Borean Languages - Starostin's Model

Starostin's Model

As envisaged by Sergei Starostin (2002), Borean is divided into two groups, Nostratic and Dene–Daic, the latter consisting of the Dené–Caucasian and Austric macrofamilies. Starostin tentatively dates the Borean proto-language to the Upper Paleolithic, approximately 16 thousand years ago. Starostin's model of Borean would thus include most languages of Eurasia, as well as the Afroasiatic languages of North and East Africa, and the 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 (Sino-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 thousand 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." 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 very 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 open to 'bona fide' discussion.

They have also suggested possible links between 'Borean' and other families. In their view comparisons with 'Borean' data suggest that Khoisan cannot be included within it but that more distant connections on an even deeper level might be possible, that how the African superfamilies Niger–Congo, 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, 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 into distant relationships of languages is needed to find out whether these additional superfamilies are related to 'Borean' on a higher level or are hitherto unidentified branches of 'Borean'."

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

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

• "Borean"
  • Nostratic (speculative, Holger Pedersen 1903)
    • Afroasiatic (widely recognized family)
    • Eurasiatic (speculative, Joseph Greenberg 2000), c.f. Indo-Uralic
      • Indo-European (widely recognized family)
      • Uralic (widely recognized family)
      • Macro-Altaic (controversial; Roy Andrew Miller 1971, Gustaf John Ramstedt 1952, Matthias Castrén 1844)
        • Turkic (widely recognized family)
        • Mongolic (widely recognized family)
        • Tungusic (widely recognized family)
        • Korean (language isolate)
        • Japonic (widely recognized family)
      • Paleosiberian (phylogenetic unity widely rejected)
        • Nivkh
        • Eskimo–Aleut
        • Yukaghir (sometimes grouped with Uralic)
        • Chukotko-Kamchatkan
    • Kartvelian (widely recognized family)
    • Dravidian (widely recognized family)
  • Dene–Daic (speculative, Starostin 2005)
    • Dené–Caucasian (speculative, Nikolayev 1991; expanded by Bengtson 1997), c.f. Dené–Yeniseian (Edward Vajda 2008)
      • Na-Dené (widely recognized family)
      • Basque (language isolate)
      • Sino-Caucasian (speculative, Starostin 2006)
        • Sino-Tibetan (widely recognized family)
        • North Caucasian (speculative unification of East Caucasian and West Caucasian, Nikolayev & Starostin 1994)
        • Yeniseian (widely recognized family)
        • Burushaski (language isolate)
    • Austric (speculative, Wilhelm Schmidt 1906)
      • Austro-Asiatic (widely recognized family)
      • Miao–Yao (widely recognized family)
      • Austro-Tai (speculative, Paul Benedict 1942)
        • Austronesian (widely recognized family)
        • Tai–Kadai (widely recognized family)