Eurasiatic is a hypothetical and controversial language macrofamily proposal that would include many language families historically spoken in northern, western, and southern Eurasia .
126-564: The idea of a Eurasiatic superfamily dates back more than 100 years. Joseph Greenberg 's proposal, dating to the 1990s, is the most widely discussed version. In 2013, Mark Pagel and three colleagues published what they believe to be statistical evidence for a Eurasiatic language family. The branches of Eurasiatic vary between proposals, but typically include the highly controversial Altaic macrofamily (composed in part of Mongolic , Tungusic and Turkic ), Chukchi-Kamchatkan , Eskimo–Aleut , Indo-European , and Uralic —although Greenberg uses
252-649: A constitutional referendum on whether to adopt Russian as a second official language. According to the Central Election Commission, 74.8% voted against, 24.9% voted for and the voter turnout was 71.1%. Starting in 2019, instruction in Russian will be gradually discontinued in private colleges and universities in Latvia, and in general instruction in Latvian public high schools. On 29 September 2022, Saeima passed in
378-633: A lingua franca in Ukraine , Moldova , the Caucasus , Central Asia , and to a lesser extent in the Baltic states and Israel . Russian has over 258 million total speakers worldwide. It is the most spoken native language in Europe , the most spoken Slavic language , as well as the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia . It is the world's seventh-most spoken language by number of native speakers , and
504-510: A new education law which requires all schools to teach at least partially in Ukrainian, with provisions while allow indigenous languages and languages of national minorities to be used alongside the national language. The law faced criticism from officials in Russia and Hungary. The 2019 Law of Ukraine "On protecting the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language" gives priority to
630-487: 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
756-438: A book, The Languages of Africa , in 1955). He revised the book and published it again during 1963, followed by a nearly identical edition of 1966 (reprinted without change during 1970). A few more changes of the classification were made by Greenberg in an article during 1981. Greenberg grouped the hundreds of African languages into four families, which he dubbed Afroasiatic , Nilo-Saharan , Niger–Congo , and Khoisan . During
882-535: A class taught by Franz Boas concerning American Indian languages . He graduated in 1936 with a bachelor's degree. With references from Boas and Ruth Benedict , he was accepted as a graduate student by Melville J. Herskovits at Northwestern University in Chicago and graduated in 1940 with a doctorate degree. During the course of his graduate studies, Greenberg did fieldwork among the Hausa people of Nigeria, where he learned
1008-419: A combination of errors, accidental similarity, excessive semantic latitude in comparisons, borrowings, onomatopoeia, etc. However, Harvard geneticist David Reich notes that recent genetic studies have identified patterns that support Greenberg's Amerind classification: the "First American” category. "The cluster of populations that he predicted to be most closely related based on language were in fact verified by
1134-445: A given family). In contrast to traditional comparative linguistics, the researchers did not attempt to "prove" any given pairing as cognates (based on similar sounds), but rather treated each pairing as a binary random variable subject to error. The set of possible cognate pairings was then analyzed as a whole for predictable regularities. Words were separated into groupings based on how many language families appeared to be cognate for
1260-558: A hard or soft counterpart, and the distinction is a prominent feature of the language, which is usually shown in writing not by a change of the consonant but rather by changing the following vowel. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels . Stress , which is often unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically , though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress – such as to distinguish between homographic words (e.g. замо́к [ zamók , 'lock'] and за́мок [ zámok , 'castle']), or to indicate
1386-479: A language that "belongs to the European cultural space". The financing of Russian-language content by the state will cease, which the concept says create a "unified information space". However, one inevitable consequence would be the closure of public media broadcasts in Russian on LTV and Latvian Radio, as well as the closure of LSM's Russian-language service. In Lithuania , Russian has no official or legal status, but
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#17328448783671512-572: A lesser extent the languages to the south and the east: Uralic , Turkic , Persian , Arabic , and Hebrew . According to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California , Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring approximately 1,100 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency. Feudal divisions and conflicts created obstacles between
