Relationships
No generally accepted connection has been demonstrated between Burushaski and any other language or language family. Several attempts have been made to establish a genealogical relationship between Burushaski and the Caucasic languages, with the Yeniseian languages in a family called Karasuk, as a non-Indo-Iranian Indo-European language, or to include Burushaski in the Dené–Caucasian proposal, which includes both Caucasic and Yeniseian. None of these efforts has been accepted by scholarly consensus. In 2008 Edward Vajda attempted to demonstrate Merritt Ruhlen's proposal that Yeniseian was most closely related to Na-Dene in a Dené–Yeniseian family, but the evidence adduced has not been extended to Burushaski.
Following Berger (1956), the American Heritage dictionaries suggested that the word *abel (apple), the only name for a fruit (tree) reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European, may have been borrowed from a language ancestral to Burushaski. (Today "apple" and "apple tree" are /balt/ in Burushaski.) Others, however, reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European word for "apple (tree)" as *mel-, and yet others do not think Proto-Indo-European had a word for "apple" at all and consider the different words of various Indo-European subgroups to be separate loans from unidentified non-Indo-European languages.
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