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Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin
Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin (russian: Серге́й Анато́льевич Ста́ростин; March 24, 1953 – September 30, 2005) was a Russian historical linguist and philologist, perhaps best known for his reconstructions of hypothetical proto-languages, including his work on the controversial Altaic theory, the formulation of the Dené–Caucasian hypothesis, and the proposal of a Borean language of still earlier date. He was also the author of a widely respected reconstruction of Old Chinese. Theories In 1986, Starostin and Igor M. Diakonoff suggested that the Hurro-Urartian languages belong to the Northeast Caucasian language family. Starostin was also instrumental in the reconstruction of Proto-Kiranti, Proto-Tibeto-Burman, Proto-Yeniseian, Proto-North-Caucasian, and Proto-Altaic. He developed the hypothesis, originated by Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur Khan in the 17th century, but really revived by Gustaf John Ramstedt in the early 20th century, that Japanese i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million residents within the city limits, over 17 million residents in the urban area, and over 21.5 million residents in the metropolitan area. The city covers an area of , while the urban area covers , and the metropolitan area covers over . Moscow is among the world's largest cities; being the most populous city entirely in Europe, the largest urban and metropolitan area in Europe, and the largest city by land area on the European continent. First documented in 1147, Moscow grew to become a prosperous and powerful city that served as the capital of the Grand Duchy that bears its name. When the Grand Duchy of Moscow evolved into the Tsardom of Russia, Moscow remained the political and economic center for most of the Tsardom's history. When ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vladislav Illich-Svitych
Vladislav Markovich Illich-Svitych (russian: Владисла́в Ма́ркович И́ллич-Сви́тыч, also transliterated as Illič-Svityč; September 12, 1934 – August 22, 1966) was a Soviet linguist and accentologist. He was a founding father of comparative Nostratic linguistics and the Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics. Biography Of Polish-Jewish descent, Illich-Svitych was born in Kiev. In 1941, he moved with his parents to Chkalov (now Orenburg) and later to Moscow. His father, Mark Vladislavovich Illich-Svitych (1886–1963), worked as a bookkeeper. His mother, Klara Moiseevna Desner (1901–1955), was chief director of puppet theater in Orenburg. He resuscitated the long-forgotten Nostratic hypothesis, originally proposed by Holger Pedersen in 1903. While embarking on a field trip to collect data on the Hungarian dialects of the Carpathians, he died in an automobile accident on August 22, 1966, near Moscow. His death prevented him from completin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tibeto-Burman
The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non- Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the Southeast Asian Massif ("Zomia") as well as parts of East Asia and South Asia. Around 60 million people speak Tibeto-Burman languages. The name derives from the most widely spoken of these languages, Burmese and the Tibetic languages, which also have extensive literary traditions, dating from the 12th and 7th centuries respectively. Most of the other languages are spoken by much smaller communities, and many of them have not been described in detail. Though the division of Sino-Tibetan into Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman branches (e.g. Benedict, Matisoff) is widely used, some historical linguists criticize this classification, as the non-Sinitic Sino-Tibetan languages lack any shared innovations in phonology or morphology to show that they comprise a clade of the phylogenetic tree. History During the 18th century, several scholars noticed para ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Kiranti
The Kiranti languages are a major family of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Nepal and India (notably Sikkim, Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and Kumai) by the Kirati people. External relationships George van Driem had formerly proposed that the Kiranti languages were part of a Mahakiranti family, although specialists are not completely certain of either the existence of a Kiranti subgroup or its precise membership. LaPolla (2003), though, proposes that Kiranti may be part of a larger "Rung" group. Languages There are about two dozen Kiranti languages. The better known are Limbu, Sunuwar, Bantawa Rai, Chamling Rai, Khaling Rai, Bahing Rai, Yakkha language, Vayu, Dungmali Rai, Lohorung Rai and Kulung Rai. Kiranti verbs are not easily segmentable, due in large part to the presence of portmanteau morphemes, crowded affix strings, and extensive (and often nonintuitive) allomorphy. Classification Overall, Kiranti languages are: * Limbu * Eastern Kiranti ** Gre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Northeast Caucasian Languages
The Northeast Caucasian languages, also called East Caucasian, Nakh-Daghestani or ''Vainakh-Daghestani'', is a family of languages spoken in the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia and in Northern Azerbaijan as well as in diaspora populations in Western Europe and the Middle East. They are occasionally called ''Caspian'', as opposed to ''Pontic'' for the Northwest Caucasian languages. Name of the family Several names have been in use for this family. The most common term, ''Northeast Caucasian'', contrasts the three established families of the Caucasian languages: ''Northeast Caucasian'', ''Northwest Caucasian'' (Abkhaz–Adyghean) and ''South Caucasian'' (Kartvelian). This may be shortened to ''East Caucasian''. The term ''Nakh(o)-Dagestanian'' can be taken to reflect a primary division of the family into Nakh and Dagestanian branches, a view which is no longer widely accepted, or ''Dagestanian'' can subsume the entire family. The rare term ''North Cas ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hurro-Urartian Languages
