Alarodian languages


The Alarodian languages are a proposed language family that encompasses the Northeast Caucasian languages and the extinct Hurro-Urartian languages.

History

The term Alarodian is derived from Greek Ἀλαρόδιοι, the name of an ethnic group mentioned by Herodotus which is usually equated with the people of the kingdom of Urartu, in modern-day Armenia, northwestern Iran, and eastern Turkey.
Historically, the term "Alarodian languages" was employed for several language family proposals of various size. Sayce employed the name for a small group that comprised Urartian and the Kartvelian languages. In 1884, the German orientalist Fritz Hommel further included all languages of the Caucasus and the ancient Near East which did not belong to the Indo-European, Semitic, and the now obsolete Ural–Altaic language families, e.g. Elamite, Kassite. Later, he extended the Alarodian family to include the pre-Indo-European languages of Europe, e.g. Lemnian, Etruscan, Ligurian. Karel Oštir's version of Alarodian included all aforementioned languages, further Basque, Sumerian, Egyptian, the Cushitic and Berber languages. The historical Alarodian proposal – especially Oštir's maximal extension – was however not well-received by the majority of scholars, and eventually abandoned.
in the modern day.
The term "Alarodian languages" was revived by I.M. Diakonoff for the proposed language family that unites the Hurro-Urartian and Northeast Caucasian languages. Work by I.M. Diakonoff and Starostin asserted the connection between "Nakh-Dagestanian" and Hurro-Urartian on the basis of comparison of their reconstruction to Proto-Nakh-Dagestanian, later published in 1994 with Nikolayev.

Proposed relation to Tyrsenian

The inclusion of Etruscan and the related Tyrsenian languages has also been proposed, first by Orel and Starostin in 1990, on the basis of sound correspondences. Facchetti has argued that there is a "curious" set of isoglosses between Etruscan and Hurrian, while Pliev proposed instead that Etruscan had a Nakh substrate. In 2006, Robertson further developed the hypothesis for including Tyrsenian based on proposed Etruscan/Nakh sound correspondences and reconstructions for the numerals.

Reception

The validity of the Alarodian hypothesis remains fairly controversial. Many scholars doubt that the Hurro-Urartian and Northeastern Caucasian languages are related, or believe that, while a connection is possible, the evidence is far from conclusive. The Indo-Europeanist Allan R. Bomhard argues instead for a genetic relationship between Hurro-Urartian and Indo-European. The Caucasian language specialist Johanna Nichols grounds her scepticism in the Alarodian theory in that "neither Diakonoff and Starostin, nor Nikolayev and Starostin, take on the burden of proof and discuss whether the incidence of resemblances exceeds chance expectation, nor do they present examples of the kind of shared morphological paradigmaticity that would strongly support genetic relatedness".

Literature