Annotation of the results obtained in 2022
In accordance with the work plan, activities to fulfill the objectives of the project in the reporting period (third year) included a) collecting sources from libraries and archives, b) interviewing respondents and c) desk research. Besides, a research trip to Georgia was planned. The two-fold essence of the problematics chosen by us determined the overall design of the study. On the one hand, the project team continued to study various issues of distant linguistic relationship, and on the other hand, the second part of the team analyzed this activity, trying to assess the current condition and prospects of Moscow comparative studies, a broader comparativist sphere in linguistics, and thus was engaged in history and theoretical problems of scholar knowledge studies. The priority areas of the actual linguistic part of the project were, firstly, the verification of existing / postulation of new hypotheses of distant relationship, secondly, the reconstruction of fragments of ethnocultural and linguistic history, mainly of the peoples of the Afroasiatic circle, and thirdly, the improvement of the tools of comparative studies (lexicostatistical method). An intensive work was continued on the Canarian etymological dictionary and the reconstruction of cultural vocabulary (names of animals) in Berber of Afroasiatic origin. Another priority area was the reconstruction of the Proto-Afroasiatic cultural vocabulary and the development of a lexicostatistical classification of the Afroasiatic languages. Today, one of the key issues in the classification of the Afroasiatic superfamily, on which, in particular, the solution of the problem of the Afroasiatic ancestral home depends, is the classification place of the Omotic and Cushitic, should they be considered as sister linguistic families? The next problem is the specific affinity of the Hadza language with individual Afroasiatic branches: the Hadza is more closely related to the southern (Cushitic and Omotic) languages than to the northern (Semitic, Egyptian and Berber). At present, we are inclined to believe that the Hadza represent the third southern branch of the Afroasiatic superfamily. A slightly different classification of its constituent branches and groups is also proposed, which differs from the existing classification by George Starostin et al. The genealogical relationships of individual Afroasiatic languages are as follows. Both southern families split almost immediately after their common ancestor splits from that of the North Afroasiatic languages. Further, the Cushitic family breaks up, followed by the Omotic. In the northern grouping of the Afroasiatic languages, the Semitic branch is first separated from the Egyptian (sister language in relation to it), then the Berber branch is separated from the Chadic. Within the Semitic branch, the common ancestor of the modern South Arabian languages, Proto-South Semitic, turns out to be the first isolated language. The Akkadian language stands apart as the second, although chronologically it, along with the Eblan, is the most ancient of the known Semitic languages. And finally, three West Semitic branches appear (almost simultaneously) - Canaanite (Hebrew, Phoenician, Ugaritic), Arabic-Aramaic with South Arabian epigraphic (Sabaean) language and Ethiopian. Separately, it is worth mentioning the study of the manuscript heritage of Vladislav Illich-Svitych from the archive of the so-called Nostratic Seminar. This is a critical analysis of his hitherto unpublished work on the reconstruction of the South Caucasian (Kartvelian) vocalism in the context of comparisons with other Nostratic languages. It is now clear that some of the comparisons it contains are outdated and should be discarded; others remain relevant, albeit often in heavily edited form. Thus, purely archival work leads us to pessimistic conclusions about the current state of Nostratic comparisons in general. Establishing vocalism correspondences between the Western (Indo-European, Kartvelian) and Eastern Nostratic languages (Altaic, Uralic, Dravidian, etc.) is unlikely until stable reconstructions of the vocalism of the Eastern Nostratic daughter systems are obtained, in which, although significant progress has been made in recent decades, all yet much remains unclear. From the Caucasian interests of the researchers involved in the implementation of the project, a topic for the near future emerges. Preliminarily, it can be designated as a historical "investigation" of the Dene-Sino-Caucasian hypothesis, which implies, firstly, a thorough analysis of the socio-political-historical context in which it was formulated, and secondly, a critical assessment of the contribution of various scholars to its development and the contemporary evidences base; and thirdly, consideration of public resonance, namely the impact of the hypothesis on some national ideologies, nationalist disputes, and so on. The historiographic research of the project's team also focused on foreign connections of Russian scholars, namely, the points of mutual influence of Moscow comparativists and linguistic anthropologists (descriptivists) from the USA. In the early history of linguistic anthropology, both American and Russian, there was a period of rejection of the "Indo-Germanic" heritage in the linguistics of Europe in the 19th century. Comparative Indo-Europeanists did not look deeply into questions of the cultural basis of human language, also because of the comparative cultural homogeneity of Europe. On the contrary, the study of