Nostratic Centennial Conference: the Pécs Papers

Összefoglaló

1903 was the year of the first appearance of the term Nostratic in the oft-quoted article by Holger Pedersen. It was not the first time that the distant genetic relations of Old-World language families had been discussed, but the coining of a name along with Pedersen’s forceful arguments for, at least, a solid connection between Indo-European and Uralic, clearly marked the birth of Nostratic in a programmatic sense. In 2003, the Nostratic Centennial Conference was held at the University of Pécs, Hungary, commemorating the hundred years of progress in Nostratic research. Papers from that conference are the basis of this volume, some of which contribute directly to Nostratic scholarship, while some discuss other hypotheses of long-range relationship or seek to make wider methodological contributions. Being a notion of great scope and boldness, the Nostratic hypothesis has always faced enormous challenges. For the early decades after its birth Nostratic had a rather difficult childhood, but then began to assume a more mature state of development as its adolescence dawned in the early 1960s, for it was then that two linguists at the Moscow Academy started to investigate the possibility of proving the distant genetic relationship of some language families of Eurasia. The story of how the young scholars, V.M Illich-Svitych and A.B. Dolgopolsky, began their investigations independent of each other is famously detailed by Rimma Bulatova (1989). The former was working on etymological comparison of language families, while the latter was focusing on probabilistic methods in demonstrating distant relations when they fortuitously became aware of each other’s work. Despite the premature passing of Illich-Svitych, the subsequent emergence of the ‘Moscow Nostratic School’ proved tremendously productive, and a solid foundation for progress was established. The Bibliographia Nostratica (Hegedűs 19921) demonstrates the growing vitality of the field between 1960 and 1990, with 45 pages of publications on Nostratic in the period listed. The literature has been growing so intensively since then that what is really needed is a continuously updated on-line database. To this end we invite authors to send their annual list of publications and other additions to Irén Hegedűs, so that we may develop a really useful on-line resource. The last two decades saw a new phase in Nostratic scholarship, as conferences dedicated to the topic began to be held and their proceedings published. In particular the Ann Arbor Symposium on Language and Prehistory (Michigan, November 1988) was a catalyst in the progress of research in this field, and the materials of the conference were published in several volumes (Shevoroshkin ed. 1989a, 1989b, 1990, 1992).