Learning to read the 'original stuff'

If you've ever studied a foreign language you may have been struck by the similarities between various words and their English counterparts. English father is vater in German, padre in Spanish and Italian, and père in French. Such similarities reflect these languages' membership in the vast Indo-European language family, which includes Slavic, Germanic, Romance, Indo-Iranian and many others, all descendants of more ancient languages like Latin, Greek and Sanskrit.

Less widely known, says Vitaly Shevoroshkin, professor of linguistics and of Slavic languages and literatures, is that Indo-European is the daughter of a more ancient tongue, Nostratic.

Just as Indo-European was reconstructed in the 19th century, Nostratic, according to Shevoroshkin and other Nostraticists, was independently reconstructed in the 1960s by two Soviet linguists, the late V. M. Illich-Svitych and Aaron B. Dolgopolsky. Nostratic (from the Latin 'noster' meaning 'our') language, was spoken 14,000 years ago and yielded six main lineages: Indo-European, Uralic (includes Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian), Afro-Asiatic (from which Ethiopian, Hebrew, Arabic and many African languages derived), and Dravidian (spoken in India and nearby regions), Altaic (Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic) and Kartvelian (Georgian, Chechen, Adyghe, Abkhazian).

Photo by Bill Wood, U-M Photo Services Shevoroshkin and Kamholz

It was an interest in Illich-Svitych's dictionary of Nostratic, finished and published after his death, that resulted in UROP student David Kamholz's undertaking an intensive independent study in Russian with Professor Shevoroshkin. "Dave was interested in the dictionary, but he wanted to read the original stuff." Shevoroshkin says, "so we ended up having a very scientific and thorough discussion of Russian."

Kamholz, a junior from Ann Arbor, describes his etymological journey into Russian as one he never could have gotten in a normal language class, where conversational vocabulary and speech is often the focus. As he grappled with the language he quickly became overwhelmed by his growing lists of vocabulary words and realized a better approach was to take the words apart and learn the roots.

"You can't just know one Indo-European language, you have to know several to see how the roots fit together," says Kamholz, who has also studied Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian and French. "Since I learned about Indo-European I very much wanted to understand how it all fit together. Russian has enhanced my understanding of Indo-European, and if I want to understand Nostratic, I have to understand Indo-European."