Allan R. Bomhard

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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]

Books

  • 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]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Johnson, George (June 27, 1995). "Linguists Debating Deepest Roots of Language". The New York Times.
  2. ^ 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
  3. ^ Philologos (November 9, 2022). "Was There an ancient superlanguage called Nostratic?". Mosaic.
  4. ^ 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.
  5. ^ Reviews of Toward Proto-Nostratic:
  6. ^ Reviews of Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis:
  7. ^ Greppin, John A.C. (2017). "Review of The Nostratic Hypothesis in 2011". Prace Językoznawcze. XIX (3): 235–250. ISSN 1509-5304.
  8. ^ Reviews of The Nostratic Macrofamily:
  9. ^ Kassian, Alexei (2010). "Review of The Indo-European Elements in Hurrian" (PDF). Journal of Language Relationship. 4: 199–211.