Aharon Dolgopolsky

Aharon Dolgopolsky

Aharon Dolgopolsky ( Hebrew אהרון דולגופולסקי; Russian Арон Борисович Долгопольский ;) (born November 18, 1930 in Moscow ; † July 20, 2012 in Haifa , Israel ) was a linguist born in Russia and later living in Israel , who played a decisive role in the development of the nostratic macro family .

Life and effect

Dolgopolsky was initially a member of the Institute of Linguistics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, his research area was comparative linguistics .

In the early 1960s he began - simultaneously with but independently of Wladislaw Illitsch-Switytsch  - to study lexical and grammatical commonalities of different language families in Eurasia and Africa. The Indo-European , Afro-Asian , Kartwel , Ural and Altaic were used for comparison. Dolgopolsky and Illitsch-Switytsch came to the conclusion that these language families are genetically related to each other and must go back to a common predecessor, which they called " Nostratisch " based on a concept by Holger Pedersen from the early 20th century . Dolgopolsky and Illitsch-Switytsch were the first to carry out a broad comparison of the proto-languages ​​of the daughter families of nostratic, established numerous word equations and established phonetic laws for this macro family .

Dolgopolsky taught nostratic linguistics at Moscow University for eight years, where he trained a number of Russian linguists known worldwide, including Sergei Starostin , the founder of the Dene-Caucasian , another Eurasian macro family. In contrast to Starostin, however, he resolutely rejects glottochronology . In 1976 Dolgopolsky left Russia to become an Israeli citizen and professor of linguistics at Haifa University.

Overall, his nostratic hypothesis was only approved by a minority of the relevant researchers. Joseph Greenberg had a similar experience with his competing model, the Eurasian macro family , which, however, does not include the huge group of Afro-Asian languages. Dolgopolsky has in the meantime come closer to Greenberg's approach in terms of content (but not methodology) in that he sees the Afro-Asian as a parallel branch to the (remaining) nostratic, and no more as a subgroup of the nostratic.

Works

A clear summary of the nostratic is his work The Nostratic Macrofamily and Linguistic Palaeontology from 1998, in which he not only compiles 124 detailed nostratic word equations, but also deduces the culture of their bearers from the linguistic commonalities. The following titles by Dolgopolsky have been published in English:

• 1964 A Long-Range Comparison of Some Languages ​​of Northern Eurasia. Nauka, Moscow.
• 1984 On Personal Pronouns in the Nostratic Languages. Braunmüller, Vienna.
• 1986 A Probabilistic Hypothesis Concerning the Oldest Relationships among the Language Families in Northern Eurasia. Karoma, Ann Arbor (Me).
• 1987 Cultural Contact of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Indo-Iranian with Neighboring Languages. Folia Linguista Historica.
• 1988 The Indo-European Homeland and Lexical Contacts of Proto-Indo-European with Other Languages. Mediterranean Language Review.
• 1989 Problems of Nostratic Comparative Phonology. Brockmeyer, Bochum.
• 1992 The Nostratic Vowels in Indo-European. Brockmeyer, Bochum. (Russian as early as 1976.)
• 1998 The Nostratic Macrofamily and Linguistic Palaeontology. McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Oxford - Oakville.
• 1999 From Proto-Semitic to Hebrew: Phonology. Centro Studi Camito-Semitici, Milan.

literature

• Merritt Ruhlen: On the Origin of Languages. Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy. Stanford University Press, 1994.
• Merritt Ruhlen: The Origin of Language. Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue. John Wiley, New York 1996.
  ( Popular version of previous title. )
• Merrit Ruhlen: A Guide to the World's Languages. Arnold, New York / Melbourne / Auckland 1991.
• Sydney M. Lamb, E. Douglas Mitchell (Eds.): Sprung from Some Common Source. Investigations into the Prehistory of Languages. Stanford University Press, Stanford CA 1991.
• Vitaly Shevoroshkin: Reconstructing Languages ​​and Cultures. Abstracts and Materials from the First International Interdisciplinary Symposium on Language and Prehistory. Brockmeyer, Bochum 1989.
• Joseph Greenberg: Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 1, Grammar. Stanford University Press 2000.
• Joseph Greenberg: Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 2, Lexicon. Stanford University Press 2000.

Individual evidence

1. ^ About the Center. Information on the homepage of the Aharon Dolgopolsky Center for Nostratic Research . Retrieved August 20, 2020.
2. ↑ Aharon Dolgopolsky: Sources of Linguistic Chronology . In: Renfrew, MacMahon, Trask (Eds.): Time Depth in Historical Linguistics . The McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research, 2000, ISBN 1-902937-14-7 .