Eurasian - pannous/hieros GitHub Wiki

Eurasian is an observed and proposed language phenomenon "macrofamily" affecting many language families historically spoken in northern, western, and southern Eurasia.

There are two scenarios of its emergence:

1. As old remnants of the languages spoken during the paleolithic settlement of Europe and Asia 45000 BC (unlikely)
2. As some kind of contact phenomenon / lingua franca during the Neolithic and after:

At the end of the last ice age, human populations where much more distinct, homogenous and clustered than today. West hunter gatherers were as distinct from Anatolian farmers as the chinese are today.
Then the great mixing started, and waves of populations replaced the indigenous: Near Eastern and Anatolian populations formed Early European Farmers, after contact with Iranian and Caucasian neolithic populations (who are misleadingly labeled caucasian hunter gatherers). These two streams of farmers met again in the Pontic Steppes in the 5th millennium BC, where they merged with indigenous EHG (Likely speaking proto Turk and Uralic languages). During each of the above contacts, the populations and language families merged. This is how all western Eurasian languages are related. Because of the strong repeated eastward push of Turks, Mongols and Afanasievo related pioneers, even east asiatic languages show many resemblance to Eurasian roots and structures.

Turk, Hunnic and Uralic had enormous impact on Slavic and Germanic languages, as factions from the steppe kept pushing into Europe. The overlap was not just geographical: Goth, Huns and Tartars were polylingual mixed bags of said ethnics.

By then all of these families had strong caucasian components, who also spread south during all of the neolithic to form Akkadian, Babylonian and Egyptian languages. These caucasians are very recognizable in the archaeological records via hawk like noses, red hair and titanus body height (one Iranian pioneer in 3000BC measured 1.8 meters in height).

As such, Eurasian was not an actual lingua franca, but is a bag of very recognizable interregional shared roots, which go beyond wanderwords but include regional grammatical features, especially pronouns and numbers.

Our Eurasian hypothesis, which is strongly linked to neolithic and chalcolithic paleogenetics differs from:

"Eurasiatic" family, promoted by Greenberg etc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasiatic_languages

Eurasiatic resembles Nostratic in including Uralic, Indo-European, and Altaic, but differs from it in excluding the South Caucasian languages, Dravidian, and Afroasiatic and including Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Nivkh, Ainu, and Eskimo–Aleut. It was propounded by Joseph Greenberg in 2000–2002. Subsequently it was met with many objections by linguists (as usual).

In 2013, Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, and Andrew Meadea published statistical evidence that attempts to overcome these objections. According to their earlier work, most words exhibit a "half-life" of between 2,000 and 4,000 years, consistent with existing theories of linguistic replacement. However, they also identified some words – numerals, pronouns, and certain adverbs – that exhibit a much slower rate of replacement with half-lives of 10,000 to 20,000 or more years. Drawing from research in a diverse group of modern languages, the authors were able to show the same slow replacement rates for key words regardless of current pronunciation. They conclude that a stable core of largely unchanging words is a common feature of all human discourse, and model replacement as inversely proportional to usage frequency. pdf

One very interesting fossile language is Kusunda, spoken by people in Nepal who are closest related to the famous Japanese aboriginal Jomon of Haplogroup D, first Asian wave of modern humans according to Nature. Though Indo-European Nepalese must have had a tremendous influence, in gives invaluable insights into important roots: e.g.
iŋ sun : iŋ / inəŋ eye ⇔ gün : Augen

The strongest connections can be found between Indo-European and Finno-Uralic languages, yielding the concept of Indo-Uralic_languages.

Quoth:
«If all these and many other resemblances that might be adduced do not prove the common origin of Aryan and Ugrian, and if we assume that the Ugrians borrowed not only a great part of their vocabulary, but also many of their derivative syllables, together with at least the personal endings of their verbs from Aryan, then the whole fabric of comparative philology falls to the ground, and we are no longer justified in inferring from the similarity of the inflections in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit that these languages have a common origin.»

This page picks up on main evidence in including Egyptian, Turk, Uralic and Kartvelian to be part of a bigger Eurasian language family.

Dravidian languages also seem to be distantly related, even Khmer. The whole concept of purely genealogical development of languages becomes questionable once one analyses Creole languages which share equal traits of both parental languages not just in vocabulary but also in grammar. Linguists cling to the idea of monoparental language development similar to how racists cling to paternal Y-Haplogroups in the light of whole genome admixture.

The strongest evidence of some kind of common heritage, relationship, intense contact, sprachbund or hegemony is found in Pronouns and grammatical features. These features are often super regional with patches extending language barriers being of special interest.

It will be fascinating to link these features to genetically clusters such as east hunter gatherers, who might have possessed the first person 'bin' which was kept in Turk languages and spread to German. Now that paleo genetics offer an ever increasing finer picture of the movement, spread and distribution of people, sometimes to the family level, there is hope that in the future these developments can be connected to linguistic features. Because before the formation of states, genes and languages where very highly correlated.

Eurasian languages have in common that b/p is not a grammatical suffix, with the exception of 3rd person who.

See fruit and plant for prime Examples of Eurasian word clusters