unwritten, exotic (“holophrastic and polysynthetic”) languages of the New World required the researcher to take this factor into account. The reaction was the appearance of an “analytical” approach by Franz Boas, his calls to study phonology in close connection with the grammar of a particular language and language as a whole in the context of a single cultural process, in which it was proposed to see something similar to the action of apperception. Boasian phenomenology, so to speak, event-wise, meant a step back to Wilhelm von Humboldt, but paradigmatically anticipated many trends in modern linguistics. The emphasis is not on linguistic divergence, concentrated in the so-called phonetic laws, but on the multidimensional historical connections of unique languages prevented Boas from the race for reconstructions of proto-linguistic forms. And his psychologism made it possible to formulate the concept of the phoneme, at least for such a student of his as Edward Sapir. The image of the family tree has faded to a metaphor in the constructions of Academician Nikolay Marr, who insisted on a single glottogony process, in which the language was destined to submit to the class struggle - socio-economic laws. Instead of etymologies and lexical proto-forms, Marr proposed a “paleontology” of the language addressed to preliterate times by dividing words into primary elements that reveal correspondences in the future idea of the sound chains by Joseph Greenberg and Vitaly Shevoroshkin. Nikolay Yakovlev, at that time a Marrist, approached the division of the sound system of the language into phonemes, but from a completely different point. Further, Boas's moderate anti-colonialism provided an additional impetus to view contemporary European science with suspicion. In the USSR, the rejection of Eurocentrism, at least, was declared by Japhetic theory, always more politics than science. Paradoxically, the descriptive linguistics of the Boasians may turn out to be typologically close to Marrism. Further, the prospects for both directions, as well as for the directions that grew out of their criticism, developed in completely different ways. In this context, on the basis of numerous documentary sources - the correspondence of Sapir with A.L. Kroeber as well as Robert Lowie, Morris Swadesh with both Mary Haas and Charles Voegelin, stored in the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia); as well as data from 30 interviews collected from Russian scientists in the course of the project, it was considered how the method of determining distant relationship (constructing Sapir’s phyla) and, in particular, Swadesh's glottochronology, influenced the development of ideas and scientific searches of Moscow comparativists. Link (the project's website): http://nostratic.org/index.php

 

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Annotation of the results obtained in 2020
In the first phase of the project (2020), the work was carried out in two directions: part of the research team continued to work on various purely linguistic aspects of long-distance language relationship, while the other part of the team was engaged in the science history and its theoretical problems. In the linguistic part of the project, one of the priorities was demonstration of possibilities of linguistic methods in reconstruction of fragments of the ethnocultural and linguistic history. In the first stage, in was an attempt at reconstructing prehistory of the Libyan-Berbers and aboriginal people of the Canary Islands, as well as the first phase of work on the Canary etymological dictionary. The problems of origin and kinship of the indigenous languages of the Canary Islands extinct by the 18th century are far from solved. The results of searches in this area have been published in two articles. They contain reconstruction of ethnolinguistic history of the Proto-Libyo-Berbers and aboriginal people of the Canary Islands, as well as deciphering of the inscriptions made by varieties of Libyan script and address the problem of Phoenician borrowings in Libyan languages and borrowings from the latter into Nubian languages. Another priority was reconstruction of Proto-Afrasian cultural vocabulary. For the first time, a complete set of Proto-Afrasian zoonyms with all the reflexes in individual languages was compiled and prepared for publication; also, reconstruction of Proto-Afrasian terminology of weapons and armed conflicts was published, including the problem of origin of wars in prehistory from a linguistic point of view, usually not taken in consideration by archaeologists and prehistorians. The most innovative finding is that the lexical reconstruction - for all the difficulties of interpreting historical reality in this topic - indicates, apparently, that the concept of war as a large-scale armed conflict, different from its other types, either already embodied in a few separate terms (like *gVr-), or came close to it, reflecting in several semantically close terms which points to the formation of the concept of "war" at the Proto-Afrasian level, i.e. in the minds of the late Mesolithic/ Epipaleolithic community in the Middle East in the 11th millennium BCE. Research has also been continued to identify lexical contacts, both external to and within the Afrasian macrofamily, between languages representing different branches. In the reporting year, a paper was published on ancient Egyptian-Arabic contacts in the vocabulary, allowing to assume the immediate proximity from Egypt of the ancestral home of proto-Arabs and their cultural contacts during most