Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A hypothetical language proposed as the parent language of Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, Dravidian, Indo-European, Kartvelian, Uralic-Yukaghir, and perhaps other language families.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • proper noun A conjectural and not widely accepted grouping of languages including the Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut, Dravidian, Elamite, Sumerian, Kartvelian, and Afro-Asiatic languages, and less commonly including the Aegean and Ainu languages as well.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Danish nostratisk, from Latin nostrās, nostrāt-, belonging to our country or people, from noster, our, ours; see nes- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From German nostratisch.

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Examples

  • In my blog entry entitled Nostratic and the curse of the online forum, I had merely explained that the topic of Nostratic Theory is bogged down by its own controversies and how online forums that serve to represent it need the maturity to strive continuously to cultivate balanced debate.

    Archive 2007-03-01 2007

  • They have an online article called The Nostratic linguistic macrofamily by Ilya Yakubovich of the University of California.

    Archive 2007-03-01 2007

  • In my blog entry entitled Nostratic and the curse of the online forum, I had merely explained that the topic of Nostratic Theory is bogged down by its own controversies and how online forums that serve to represent it need the maturity to strive continuously to cultivate balanced debate.

    Nostratic-L yahoogroups update 2007

  • The last Nostratic forum moderated by Andy Howey called Nostratic-L was what must have been the third in a line of groups in which I had tried to participate on the subject, devoted to Nostratic.

    Nostratic and the curse of the online forum 2007

  • They have an online article called The Nostratic linguistic macrofamily by Ilya Yakubovich of the University of California.

    What is Nostratic Theory? 2007

  • The last Nostratic forum moderated by Andy Howey called Nostratic-L was what must have been the third in a line of groups in which I had tried to participate on the subject, devoted to Nostratic.

    Archive 2007-03-01 2007

  • Even from a Nostratic point of view, it's nonsense because PIE is likely to be closer to Uralic and Altaic than any other language group identified as 'Nostratic' and yet their respective protolanguages are securely placed to the north and east of the Black Sea.

    A modification of Indo-Aegean, plus some new grammatical ideas on Minoan 2009

  • Regarding Bomhard's general reconstruction of Proto-Nostratic, I believe that many of these "Nostratic" roots are not genuine.

    Archive 2007-10-01 2007

  • Sadly, if you want a serious discussion and inspection of "long-range reconstruction" of any of the hypothesized proto-languages, such as Nostratic, you're probably going to have to wait a few centuries when an intellectual renaissance finally happens.

    Archive 2007-03-01 2007

  • Sadly, if you want a serious discussion and inspection of "long-range reconstruction" of any of the hypothesized proto-languages, such as Nostratic, you're probably going to have to wait a few centuries when an intellectual renaissance finally happens.

    Nostratic and the curse of the online forum 2007

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