American linguist (born 1943)
Allan R. Bomhard is an American independent scholar publishing in the field of comparative linguistics . He is part of a small group of proponents of the Nostratic hypothesis , according to which the Indo-European languages , Uralic languages , Altaic languages , and Afroasiatic languages would all belong to a larger macrofamily .[ 1] The theory is widely rejected by mainstream linguists as a fringe theory .[ 1] [ 2] Among Nostratists, he has been described as "a maximalist who casts his nets as widely as possible" among far-flung languages not generally believed to be related.[ 3]
Russian linguists Georgiy Starostin , Mikhail Zhivlov, and Alexei Kassian have criticized his work as imprecise and "historically unrealistic".[ 4]
Toward Proto-Nostratic: A New Approach to the Comparison of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Afroasiatic . Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1984.[ 5]
Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis. Charleston: SIGNUM Desktop Publishing, 1996.[ 6]
Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic: Comparative Phonology, Morphology, and Vocabulary . Leiden and Boston: Brill. 2 vols, 2008.
The Nostratic Hypothesis in 2011: Trends and Issues . Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man, 2011.[ 7]
An Introductory Grammar of the Pali Language . Charleston: Charleston Buddhist Fellowship, 2012.
A Sketch of Proto-Indo-Anatolian Phonology . Florence, SC USA, 2024.
with John C. Kerns:
The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship . Berlin, New York, NY, and Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994.[ 8]
with Arnaud Fournet:
The Indo-European Elements in Hurrian . La Garenne Colombes / Charleston, 2010.[ 9]
^ a b Johnson, George (June 27, 1995). "Linguists Debating Deepest Roots of Language" . The New York Times .
^ Campbell, Lyle (1998). Historical Linguistics: An Introduction . The MIT Press. p. 311. 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
^ Philologos (November 9, 2022). "Was There an ancient superlanguage called Nostratic?" . Mosaic .
^ Starostin, George ; Zhivlov, Mikhail; Kassian, Alexei (2016). "The "Nostratic" roots of Indo-European: from Illich-Svitych to Dolgopolsky to future horizons" . Slovo a Slovesnost . 77 (4): 403.
^ Reviews of Toward Proto-Nostratic :
^ Reviews of Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis :
^ Greppin, John A.C. (2017). "Review of The Nostratic Hypothesis in 2011 " . Prace Językoznawcze . XIX (3): 235–250. ISSN 1509-5304 .
^ Reviews of The Nostratic Macrofamily :
^ Kassian, Alexei (2010). "Review of The Indo-European Elements in Hurrian " (PDF) . Journal of Language Relationship . 4 : 199–211.
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