of the Egyptian kingdom history – from the Old to New Kingdom. A special important problem of modern comparative-historical linguistics is the theoretical and practical possibilities of lexicostatistics and glottochronology in genealogical analysis of languages with different levels of kinship and their correlation with historical dating. In order to analyze the accuracy of the calculated dating, as well as the reliability of the tree's topology and the statistical reliability of its nodes, a team of researchers began work of refinement and detailing of the lexicostatistic classification of Afrasian languages and the glottochronology of branching of Afrasian macrofamily. Another research was carried out in the lexicostatistic classification of Mayan languages using the 100-word diagnostic list. As a result, it has been established that between the Mamian and Kichean languages, traditionally belonging to the Eastern Maya branch, the number of common innovations is less than the amount of common basic vocabulary items between the Mamian and Kanhobal languages, whose similarity is rather due to tight contacts. As for interpreting the similarities between the proto-Mayan basic vocabulary and Proto-Miche-Soke vocabulary, they most likely do not testify to the existence of proto-Maya-Miche-Soke language, but rather reflect some very ancient contact situation. In the light of the data obtained, the construction of a strictly binary tree of Mayan languages is postponed for a certain time. In addition to purely research activities, the project's performers were engaged in popularizing their ideas. Two lectures were given, the content of which included: sources of our knowledge about ancient history and prehistory; comparative-historical method in linguistics, goals, problems and perspectives of this science, history and activity of the Moscow School of comparative linguistics, possibilities of interdisciplinary research; ethnolinguistic picture of the world, how it developed and what it looks like today; correlation of linguistic, genetic and archaeological data in different regions and historical periods. In the scientific-historical part of the project, a group of researchers was engaged in the history of Moscow School of comparative linguistics (in the field of distant kinship). This form of work included audio and video recording of semi-structured interviews followed by transcripts of the conversations. Participants and witnesses of events related to the main stages of the school development were interviewed. As a manifestation of resonance caused by the posthumous release of the main work of Illich-Svitych "Essay in comparison of Nostratic languages", the so-called Nostratic seminar dedicated to his memory began to function. During the reporting period, work was carried out to collect archival material of the seminar sessions in the 1970s and 1980s (protocols, etc.), digitize them, comment and prepare for publication. A biographical material about Sergei Starostin, leader of the Moscow School of comparative linguistics during more than 25 years, is prepared for publication, where one of the aspects of the multifaceted activity of the great scientist, first of all, as an Altaist, is presented in detail, and in particular the hypothesis about the Altaic nature of the Japanese language is analyzed. One of the most important aspects of the Altai linguistic family problem was the use of the method of glottochronology, proposed by the American linguist M. Swadesh in the 40s-50s of the 20th century and still regarded as controversial. Swadesh's constructions were based rather on inductive generalization of the facts known to him (or on analogy with other sciences) and had no rigorous evidence either in terms of composition of basic values or in terms of permanence of changes of the relevant words. Many linguists reject Swadesh’s method, often on a priori grounds. Starostin constantly turned to the method of glottochronology, and his works are based on it both in the field of Altaic studies, and in analysis of other families. However, he corrected M. Swadesh, revising and complicating his formula, highlighting the disturbing factors (the permanence of natural replacing items in the basic vocabulary is not observed in case of replacing the original word with a borrowed one) and taking into account the different degrees of lexicon "basicness": the 35-word list proposed by S.Ye. Yakhontov, his own 55-word list, canonical100-word list, extended 110-word list. Although in Altaic studies, there were attempts on the basis of glottochronology to show the absence of Altaic genetic unity, they were not convincing, according to Starostin, and his results were different. He compared the lists of basic vocabularies reconstructed for Turkic, Mongolian, Tungus-Manchurian and Korean language, compiled in part by his predecessors, using new materials, in particular, Korean ones, collected by him in 1978 on Sakhalin. Gradually, the ideas of Soviet Nostratic theory became known abroad. And yet it is treated by most linguists at best as a curious exotic theory, hardly corresponding to the linguistic reality, at worst - as a misguided direction of research. There are several reasons: belated publications in English, the outgoing fashion for Russia, personal relationships, in addition, there were unavoidable mistakes due to lack of data and experience. But, perhaps, the main reason was that Starostin consistently stood on the positions of classical comparative-historical linguistics. In themselves, the idea of kinship of languages is