Regimentum Mixtum
Abstract: The relationships between Nostratic and Caucasian languages are considered at the lexical level, taking into account the results of previous studies of the relationships between Nostratic, Abkhaz-Adyghe, and Nakh-Dagestanian languages. These studies used the graphoanalytical method, which has proven its effectiveness in studying closely related languages. Its use for studying the possible relationship of language families is problematic. For this purpose, a search for correspondences between the languages of the families under consideration was conducted among the words of the lexical core. These words are mainly the most ancient. Similar work was carried out to study the possible relationships between the Turkic and Mongolian languages. For these languages, 140 words of the lexical core were found that have correspondences simultaneously in both of these families. The same list was used to study the possible relationships between the Nostratic and Caucasian languages. As it turned out, 51 matches to Turkic or Indo-European languages representing the Nostratic macrofamily were found in the languages of the Abkhaz-Adyghe language family from this list. More such matches were found for the Nakh-Dagestan family. Taking into account the previously determined places of formation of the Nostratic, Abkhaz-Adyghe, and Nakh-Dagestanian languages, a conclusion was made about the common genetic origin of all the languages of these families. In other words, there could not have been a special proto-language for either the Caucasian or Nostratic languages.
Key words: Nostratic, Abkhaz-Adyghe, Nakh-Dagestanian, Kartvelian, graphoanalytical, “lexical core”, Caucasus.
The study of the relationship of large language families should begin with the origin of human. According to the latest paleogenetic studies, it is recognized that the basic anatomy of Homo sapiens was present in Africa by at least 150 ka, though 40 years ago it was possible to argue that Africa played no special role in human evolution [STRINGER CHRIS. 2007: 15]. The African fossil record shows that the settlement of Eurasia from Africa stretched over several tens of thousands of years, and the main route of human movement lay along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea:
The extension of early modern humans to the Levant by 100 ka has been confirmed by further dating analyses on the Skhul and Qafzeh material [Ibid: 15-16].
Thus, people from the Levant began to settle across Eurasia, during which ethnic groups and their languages were formed. A study of the Nostratic and Sino-Tibetan languages using the graphoanalytical method showed that they were formed in the same place, namely, in the area of three lakes: Sevan, Van, and Urmia [STETSYUK VALENTYN. 1998: 27-32; STETSYUK VALENTYN. 2023: 1-3]. At first, this territory was inhabited by people of the Mongoloid anthropological type, then they were displaced by Europeans. When considering the question of the origin of the human language, it was found that these two anthropological types had a large part of common phonetics and some part of common vocabulary [STETSYUK VALENTYN. 2019]. Later, the languages of these two anthropological types developed in their ways and formed two groups of languages, which were conventionally called Asian and European. Following the fact that the Turkic languages were included in the Nostratic languages, they were included in the European languages, while the Mongolian languages, whose ancestral homeland was determined in the Amur River basin [STETSYUK VALENTYN. 2010: 5-8], were part of the Asian languages. Thus, a close genetic relationship between these two language families is excluded, and in this work, the common part of their vocabulary is considered the result of later mutual borrowings and is not taken into account. However, they are descended from a single original human language, from which all modern languages have developed over the millennia.
Thus, the Mongolian languages are not included in the Nostratic macrofamily, which usually includes Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian and Kartvelian. On the other hand, some linguists deny the existence of such a macrofamily, while others believe that its composition should be expanded.
The boundaries for the Nostratian world of languages cannot yet be determined, but the area is enormous and includes such widely divergent races that one becomes almost dizzy at the thought [BOMHARD ALLAN R. 2018: 4].
In particular, according to A. Dolgopolsky, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo-Aleut languages can be classified as Nostratic. Later this idea was supported by Joseph Greenberg, and Bomhard suggested a kinship with Nostratic also of the Sumerian language(ibid: 5-7). In addition to these languages, he also refers to the Nostratic languages as Tyrrhenian, Gilyak (Nivkh), and Yukaghir [BOMHARD ALLAN R. 2014/2015: 20].