The Hurro-Urartian languages are an extinct language family of the Ancient Near East, comprising only two known languages: Hurrian and Urartian. Origins It is often assumed that the Hurro-Urartian languages (or a pre-split Proto-Hurro-Urartian language) were originally spoken in the Kura-Araxes culture. External classification While the genetic relation between Hurrian and Urartian is undisputed, the wider connections of Hurro-Urartian to other language families are controversial. After the decipherment of Hurrian and Urartian inscriptions and documents in the 19th and early 20th century, Hurrian and Urartian were soon recognized as not related to the Semitic nor to the Indo-European languages, and to date, the most conservative view holds that Hurro-Urartian is a primary language family not demonstrably related to any other language family. Early proposals for an external genetic relationship of Hurro-Urartian variously grouped them with the Kartvelian languages, Elamite, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Igor M
Igor may refer to: People * Igor (given name), an East Slavic given name and a list of people with the name * Mighty Igor (1931–2002), former American professional wrestler * Igor Volkoff, a professional wrestler from NWA All-Star Wrestling * Igorrr, (born 1984) a French musician Fictional characters * Igor (character), a stock character * Igor Karkaroff, character in the ''Harry Potter'' series * Igor, the eagle in ''Count Duckula'' * Igor, the first enemy character in fighting game ''Human Killing Machine'' * Igor, a baboon with shape-shifting powers in Marvel comics (see List of fictional monkeys) * Igor, a reoccurring character in the ''Persona'' series * Igor, a character in ''Young Frankenstein'' * Igor Nevsky, an assassin in ''Air Force One'' (film) Arts, entertainment, and media * ''Igor'' (album), a 2019 album by Tyler, The Creator * ''Igor'' (film), a 2008 American animated film * '' Igor: Objective Uikokahonia'', a 1994 Spanish MS-DOS PC video game released C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Borean Languages
Borean (also Boreal or Boralean)http://ehl.santafe.edu/EhlforWeb.pdf is a hypothetical linguistic macrofamily that encompasses almost all language families worldwide except those native to the Americas, Africa, Oceania, and the Andaman Islands. Its supporters propose that the various languages spoken in Eurasia and adjacent regions have a genealogical relationship, and ultimately descend from languages spoken during the Upper Paleolithic in the millennia following the Last Glacial Maximum. The name ''Borean'' is based on the Greek βορέας, and means "northern". This reflects the fact that the group is held to include most language families native to the northern hemisphere. Two distinct models of Borean exist: that of Harold C. Fleming and that of Sergei Starostin. Fleming's model The concept is due to Harold C. Fleming (1987), who proposed such a "mega-super-phylum" for the languages of Eurasia, termed ''Borean'' or ''Boreal'' in Fleming (1991) and later publications. In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-language
In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattested, or partially attested at best. They are reconstructed by way of the comparative method. In the family tree metaphor, a proto-language can be called a mother language. Occasionally, the German term ''Ursprache'' (from ''Ur-'' "primordial, original", and ''Sprache'' "language", ) is used instead. It is also sometimes called the ''common'' or ''primitive'' form of a language (e.g. Common Germanic, Primitive Norse). In the strict sense, a proto-language is the most recent common ancestor of a language family, immediately before the family started to diverge into the attested ''daughter languages''. It is therefore equivalent with the ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'' of a language family. Moreover, a group of languages ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philology
Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as the study of literary texts as well as oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist. In older usage, especially British, philology is more general, covering comparative and historical linguistics. Classical philology studies classical languages. Classical philology principally originated from the Library of Pergamum and the Library of Alexandria around the fourth century BC, continued by Greeks and Romans throughout the Roman/Byzantine Empire. It was eventually resumed by European scholars of the Renaissance, where it was soon joined by philologies of other European ( Germanic, Celti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Bengtson
John D. Bengtson (born 1948) is an American historical and anthropological linguist. He is past president and currently vice-president of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory, and has served as editor (or co-editor) of the journal '' Mother Tongue'' (1996–2003, 2007–present). Since 2001 he has been a member/researcher of Evolution of Human Languages, an international project on the linguistic prehistory of humanity coordinated by the Santa Fe Institute. His areas of specialization include Scandinavian languages and linguistics, Indo-European linguistics, Dené–Caucasian (Sino-Caucasian) languages, and paleolinguistics (the study of human prehistory through linguistic evidence). Publications * Bengtson, John D. 1994. (with Merritt Ruhlen) Global Etymologies. In M. Ruhlen, ''On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy''. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. * 1994. Edward Sapir and the 'Sino-Dene' Hypothesis. ''Anthropological Science'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Merritt Ruhlen
Merritt Ruhlen (May 10, 1944 – January 29, 2021) was an American linguist who worked on the classification of languages and what this reveals about the origin and evolution of modern humans. Amongst other linguists, Ruhlen's work was recognized as standing outside the mainstream of comparative-historical linguistics. He was the principal advocate and defender of Joseph Greenberg's approach to language classification. Biography Born Frank Merritt Ruhlen, 1944, Ruhlen studied at Rice University, the University of Paris, the University of Illinois and the University of Bucharest. He received his PhD in 1973 from Stanford University with a dissertation on the generative analysis of Romanian morphology. Subsequently, Ruhlen worked for several years as a research assistant on the Stanford Universals Project, directed by Joseph Greenberg and Charles Ferguson. From 1994, he was a lecturer in Anthropological Sciences and Human Biology at Stanford and co-director, along with Murra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
