Smaller superfamilies: Eurasiatic

A. Greenberg and Ruhlen follow in a tradition that traces back to the early 20^th century in noticing crucial similarities between Indo-European languages and other families across the Eurasian landmass. A group of Russian scholars’ version of this refers to a grand Nostratic family; Greenberg and Ruhlen differ in exactly which families they include but agree in broad outline.

B. Their Eurasiatic family includes Indo-European, Uralic (including Finnish and Hungarian), Altaic (stretching across Asia and including Turkish and Mongolian), Korean and Japanese, the Chukchi-Kamchatkan group spoken in far eastern Russia, and the Eskimo-Aleut languages spoken across the Bering Strait in northern North America.

C. Evidence that these families had a common ancestor comes from similarities such as those outlined below.

Evidence for the Eurasiatic mega-family:

D. Note that words for “I” beginning with m and words for “you” beginning with t—a pattern we are familiar with from Spanish (me/te)—are common across Asia and in the Arctic. Importantly, similarities between aspects of grammar, rather than concrete words, are considered more indicative of a historical relationship because grammatical items change more slowly than concrete ones. For example, Russian’s noun and verb endings are similar to Latin’s in both their shape and function, while its vocabulary is extremely different