Borean languages

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Borean
(widely rejected)
Geographic
distribution		Eurasia, sometimes the Americas
Linguistic classificationProposed language family
Subdivisions
Language codes
GlottologNone
Borean macro-family according to Sergei Starostin

Borean (also Boreal or Boralean)

northern hemisphere. Two distinct models of Borean exist: that of Harold C. Fleming and that of Sergei Starostin
.

Fleming's model

The concept is due to

Kartvelian, Dravidian, a group comprising Sumerian, Elamitic, and some other extinct languages of the ancient Near East, Eurasiatic (a proposal of Joseph Greenberg that includes Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, and several other language families), Macro-Caucasian (a proposal of John Bengtson that includes Basque and Burushaski), Yeniseian, Sino-Tibetan, Na-Dene, and Amerind.[5]

In 2002, Fleming argued that there were not a two large super-phyla distinction between a

Dené–Caucasian super-phyla.[5]

However, in 2013, Fleming had changed his view about this issue in a joint article with

Dene-Caucasian
as language phyla within Borean is a hypothesis that is well grounded and convincing.

Fleming writes that his work on Borean is inspired by

Northern Mongoloid physical appearance, the exceptions being southern India, southern China, southwestern Ethiopia, northern Nigeria, and the Chad Republic.[5]

The phylogenetic composition of Borean (noncommital about higher linkages within the whole) according to Fleming, Bengtson, Zegura, Harrod, and Keita (2013)[6] is as follows:

Starostin's model

Borean language tree according to Starostin

According to

Eskimo–Aleut and the Na-Dene languages of the New World
.

Murray Gell-Mann, Ilia Peiros, and Georgiy Starostin maintain that the comparative method has provided strong evidence for some linguistic superfamilies (Dené-Caucasian and Eurasiatic), but not so far for others (Afroasiatic and Austric). Their view is that since some of these families have not yet been reconstructed and others still require improvement, it is impossible to apply the strict comparative method to even older and larger groups. However, they consider this only a technical rather than a theoretical problem, and reject the idea that linguistic relationships further back in time than 10,000 years before the present cannot be reconstructed, since the "main objects of research in this case are not modern languages, but reconstructed proto-languages which turn out to be more similar to one another than their modern day descendants".[1] They believe that good reconstructions of superfamilies such as Eurasiatic will eventually help in investigating still deeper linguistic relationships. While such 'ultra-deep' relationships can currently be discussed only on a speculative level, they maintain that the numerous morphemic similarities between language families of Eurasia, many of which Sergei Starostin compiled into a special database that he later supplemented by his own findings, are unlikely to be due to chance, making it possible to formulate a Borean super-superfamily hypothesis.[12]

They have also suggested possible links between 'Borean' and other families. In their view comparisons with 'Borean' data suggest that

East Sudanic, Central Sudanic and Kordofanian are related to Borean remains to be investigated, that the situation with the native languages of the Americas remains unresolved, and that while there are some lexical similarities between Borean and the Trans–New Guinea languages, these remain too scarce to establish a firm connection. They comment that while preliminary data indicates possible connections between Borean and some superfamilies from Africa, the Americas, and the Indo-Pacific region further research is needed to determine whether these additional superfamilies are related to Borean or unidentified branches of it.[12] Gell-Mann et al. note that their proposed model of Borean differs significantly from that of Fleming.[12]

Sergei Starostin died prematurely in 2005 and his hypothesis remains in a preliminary form, with much of the material he collected available online.[13][14]

The phylogenetic composition of Borean according to Starostin is as follows:

  • "Borean"
    • Nostratic (fringe theory, Holger Pedersen 1903)
    • Dene–Daic
      (widely rejected, Starostin 2005)
      • Dené–Yeniseian (Edward Vajda
        2008)
        • Na-Dené
          (widely recognized family)
        • Basque (language isolate)
        • Iberian (language isolate; not explicitly mentioned in Starostin's tree diagram, but usually seen as likely belonging to a common proto-family with Basque)
        • Sino-Caucasian (widely rejected, Starostin 2006)
          • Sino-Tibetan (widely recognized family)
          • Yeniseian (widely recognized family)
          • Burushaski (language isolate)
          • North Caucasian (widely rejected; Nikolayev & Starostin 1994)
          • Hattic (language isolate; not explicitly mentioned in Starostin's tree diagram, but in other works by him and his colleagues often associated with North Caucasian or treated as an independent branch of Dené–Caucasian)
          • Hurro-Urartian (widely recognized family; not explicitly mentioned in Starostin's tree diagram, but in other works by him and his colleagues often associated with North Caucasian or treated as an independent branch of Dené–Caucasian)
      • Austric (speculative, Wilhelm Schmidt 1906)
        • Austro-Tai
          (speculative, Paul Benedict 1942)
          • Austronesian (widely recognized family)
          • Tai–Kadai
            (widely recognized family)
        • Hmong–Mien (widely recognized family)
        • Austroasiatic (widely recognized family)
    • Ainu (language isolate; not explicitly mentioned in Starostin's tree diagram, but in other works by him and his colleagues mostly associated with Austric)
    • Sumerian (language isolate; not explicitly mentioned in Starostin's tree diagram, but in other works by him and his colleagues mostly associated with Dene–Daic or Nostratic)
    • Elamite (language isolate; not explicitly mentioned in Starostin's tree diagram, but in other works by him and his colleagues mostly associated with Dene–Daic or Nostratic)