Ultimately, everything comes down to the question of the possibility of monogenesis of all the languages of the world. At one time, one suggested that the idea of restoring a primary language by comparing existing languages is a chimera [YAKUSHIN B.V. 1985:66]. However, it all depends on the comparison methodology, which may be different. The very process of comparing the sound composition of words of different languages of a certain semantic field will answer the question of the existence of patterns in the names of the same objects by different people. O. Melnychuk had the same idea [MELNYCHUK A.S. 1991: 28] when he wrote about the obtained data testifying to the unity of origin of all the languages of the world:
These data are a series of extensive phonetically correlative etymological complexes, which are regularly repeated in the languages of each family, with large bundles of interconnected elementary meanings and with a specific, still not noted complex system of structural variants of the root, the same for each etymological complex [MELNYCHUK A.S. 1991: 28]
Melnichuk was engaged in comparative linguistics, in which methods of glottochronology were developed. One of them was proposed by Maurice Swadesh [SWADESH M. 1960]. He assumed that a certain part of the basic vocabulary of all languages forms a certain lexical core and tried to find this core. At first, he compiled a list of 100 words, and later expanded it to 207 words. Using his latest version, I checked the possibility of a genetic relationship between the Mongolian and Turkic languages. In the process of this work, I discovered that from the Swadesh list, only 140 words have good correspondences in all Turkic and Mongolic languages [STETSYUK VALENTYN. 2024]. Swadesh included in the lexical core words that appeared in languages over a long time and spread very widely, so not all the words in it are the most ancient. The oldest words can only be those that appeared in languages when human economic activity was limited to hunting and gathering. Words that appeared in the Neolithic with the development of agriculture and the changes in thinking associated with it cannot be the most ancient. Studying the question of the origin of numerals in Nostratic languages, I established that the initial counting of people was limited to two units, and then followed the definition of «many» [STETSYUK VALENTYN. Thus, numerals greater than two and abstract words with multiple meanings, such as “fruit”, “right”, “fight”, “play”, etc, should be excluded from the list.
Assuming that the more often a word is used in a language, the earlier it appeared in it, the scientists set themselves the task of constructing a mathematical model of changes in the dictionary and, based on this model, theoretically obtaining a relationship between the time of the word’s appearance and its rank in the frequency dictionary. They proposed an empirical formula that describes the probability of a word appearing at a given point in time. The key to this formula is a certain constant, which itself can change for different chronological sections and different languages, but the speed of language development in different periods can be very different, and we cannot have the slightest idea about these features now. The authors objectively assessed their method, noting that they only wanted to demonstrate its capabilities, because to calculate the constant it is necessary to have frequency dictionaries compiled according to a single method, and historical lexicography should have been developed to such an extent that it could provide the possibility of recording the moment of the appearance of a new word with an accuracy of at least up to a century. Nevertheless, they claimed:
There is a relationship between the frequency and the time of occurrence of the word in his language… Most of the words with a high frequency of use are ancient words, and vice versa – the lower the frequency of a word, the more likely that the word is new-created [ARAPOV M.V., HERZ M.M. 1974: 3].
Mańczak also paid attention to the frequency of word usage and claimed that the most frequently used words speak of the origin of the language. Recognizing that the Romanian language has the most words of Slavic origin, followed by Latin, Turkish, and Modern Greek, he said that both the living Romanian language and the texts written in this language still give the impression of being Romance, not Slavic. A similar phenomenon is observed in the Albanian language. R. Trautman presents the following data from G. Meyer regarding the composition of the vocabulary of the Albanian language: out of 5110 Albanian words, there are 1420 words of Romance origin, 540 of Slavic origin, 1180 of Turkish origin, 840 of Modern Greek origin, 400 of Indo-European origin, and 730 of unknown origin [TRAUTMAN REINHOLD. 1948]. Such a motley vocabulary prevents the establishment of family ties in the Albanian language, if one doesn’t pay attention to the fact that words of Indo-European origin are more frequently used.
In this regard, the lexical core of all languages should include only the most frequently used words, assuming that they were among the first to appear in human language.This should be kept in mind if we proceed from the fact that the most ancient words should include those that consisted of a combination of sounds that humans first learned to pronounce. The search for these sounds was carried out based on Heckel’s Principle “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, and it was established that they were bilabile b, bh, p, ph, sonorant m, n and neutral vowels of the «schwa» type (ə) [STETSYUK VALENTYN. 2019]. That not all words of the lexical core are a combination of these sounds can be explained by the fact that the first words constituted a category of general meaning and were eventually replaced by words of a more specific meaning with a different sound. The development of speech also could made certain adjustments.
In the noted work, the comparison of etymological complexes having a general meaning was carried out for some European and Asian languages. The Turkic languages were included to European languages in accordance with the place of their formation in Eastern Europe after results of research using the graphic-analytical method [STETSYUK VALENTYN, 1998: 48-52]. The inclusion of the Turkic languages in the Altai family is erroneous, exactly as the idea of the first Turks as Mongoloids. Mongoloid features developed in part of the Turks after mixing them with the aborigines of Asia, with whom they came into contact after migrating from Eastern Europe to Altai. According, the comparison of Asian languages in this work was fulfilled on the materials of the Sino-Tibetan and Altai languages without Turkic. The lexical material was taken from the Global Lexicostatistical Database as well from etymological and bilingual dictionaries. As a result of the work carried out, the following was established.