1. linguistic typology

THE LANGUAGES OF NORTHERN EURASIA

Later in his life, Greenberg proposed that nearly all of the language families of northern Eurasia belong to a single higher-order family, which is called Eurasiatic. The only exception was Yeniseian, which has been related to a wider Dene-Caucasian grouping also including Sino-Tibetan, and most recently to the Na-Dene languages of North America in a Dene-Yeniseian family by Edward Vajda.
The Eurasiatic grouping resembles the older Nostratic groupings of Holger Ped-ersen and Vladislav Illich Svitych in including Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic, but differs from them in including Japansese, Korean, and Ainu (which the Nostraticists excluded from comparison only for the methodological reason that they are single languages rather than language families) and in excluding Afroasiatic. At about this time of Russian Nostraticists, notably Sergei Starostin, constructed a re­vised version of Nostratic which was slightly broader than Greenberg's grouping but which similarly left out Afroasiatic.
Recently, however, a consensus has been emerging among proponents of the Nostratic hypothesis. Greenberg in fact basically agreed with the Nostratic concept, though he stressed a deep internal division between its northern 'tier' (his Eurasiatic) and a southern 'tier' (principally Afroasiatic and Dravidian). The American Nos-traticist Allan Bomhard considers Eurasiatic a branch of Nostratic alongside other branches: Afroasiatic, Elamo-Dravidian, and Kartvelian. Similarly, Georgiy Staros­tin (2002) arrives at a tripartite overall grouping: he considers Afroasiatic, Nostratic and Elamite to be roughly equidistant and more closely related to each other than to anything else. Sergei Starostin's school has now re-included Afroasiatic in a broadly defined Nostratic, while reserving the term Eurasiatic to designate the narrower sub-grouping which comprises the rest of the macrofamily. Recent proposals thus differ mainly on
the precise placement of Dravidian and Kartvelian.