1638-607: A minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . 30% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 2% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Azerbaijan , Russian has no official status, but is a lingua franca of the country. 26% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 5% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Georgia , Russian has no official status, but it
1764-429: A priori predictions about word classes more likely to retain sound and meaning over long periods of time. The authors write "Our ability to predict these words independently of their sound correspondences dilutes the usual criticisms leveled at such long-range linguistic reconstructions, that proto-words are unreliable or inaccurate, or that apparent phonetic similarities among them reflect chance sound resemblances." On
1890-516: A qualitatively new entity can be said to emerge—the general language of the working class... capitalism has the tendency of creating the general urban language of a given society. In 2010, there were 259.8 million speakers of Russian in the world: in Russia – 137.5 million, in the CIS and Baltic countries – 93.7 million, in Eastern Europe – 12.9 million, Western Europe – 7.3 million, Asia – 2.7 million, in
2016-531: A significant factor in the results on the basis that for a word to appear cognate in many language families solely because of borrowing would require frequent swapping back and forth. This is deemed unlikely because of the large geographical area covered by the language groups and because frequently-used words are the least likely to be borrowed in modern times. Finally, they state that leaving aside closed-class words with simple phonologies (e.g., I and we ) does not affect their conclusions. According to Greenberg,
2142-509: A single genetic unit. This excludes the Austronesian languages , which have been established as associated with a more recent migration of people. Greenberg's subgrouping of these languages has not been accepted by the few specialists who have worked on the classification of these languages. However, the work of Stephen Wurm (1982) and Malcolm Ross (2005) has provided considerable evidence for his once-radical idea that these languages form
2268-614: A single genetic unit. Wurm stated that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese and the West Papuan and Timor–Alor families "are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity [...] in a number of instances." He believes this to be due to a linguistic substratum . Most linguists concerned with the native languages of the Americas classify them into 150 to 180 independent language families. Some believe that two language families, Eskimo–Aleut and Na-Dené , were distinct, perhaps
2394-469: A slightly different branching, listing seven language families: Altaic [Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic], Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Dravidian , "Inuit-Yupik"—which is a name giving to LWED grouping of Inuit (Eskimo) languages that does not include Aleut —Indo-European, Kartvelian , and Uralic. Murray Gell-Mann , Ilia Peiros , and Georgiy Starostin group Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Nivkh with Almosan instead of Eurasiatic. Regardless of version, these lists cover
2520-805: A stable core of largely unchanging words is a common feature of all human discourse, and model replacement as inversely proportional to usage frequency. Pagel et al. used hypothesized reconstructions of proto-words from seven language families listed in the Languages of the World Etymological Database (LWED). They limited their search to the 200 most common words as described by the Swadesh fundamental vocabulary list . Twelve words were excluded because proto-words had been proposed for two or fewer language families. The remaining 188 words yielded 3804 different reconstructions (sometimes with multiple constructions for
2646-923: A subgroup within Nostratic alongside Afroasiatic , Kartvelian , and Dravidian . LWED likewise views Eurasiatic as a subfamily of Nostratic. The Nostratic family is not endorsed by the mainstream of comparative linguistics . Harold C. Fleming includes Eurasiatic as a subgroup of the hypothetical Borean family. The subdivisioning of Eurasiatic varies by proposal, but usually includes Turkic , Tungusic , Mongolic , Chukchi-Kamchatkan , Eskimo–Aleut , Indo-European , and Uralic . Greenberg enumerates eight branches of Eurasiatic, as follows: Altaic [Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic], Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Eskimo–Aleut, Etruscan , Indo-European, "Korean-Japanese-Ainu", Nivkh , and Uralic–Yukaghir . He then breaks these families into smaller sub-groups, some of which are themselves not widely accepted as phylogenetic groupings. Pagel et al. use