understandable to many, but its proving methods are accessible not to all linguists, but only to those who have mastered the most complex and sophisticated tools of the comparative and historical method. The project's historiographical studies also focused on Russian-American academic ties, points of mutual influence between Moscow comparativists and American linguistic anthropologists (descriptivists). A translation of Franz Boas' work "On alternating sounds" (1888) is being done as part of study of the history of descriptivism and detailed comments on the text are being prepared for publication. Characteristically, this small essay already contains a message against the then widespread prejudice about the evolutionary underdevelopment of non-European peoples and native languages; cultural phenomena are seen in it as historically conditioned by the process of learning. Much of the follow-up to Boas and his disciples is merely further elaboration of conclusions presented in this article. In the context of study of long-distance kinship, verification of the method of glottochronology - the most important are views of such Boasian followers as E. Sapir and especially M. Swadesh. The latter was the target of a "witch hunt" against left-wing professors during the years of McCarthyism. Difficult life circumstances led to the fact that for all the scholarly achievements of M. Swadesh, he remained a white spot in the history of science. In this sense, a detailed academic biography of the American “father of glottochronology” would be extremely useful. In the reporting year, the necessary source base was collected, including copies of documents from the foundations of the American Philosophical Society (AFS, Philadelphia); besides, materials to the biographies of other scholars involved in the Soviet-American academic contacts of the time are being worked at together with compiling the base of full-page files of their publications (currently 1,029 titles). Besides, two articles have been published on the history of early academic contacts based on the AFS collections little known to Russian readers. Thus, the results of the 2020 project phase embrace six articles, including three in the journals indexed in the Scopus database. Besides, work has begun on two monographs, and a certain corpus of sources has been collected, including archival materials from the sessions of the Nostratic Illich-Svitych Memorial Seminar, biographical materials and 10 in-depth and structured interviews (audio recording and transcript).

 

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Annotation of the results obtained in 2021
In 2021 (in the second year), the project activities included both the development of linguistic theme proper and the study of the history of the Moscow school of comparative studies and, generally, historical linguistics (linguistic anthropology). The priority directions of the year were, firstly, the verification of existing hypotheses of distant relationship or the postulation of new ones, secondly, the reconstruction of the ethnocultural and linguistic history, mainly of the peoples of the Afro-Asiatic world, and thirdly, the improvement of the toolkit of comparative studies (lexicostatistical method). In particular, studies were carried out on the Afrasian-Sumerian and Afrasian-Elamite comparisons in order to test Václav Blažek’s hypothesis of possible Afro-Asiatic attribution of Elamite language. The work on the Canarian etymological dictionary also continued throughout the year. The real event was the results of the lexicostatistical comparison of Hadza language (Northern Tanzania) with the languages, which represent all taxa of the Afro-Asiatic macrofamily (according to A. Militarev/O. Stolbova’s etymological database as well as Militarev’s lexicostatistical database). On average, it showed 4% matches in a 50-word list, 5-6% in a 100-word list between Hadza and the languages of all Afro-Asiatic branches. Hadza is usually classified as a language of Khoisan family on the grounds that its phonetic structure is characterized by the presence of so-called clicks (click consonants). The hunters and gatherers, Hadza, live in tropical Eastern Africa away from the main area of the Khoisan peoples (Kalahari Desert). Their physical type has some capoid ("Bushman") features. Previously, genetic research showed that Hadza are close to West African pygmies. The ancestors of the Hadza split from the ancestors of the Pygmies and Khoisans about 96,000 – 98,000 years ago. Directly within the framework of this project, it was established that the system of Hadza personal pronouns (I-you-we), which "mark" different languages, correspond to pan-Afro-Asiatic that cannot be explained only by Afrasian borrowings in Hadza (they are also found) or a common substratum for both. Everything speaks in favor of the ancient linguistic shift in the ancestors of the Hadza. According to the authors of the project, it is most likely that proto-Hadza is the earliest Afro-Asiatic branch in Africa, superimposed on an unknown (Khoisan?) substratum. Earlier, some considerations have already been expressed in favor of situating of the Afro-Asiatic linguistic homeland somewhat north of the Hadza area. So, Alexander Militarev together with Sergei Nikolaev came to the conclusion that the set of zoonyms reconstructed for the Afro-Asiatic proto-language is characteristic of the subequatorial fauna of Northeast Africa. This year's research further reinforces this view. Another priority was the reconstruction of the proto-Afro-Asiatic cultural