, as particularly clearly by Bomhard, who says that (t)he longer the period of separation, the lesser the chances will be that

similarities of morphological forms (...) will be found, adding that this is, fortunately not the case with lexical forms. Morphological paradigms come and go, true enough, but the explicit claim that they are definitely to be viewed as diachronically less stable than the lexicon is certainly something which is not apt to win new friends for the Nostratic endeavor. It is here that we have to say that at least some practitioners of Nostratic and other long-ranging comparisons seem to be looking for, say, some kind of shortcut to the establishment of language families, coupled with a tendency to blame the failure of more traditional methods to reveal deeper genetic relationships rather on these methods than on the absence of relationship among the languages investigated. The inevitable outcome of this are relaxations of the method, or methods which allow the detection of more evidence in some sets of data than the real historical development of these data may actually have put into them. I have to include the whole literature which has been devoted to mathematical or statistical solutions to problems of language classification under this rubric of shortcuts, and illegitimate shortcuts at that. Learned as all three contributions to this complex in the present volume may be (D. Ringe, Robert Oswalt, William Baxter), they all fail to address the essentially linguistic side of the problem. While it is of course, to some extent, not uninteresting to know how many lexical resemblances between unrelated languages may be expected due to pure chance, the question, what a resemblance actually is, is rarely even addressed, let alone answered, by this kind of approach. The statistical approach inevitably projects the data on a two-dimensional level (and, where linguistic geography is ignored, and we have to say that this is mostly the case, one further dimension is lost), treating every lexical item in the data-base as essentially having the same diachronic status; innovative vs. archaic items thus cannot be differentiated, nor is there any way to incorporate diatopic facts into the picture. Traditional comparativism, with its insistence on systematicity and regularity of correspondences, rather than superficial similarity, has little to learn from this, especially

in connection with the language families viewed as Nostratic, since their history is known to an often impressive extent, allowing us to study how and why certain linguistic items came to look like (and mean what) they do over the millennia. Why we should do away with this knowledge and rely on an intrinsically ahistoric procedure to learn more about an intrinsically historical process, I am unable to see. While Ringe and Baxter are aware of all this, Oswalt seems not to be. Sifting by counting and calculating seems thus not to be the procedure the reader should follow, and most of the rest of the papers is devoted to hard data and what they have to tell us. Manaster Ramer et al. bring up the interesting, and potentially decisive, question whether the broader Nostratic hypothesis, and eventually only it, may furnish us with explanations for irregularities or difficult facts, which remain inexplicable lest one transcends the boundaries of the traditional language families. Personally, I regard this question as the one we should ask any proponent of any unorthodox alignment. Since explanation is what comparative linguistics is all about, this approach could be a real shortcut to classification, albeit a thorny path rather than a well-paved highway. The questions, how many lexical comparisons are needed for a language family to be valid, how many sound-laws should link them, how the pitfall of pure chance can be avoided by mathematical reasoning etc. pale before even a handful of real explanations, say, of the sort which explains the synchronically opaque relationship between English sit and set as going back to a once productive formation of causatives in Indo-European (to wit: *sed-jo: vs. *sod-j-o:, with regular sound-correspondences and documentable soundchanges from PIE down to Modern English). If such evidence should be present, few examples may suffice to convince even hard-nosed sceptics that something is going on here. However, as Vines reaction to Manaster Ramer et al.s paper shows, as far as the Indo-European forms the latter discuss are concerned, this seems not to have been found yet (and the present reviewer has to add that there are serious problems to be found with some of the Altaic and Uralic data here as well). However, it is this particular avenue any