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#17328448783672772-400: A time, his classification was considered bold and speculative, especially the proposal of a Nilo-Saharan language family. Now, apart from Khoisan, it is generally accepted by African specialists and has been used as a basis for further work by other scholars. Greenberg's work on African languages has been criticised by Lyle Campbell and Donald Ringe, who do not believe that his classification
2898-424: A tripartite overall grouping: he considers Afroasiatic, Nostratic and Elamite to be roughly equidistant and more closely related to each other than to any other language family. Sergei Starostin's school has now included Afroasiatic in a broadly defined Nostratic. They reserve the term Eurasiatic to designate the narrower subgrouping, which comprises the rest of the macrofamily. Recent proposals thus differ mainly on
3024-527: Is Belarusian, among ethnic Belarusians this share is 28.5%; the highest share of those who speak Belarusian at home is among ethnic Poles — 46.0%. In Estonia , Russian is spoken by 29.6% of the population, according to a 2011 estimate from the World Factbook, and is officially considered a foreign language. School education in the Russian language is a very contentious point in Estonian politics, and in 2022,
3150-475: Is a co-official language per article 5 of the Constitution of Kyrgyzstan . The 2009 census states that 482,200 people speak Russian as a native language, or 8.99% of the population. Additionally, 1,854,700 residents of Kyrgyzstan aged 15 and above fluently speak Russian as a second language, or 49.6% of the population in the age group. In Tajikistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication under
3276-401: Is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian , and a moderate degree of it in all modern Slavic languages, at least at the conversational level. Russian is written using a Cyrillic alphabet. The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The following table gives their forms, along with IPA values for each letter's typical sound: Older letters of
3402-593: Is a post-posed definite article -to , -ta , -te similar to that existing in Bulgarian and Macedonian. In the Southern Russian dialects , instances of unstressed /e/ and /a/ following palatalized consonants and preceding a stressed syllable are not reduced to [ɪ] (as occurs in the Moscow dialect), being instead pronounced [a] in such positions (e.g. несл и is pronounced [nʲaˈslʲi] , not [nʲɪsˈlʲi] ) – this
3528-640: Is a subfamily of Nilo-Saharan. During 1971 Greenberg proposed the Indo-Pacific macrofamily , which groups together the Papuan languages (a large number of language families of New Guinea and nearby islands) with the native languages of the Andaman Islands and Tasmania but excludes the Australian Aboriginal languages . Its principal feature was to reduce the manifold language families of New Guinea to
3654-406: Is an attempt to demonstrate such means. Greenberg argued for the virtues of breadth over depth. He advocated restricting the amount of material to be compared (to basic vocabulary, morphology, and known paths of sound change) and increasing the number of languages to be compared to all the languages in a given area. This would make it possible to compare numerous languages reliably. At the same time,
3780-485: Is being used less frequently by Russian-speaking typists in favor of the extension of Unicode character encoding , which fully incorporates the Russian alphabet. Free programs are available offering this Unicode extension, which allow users to type Russian characters, even on Western 'QWERTY' keyboards. The Russian language was first introduced to computing after the M-1 , and MESM models were produced in 1951. According to
3906-613: Is called yakanye ( яканье ). Consonants include a fricative /ɣ/ , a semivowel /w⁓u̯/ and /x⁓xv⁓xw/ , whereas the Standard and Northern dialects have the consonants /ɡ/ , /v/ , and final /l/ and /f/ , respectively. The morphology features a palatalized final /tʲ/ in 3rd person forms of verbs (this is unpalatalized in the Standard and Northern dialects). During the Proto-Slavic (Common Slavic) times all Slavs spoke one mutually intelligible language or group of dialects. There
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4032-528: Is justified by his data and request a re-examination of his macro-phyla by "reliable methods" (Ringe 1993:104). Harold Fleming and Lionel Bender , who were sympathetic to Greenberg's classification, acknowledged that at least some of his macrofamilies (particularly the Nilo-Saharan and the Khoisan macrofamilies) are not accepted completely by most linguists and may need to be divided (Campbell 1997). Their objection
