Eurasiatic_languages

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Eurasiatic languages

name=Eurasiatic region=northern Eurasia familycolor= child1=Indo-European child2=Uralic-Yukaghir child3=Altaic child4=Chukotko-Kamchatkan child5=Eskimo-Aleut child6=Korean child7=Japonic child8=Ainu child9=Gilyak child10=Etruscan }}

Eurasiatic is a language family proposed by Joseph Greenberg that groups all of the language families historically spoken in northern Eurasia into a single macrofamily, with the sole exception of the Yeniseian languages, spoken in part of Siberia, but including the Eskimo-Aleut languages, spoken in northernmost North America and Greenland with a toehold in easternmost Siberia.

The branches of Eurasiatic

As laid out by Greenberg (2000:279-81), the branches of Eurasiatic are:

Etruscan

Indo-European

Uralic-Yukaghir

Altaic

Korean-Japanese-Ainu

Gilyak (= Nivkh)

Chukotian (= Chukotko-Kamchatkan)

Eskimo-Aleut
These groupings, except for the first two, are the native languages in various parts of northeast Asia. Eskimo-Aleut is moreover spoken across the subarctic region from northeast Asia to Greenland, and the Uralic languages are also spoken westward as far as into Scandinavia and Hungary.

Relation to other language families
According to Greenberg, the language family that Eurasiatic is most closely connected to is Amerind. He states that "[t]he Eurasiatic-Amerind family represents a relatively recent expansion (circa 15,000 BP) into territory opened up by the melting of the Arctic ice cap" (2002:2). 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" (ib.).
Eurasiatic and Nostratic include many of the same language families.
Vladimir Illych-Svitych's Nostratic dictionary did not include the smaller Siberian language families listed in Eurasiatic, but this was because protolanguages had not been reconstructed for them, and Nostraticists have not attempted to exclude these languages from Nostratic. Most recently Nostraticists have accepted Eurasiatic as a subgroup within Nostratic. (2005:331)

Reception by linguists
The Eurasiatic hypothesis is dismissed by many linguists, often on the ground that Greenberg relies in his research on mass comparison, a method he developed in the 1950s that remains extremely controversial and attracted sometimes considerable criticism (i.a. by Stefan Georg and Alexander Vovin. Others, citing the wide acceptance of his classification of African languages (cf. Nichols 1992:5), are taking more of a wait-and-see attitude. Greenberg also has his supporters, among them the American linguists Merritt Ruhlen and Allan Bomhard.
One of the basic difficulties to proving a genetic relationship between two languages is that contact between populations often results in exchange of words, so that similarities in vocabulary do not necessarily indicate a common origin. Greenberg addressed this question in his Essays in Linguistics (1957:39).

Morphosyntax
Winfred P. Lehmann (2002) and others have recently argued that Proto-Indo-European descended from a language characterized by active-stativeness, Subject-Object-Verb word order, use of agglutination, and absence of grammatical gender.
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Eurasiatic_languages: information

The branches of Eurasiatic

Relation to other language families

Reception by linguists

Morphosyntax