sane future Nostratistics should follow, rather than insisting on the unlikeliness that this or that word may be a borrowing and similar objections, which in the long run will prove untenable anyway. Having mentioned Vines problems with Manaster Ramers proposals, we have finally to mention the largest, most important, and most tedious task every potential sifter of evidence for Nostratic will inevitably have to undertake. It is the task of checking the data, of checking whether the words and forms used to justify Nostratic actually exist, have the meaning they are said to have, are not due to inter-branch borrowing, whether the first-level reconstructs of the protolanguages which form the primary input for Nostratic are properly done etc. A host of sources for potential errors are awaiting any Nostraticist, especially since it seems impossible today for a single linguist to control all the relevant data from (at least) six major language families, let alone to keep track of every potentially relevant development in Uralic Studies, Dravidology etc. Yet it has to be done, somehow. The reviewers own experience with (mainly Muscovite) Nostratistics (and with most extant versions of Altaic, among them that of Sergej Starostin 1991, basically defended by Baxter in this volume) is that more often than not the handling of language data as exercised by some proponents of the respective theories has been allowing too many faulty forms, unjustifiable lower-level reconstructions etc. into the discussion, than would seem to be healthy, if confidence in the whole enterprise is to be inspired. Two papers in this volume (three, if we count Vine), explicitly address the question of data-accuracy, one being the opening paper by Eric Hamp, which in a very succinct form outlines what he sees as the most basic requirements of data-accuracy for any language classification, the other one Lyle Campbells contribution. The latter tries to evaluate a long list of comparisons between Uralic (a language family for which he can claim expert knowledge) and other Nostratic languages, comparisons, which for one reason or another are claimed by Nostraticists to be the strongest indicators of relationship. The number of inconsistencies he manages to uncover, both in terms of

problems internal to Uralic, and of violations of the sound-correspondences set up by the (Muscovite) Nostraticists themselves is mind-boggling, and, if he is right, the Nostratic theory is likely to have received a serious blow from this side. If he is right, for, of course, all his objections (and we should add that he was ostensibly looking for things to object against), could be challenged, and if so, the proponents of Nostratic should exactly do this, for it is, after all, down-to-earth discussion of the data which can eventually lead to a real sifting of the evidence. It is here that even whole volumes such as this one may only scratch the surface, but actually both parties should show a vivid interest in taking up this challenge, since both proponents and critics of Nostratic and comparable theories should have a foremost interest in pristine data-accuracy. Just how many lexical comparisons the Nostratic theory can stand to lose yet still continue to be valid (Manaster Ramer et al. speak of 50 or 100 truly convincing cases (p. 65), which should suffice to accept a relationship) remains to be seen, but before this we should try to see how many comparisons will stand the test of scrutiny in the first place. It goes without saying that the twelve contributions assembled by the editors contain a great deal of thoughts, both theory-related and data-oriented, which even a lengthy review cannot hope to be able to address, among which the role of pronominal roots and paradigms (Bomhard, Vovin, Comrie), the question whether taxonomy has to precede reconstruction or vice versa (Bomhard, Greenberg), and the theoretical status of reconstructs, especially when serving as inputs for higher-level reconstructions, should at least be mentioned here. The debate is thus likely to stay with us for some time to come, the sifting has barely yet begun. For any linguistically trained reader wishing to find some kind of an introduction to the nature and problems of the Nostratic debate, this book, more than any single work by any proponent or critic of macro-comparison, should be the point of departure. For those who wish to sift the evidence on their own the recommendation can, however, only be to familiarize oneself with a plethora of linguistic data from the language families in

question, actually to study the languages in the conservative sense of the word, admittedly an arduous task, and certainly not viable for the majority. But the present writer is unable to give a different advice, let alone some advice which might point to a shortcut to the classification of the worlds languages. No such shortcut is available.

References:

Bomhard, Allan R. & John C. Kerns 1994 The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationships, Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter Illich-Svitych, Vladislav M. 1971 Opyt sravnenija nostraticheskix jazykov (semitoxamitskij, kartvelskij, indoevropejskij, uralskij, dravidijskij, altajskij), Moskva: Nauka Starostin, Sergej A. 1991 Altajskaja problema i proisxozhdenie japonskogo jazyka, Moskva: Nauka