4158-563: Is more spoken than English. Sizable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America, especially in large urban centers of the US and Canada, such as New York City , Philadelphia , Boston , Los Angeles , Nashville , San Francisco , Seattle , Spokane , Toronto , Calgary , Baltimore , Miami , Portland , Chicago , Denver , and Cleveland . In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, and live in ethnic enclaves (especially
4284-534: Is not a generally accepted proposal. Eurasiatic and another proposed macrofamily, Nostratic , often include many of the same language families. Vladislav Illich-Svitych 's Nostratic dictionary did not include the smaller Siberian language families listed in Eurasiatic, but this was only because protolanguages had not been reconstructed for them; Nostraticists have not attempted to exclude these languages from Nostratic. Many Nostratic theorists have accepted Eurasiatic as
4410-489: Is not found in language families or languages outside Eurasiatic. In 1998, Joseph Greenberg extended his work in mass comparison , a methodology he first proposed in the 1950s to categorize the languages of Africa, to suggest a Eurasiatic language. In 2000, he expanded his argument for Eurasiatic into a full-length book, Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family , in which he outlines both phonetic and grammatical evidence that he feels demonstrate
4536-564: Is odd") – чу́дно ( chúdno – "this is marvellous"), молоде́ц ( molodéts – "well done!") – мо́лодец ( mólodets – "fine young man"), узна́ю ( uznáyu – "I shall learn it") – узнаю́ ( uznayú – "I recognize it"), отреза́ть ( otrezát – "to be cutting") – отре́зать ( otrézat – "to have cut"); to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words, especially personal and family names, like афе́ра ( aféra , "scandal, affair"), гу́ру ( gúru , "guru"), Гарси́я ( García ), Оле́ша ( Olésha ), Фе́рми ( Fermi ), and to show which
4662-402: Is recognized as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . Russian is the language of 9% of the population according to the World Factbook. Ethnologue cites Russian as the country's de facto working language. In China , Russian has no official status, but it is spoken by the small Russian communities in the northeastern Heilongjiang and
4788-569: Is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. Also, Russian has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, but because of later interaction in the 19th and 20th centuries, Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian. Over the course of centuries, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have also been influenced by Western and Central European languages such as Greek, Latin , Polish , Dutch , German, French, Italian, and English, and to
4914-576: Is spoken by 14.2% of the population according to an undated estimate from the World Factbook. In 2005, Russian was the most widely taught foreign language in Mongolia, and was compulsory in Year 7 onward as a second foreign language in 2006. Around 1.5 million Israelis spoke Russian as of 2017. The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian and there are Russian newspapers, television stations, schools, and social media outlets based in
5040-516: Is supported by the existence of a grammatical pattern "whereby plurals of nouns are formed by suffixing - t to the noun root ... whereas duals of nouns are formed by suffixing - k ." Rasmus Rask noted this grammatical pattern in the groups now called Uralic and Eskimo–Aleut as early as 1818, but it can also be found in Tungusic, Nivkh (also called Gilyak) and Chukchi–Kamchatkan—all of which Greenberg placed in Eurasiatic. According to Ruhlen, this pattern
5166-417: Is that cognates are assumed to have a common origin on the basis of similar sounds and word meanings. It is generally assumed that semantic and phonetic corruption destroys any trace of original sound and meaning within 5,000 to 9,000 years making the application of comparative methods to ancient superfamilies highly questionable. Additionally, apparent cognates can arise by chance or from loan words . Without
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5292-518: Is the stressed word in a sentence, for example Ты́ съел печенье? ( Tý syel pechenye? – "Was it you who ate the cookie?") – Ты съе́л печенье? ( Ty syél pechenye? – "Did you eat the cookie?) – Ты съел пече́нье? ( Ty syel pechénye? "Was it the cookie you ate?"). Stress marks are mandatory in lexical dictionaries and books for children or Russian learners. The Russian syllable structure can be quite complex, with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to four consecutive sounds. Using
5418-461: The 2011 Lithuanian census , Russian was the native language for 7.2% of the population. In Moldova , Russian was considered to be the language of interethnic communication under a Soviet-era law. On 21 January 2021, the Constitutional Court of Moldova declared the law unconstitutional and deprived Russian of the status of the language of interethnic communication. 50% of the population