vocabulary. Afro-Asiatic terms related to weaponry and warfare were under studying. In total, 12 proto-forms were reconstructed for weapons (from a club to a shield), and 13 for different types of armed conflicts; some of which indicate either the already formed or the emerging meaning of “war” in the language, and hence in the social reality of the proto-Afro-Asiatic community. Considering that the solution of this problem is important not only from a linguistic point of view, but also leads us to historical, cultural and even evolutionary generalizations, the editorial board of one of the leading specialized journals in Russia and the world (‘Ethnographic Review’) suggested holding a discussion on its pages on issues of a general methodological plan and more specific ones related to the reconstruction of individual proto-Afro-Asiatic lexemes, under the slogan "Lexical reconstruction for the reconstruction of prehistory." It was attended by both the team members of the project (Alexander Militarev, Anna Dybo) and other leading ethnologists and linguists/specialists in this field (Alexander Kozintsev, George Starostin). In terms of the development of the methodology, an analysis of the lexicostatistical classification was undertaken, which makes it possible to quantify the arising errors based on the value of the average absolute deviation, as well as to minimize their impact on the configuration of the tree (Stammbaum) using the procedure for eliminating unreliable links. Despite the general plausibility and usefulness of the results obtained, in the constructed genealogical trees, internal inconsistencies and artifacts are found that cannot be explained or contradict the known data. The most common of these inconsistencies are: instability of the tree configuration when the number or composition of idioms changes; the tree contains a large number of closely spaced links, the interpretation of which is problematic or impossible. It was found that the main reason for these problems is the imperfection of the previous method of building a tree, implemented in Starling. The use of the methodology proposed by the authors of the project makes it possible to effectively solve both identified problems associated with the instability of the topology and excessive clustering of the tree, as well as significantly improve the resulting classification of the tree from the point of view of its content-related interpretation. The universalism of the developed methodology makes it possible to apply it to the analysis of any genealogical trees obtained on the basis of lexicostatistical calculations, regardless of how they were built. All the main procedures of the method are well formalized and can be implemented as an additional module Starling, or as an independent utility, convenient for practical use in the analysis and refinement of lexicostatistical classifications. Another part of the team was engaged in the history of linguistics. Among the subjects there were, firstly, the main milestones of the academic activities of Sergei Starostin (1953-2005), the former and probably the most prominent head of the Moscow school of comparative studies; and secondly, the rising of linguistic anthropology in the Caucasus (the roles of Nikolai Yakovlev, Alexei Gren, etc.). A certain corpus of sources was collected, including archival materials of the meetings of the Nostratic seminar in memory of V.M. Illich-Svitych, biographical material and 10 (semi)structured interviews. Participants and witnesses of events related to the main events and stages in the history of the Moscow school of comparative studies were interviewed. The historiographic research of the project executors also focused on Russian-American relations, points of mutual influence of Moscow comparativists and linguistic anthropologists (descriptivists) from the United States. In the reporting year, work was completed on detailed commentaries (23,600 words) to the work of Franz Boas ("On alternating sounds", 1888), which has a landmark character from the point of view of the history of anthropology. This article was written by its author on a particular problem, i.e. experimental studies of the effect of the so-called "Sound blindness". Subsequently, the results of observations on the perception of language were transferred by Boas to a wide field of culture, and the process of acculturation is likened to the action of apperception - the instilling of cultural norms and values into each individual member of society. In these comments to Boas’s article, much attention is paid to the attitude of the classic of American descriptivism to the discussions of his time (around polysyntheticism, two levels of phonology), the connections, even if dotted, between Boasian linguistics and modern Russian comparative studies. The comments in particular include: an analysis of the linguistic views of Boas, in particular his concepts of apperception and linguistic relativism as a link to the forthcoming so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; a discussion about the role of the primary organs of speech in the process of phonetic articulation in the context of the problem formulated by Chaz Hocket, proposing the late appearance of labiodental consonants, initially only in societies that switched over to agriculture); criticism of Boas's method of fieldwork research due to the general competence of him as a phonetician, which has become the focus of attention of historians of (linguistic) anthropology today.

 

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