Jäger (2015)

A computational phylogenetic analysis by Jäger (2015) did not support the Borean macrophylum in its entirety, but provided the following phylogeny of language families in Eurasia:[15]

Other languages

Sumerian

Nostratic but from a sister language of it. In other words, Sumerian descended from an older common ancestor language with Proto-Nostratic and did not descend directly from it; that is, Sumerian was closer to Nostratic but not a member of it.[16]

Kartvelian

Bomhard argues that

Eurasiatic at a very early date.[16]

Status of the hypothesis

Linguist Asya Pereltsvaig states in Languages of the World: An Introduction that both versions of the Borean hypothesis are "controversial and tentative".[17]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "«Evolution of Human Languages»: current state of affairs (03.2014)" (PDF). ehl.santafe.edu. Retrieved 3 August 2023.
  2. ISBN 9781787357471
    .
  3. ^ Campbell, Lyle (2001). "Beyond the Comparative Method". In Blake, Barry J.; Burridge, Kate; Taylor, Jo. (eds.). Historical Linguistics 2001. 15th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Melbourne, 13–17 August 2001. p. 45.
  4. ISBN 978-0262518499
    . Postulated remote relationships such as Amerind, Nostratic and Proto-World have been featured in newspapers, magazines and television documentaries, and yet these same proposals have been rejected by most mainstream historical linguistics
  5. ^ a b c "Harold Fleming (2002) "Afrasian and Its Closest Relatives: the Borean Hypothesis", Global Perspectives on Human Language". Archived from the original on 9 June 2007. Retrieved 2 July 2006.
  6. ^
    John D. Bengtson and Shomarka O.Y. Keita – "The Early Dispersions of Homo Sapiens sapiens and proto-Human from Africa." in Mother Tongue (journal)
    , issue XVIII, pp. 143–188, 2013
  7. ^ "It is clear that the Borean hypothesis involves a super-phylum some of whose sub-taxa are themselves super-phyla. The term phyletic chain is introduced as a better label," in name="Greenberg conference">Harold Fleming (2002) "Afrasian and Its Closest Relatives: the Borean Hypothesis", Global Perspectives on Human Language Archived 9 June 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  8. ^ "The basic hypothesis is that Afrasian is related to the following groups of languages before it is related to any others." in Harold Fleming (2002) "Afrasian and Its Closest Relatives: the Borean Hypothesis", Global Perspectives on Human Language.
  9. ^ "The Nostratic hypothesis is explicitly rejected here because it is not a valid taxon, Afrasian being coordinate to the rest and group c being aberrant in its relationship to the others." in name="Greenberg conference">Harold Fleming (2002) "Afrasian and Its Closest Relatives: the Borean Hypothesis", Global Perspectives on Human Language Archived 9 June 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  10. John D. Bengtson and Shomarka O.Y. Keita – "The Early Dispersions of Homo Sapiens sapiens and proto-Human from Africa." in Mother Tongue (journal)
    , issue XVIII, p. 143–188, 2013
  11. ^ Driem, George van (2006). "Sino-Austronesian vs. Sino-Caucasian, Sino-Bodic vs. Sino-Tibetan, and Tibeto-Burman as Default Theory" (PDF). Contemporary Issues in Nepalese Linguistics. Kathmandu: Linguistic Society of Nepal. Archived from the original (PDF) on 26 July 2011.
  12. ^ a b c Murray Gell-Mann et al. (2009) "Distant Language Relationship:The Current Perspective", Journal of Language Relationship·Вопросы языкового родства
  13. ISBN 978-0-415-39923-4
    , obituary, p. xxvi.
  14. ^ Starostin's site includes a tree diagram with a hypothesized branching chronology for Borean, Sergei Starostin. "Borean tree diagram"., a database of proposed etymologies, "Description of database of suggested Borean etymologies"., "Online query of database of long-range etymologies".
  15. PMID 26403857
    .
  16. ^ a b BOMHARD, Allan. (2018). A Comprehensive Introduction to Nostratic Comparative Linguistics, p. 7
  17. ISBN 9781107002784
    .

Further reading
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