5544-676: The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1973) and the American Philosophical Society (1975). In 1996 he received the highest award for a scholar in Linguistics, the Gold Medal of Philology. Greenberg is considered the founder of modern linguistic typology , a field that he has revitalized with his publications in the 1960s and 1970s. Greenberg's reputation rests partly on his contributions to synchronic linguistics and
5670-966: The Apollo–Soyuz mission, which first flew in 1975. In March 2013, Russian was found to be the second-most used language on websites after English. Russian was the language of 5.9% of all websites, slightly ahead of German and far behind English (54.7%). Russian was used not only on 89.8% of .ru sites, but also on 88.7% of sites with the former Soviet Union domain .su . Websites in former Soviet Union member states also used high levels of Russian: 79.0% in Ukraine, 86.9% in Belarus, 84.0% in Kazakhstan, 79.6% in Uzbekistan, 75.9% in Kyrgyzstan and 81.8% in Tajikistan. However, Russian
5796-631: The Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family . It is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, and is the native language of the Russians . It was the de facto and de jure official language of the former Soviet Union . Russian has remained an official language of the Russian Federation , Belarus , Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , and Tajikistan , and is still commonly used as
5922-576: The Caucasus Mountains , and the Burushaski in the Hindu Kush Mountains) surrounded by Eurasiatic speakers. Dené–Caucasian survived in these areas because they were difficult to access and therefore easy to defend; the reasons for its survival elsewhere are unclear. Ruhlen argues that Eurasiatic is supported by stronger and clearer evidence than Dené–Caucasian, and that this also indicates that
6048-413: The Constitution of Tajikistan and is permitted in official documentation. 28% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 7% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work. The World Factbook notes that Russian is widely used in government and business. In Turkmenistan , Russian lost its status as the official lingua franca in 1996. Among 12% of the population who grew up in
6174-554: The Hausa language . The subject of his doctoral dissertation was the influence of Islam on a Hausa group that, unlike most others, had not converted to it. During 1940, he began postdoctoral studies at Yale University . These were interrupted by service in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II , for which he worked as a codebreaker in North Africa and participated with the landing at Casablanca . He then served in Italy until
6300-595: The Indo-European , Uralic , and Altaic (including Korean in his later papers) language families. Andreev also proposed 203 lexical roots for his hypothesized Boreal macrofamily. After Andreev's death in 1997, the Boreal hypothesis was further expanded by Sorin Paliga (2003, 2007). In 2013, Mark Pagel , Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, and Andrew Meade published statistical evidence that attempts to overcome these objections. According to their earlier work, most words exhibit
6426-649: The Prague school of structuralism , which influenced his work. In 1962, Greenberg relocated to the anthropology department at Stanford University in California, where he continued working for the rest of his life. In 1965 Greenberg served as president of the African Studies Association . That same year, he was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences . He was later elected to
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#17328448783676552-575: The Ukrainian language in more than 30 spheres of public life: in particular in public administration , media, education, science, culture, advertising, services . The law does not regulate private communication. A poll conducted in March 2022 by RATING in the territory controlled by Ukraine found that 83% of the respondents believe that Ukrainian should be the only state language of Ukraine. This opinion dominates in all macro-regions, age and language groups. On
6678-694: The United States Census , in 2007 Russian was the primary language spoken in the homes of over 850,000 individuals living in the United States. Russian is one of the official languages (or has similar status and interpretation must be provided into Russian) of the following: The Russian language is also one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station – NASA astronauts who serve alongside Russian cosmonauts usually take Russian language courses. This practice goes back to
6804-660: The genetic classification of languages. Joseph Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915, to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York . His first great interest was music. At the age of 14, he gave a piano concert in Steinway Hall . He continued to play the piano frequently throughout his life. After graduating from James Madison High School , he decided to pursue a scholarly career rather than a musical one. He enrolled at Columbia College in New York in 1932. During his senior year, he attended
