Allan R. Bomhard

Allan R. Bomhard is an American independent scholar publishing in the field of comparative linguistics. He is part of a small group of proponents of the Nostratic hypothesis, according to which the Indo-European languages, Uralic languages, Altaic languages, and Afroasiatic languages would all belong to a larger macrofamily.[1] The theory is widely rejected by mainstream linguists as a fringe theory.[1][2] Among Nostratists, he has been described as "a maximalist who casts his nets as widely as possible" among far-flung languages not generally believed to be related.[3]

Russian linguists Georgiy Starostin, Mikhail Zhivlov, and Alexei Kassian have criticized his work as imprecise and "historically unrealistic".[4]

  1. ^ a b Johnson, George (June 27, 1995). "Linguists Debating Deepest Roots of Language". The New York Times.
  2. ^ Campbell, Lyle (1998). Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. The MIT Press. p. 311. ISBN 978-0262518499. Postulated remote relationships such as Amerind, Nostratic and Proto-World have been featured in newspapers, magazines and television documentaries, and yet these same proposals have been rejected by most mainstream historical linguistics
  3. ^ Philologos (November 9, 2022). "Was There an ancient superlanguage called Nostratic?". Mosaic.
  4. ^ Starostin, George; Zhivlov, Mikhail; Kassian, Alexei (2016). "The "Nostratic" roots of Indo-European: from Illich-Svitych to Dolgopolsky to future horizons". Slovo a Slovesnost. 77 (4): 403.