6930-508: The 20th century, Russian was a mandatory language taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR. According to the Eurobarometer 2005 survey, fluency in Russian remains fairly high (20–40%) in some countries, in particular former Warsaw Pact countries. In Armenia , Russian has no official status, but it is recognized as
7056-478: The Americas has generated lively debate, but has been criticized strongly; it is rejected by most specialists of indigenous languages of the Americas and also by most historical linguists. Specialists of the individual language families have found extensive inaccuracies and errors in Greenberg's data, such as including data from non-existent languages, erroneous transcriptions of the forms compared, misinterpretations of
7182-465: The Belarusian society the Russian language prevails, so according to the 2019 census 6,718,557 people (71.4% of the total population) stated that they speak Russian at home, for ethnic Belarusians this share is 61.4%, for Russians — 97.2%, for Ukrainians — 89.0%, for Poles — 52.4%, and for Jews — 96.6%; 2,447,764 people (26.0% of the total population) stated that the language they usually speak at home
7308-519: The Great and developed from the Moscow ( Middle or Central Russian ) dialect substratum under the influence of some of the previous century's Russian chancery language. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution , the spoken form of the Russian language was that of the nobility and the urban bourgeoisie. Russian peasants, the great majority of the population, continued to speak in their own dialects. However,
7434-578: The Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an optional acute accent ( знак ударения ) may, and sometimes should, be used to mark stress . For example, it is used to distinguish between otherwise identical words, especially when context does not make it obvious: замо́к ( zamók – "lock") – за́мок ( zámok – "castle"), сто́ящий ( stóyashchy – "worthwhile") – стоя́щий ( stoyáshchy – "standing"), чудно́ ( chudnó – "this
7560-519: The Last Glacial Maximum . ^A The 23 words are (listed in order of cognate class size): Thou (7 cognates), I (6), Not, That, To give, We, Who (5), Ashes, Bark, Black, Fire, Hand, Male/man, Mother, Old, This, To flow, To hear, To pull, To spit, What, Worm, Ye (4) Joseph Greenberg Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist , known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and
7686-515: The Middle East and North Africa – 1.3 million, Sub-Saharan Africa – 0.1 million, Latin America – 0.2 million, U.S., Canada , Australia, and New Zealand – 4.1 million speakers. Therefore, the Russian language is the seventh-largest in the world by the number of speakers , after English, Mandarin, Hindi -Urdu, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Portuguese. Russian is one of the six official languages of
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#17328448783677812-445: The Nostratic hypothesis. Greenberg 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 Nostraticist Allan Bomhard considers Eurasiatic a branch of Nostratic, alongside other branches: Afroasiatic, Elamo-Dravidian , and Kartvelian . Similarly, Georgiy Starostin (2002) arrives at
7938-459: The Nostraticists had excluded from comparison because they are single languages rather than language families) and in excluding Afroasiatic . At about this time, Russian Nostraticists, notably Sergei Starostin , constructed a revised version of Nostratic. It was slightly larger than Greenberg's grouping but it also excluded Afroasiatic. Recently, a consensus has been emerging among proponents of
8064-573: The Pagel list, she concludes it is impossible that such words could have retained any sound and meaning pairings from 15,000 years ago given how much they have changed in the 1,500 or so-year attested history of English. She also states that the authors are "looking in the wrong place" to begin with since "grammatical properties are more reliable than words as indicators of familial relationships". Pagel et al. also examined two other possible objections to their conclusions. They rule out linguistic borrowing as
8190-807: The Russian alphabet include ⟨ ѣ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ е ⟩ ( /je/ or /ʲe/ ); ⟨ і ⟩ and ⟨ ѵ ⟩ , which both merged to ⟨ и ⟩ ( /i/ ); ⟨ ѳ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ф ⟩ ( /f/ ); ⟨ ѫ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ у ⟩ ( /u/ ); ⟨ ѭ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ю ⟩ ( /ju/ or /ʲu/ ); and ⟨ ѧ ⟩ and ⟨ ѩ ⟩ , which later were graphically reshaped into ⟨ я ⟩ and merged phonetically to /ja/ or /ʲa/ . While these older letters have been abandoned at one time or another, they may be used in this and related articles. The yers ⟨ ъ ⟩ and ⟨ ь ⟩ originally indicated
8316-458: The Russian principalities before and especially during Mongol rule. This strengthened dialectal differences, and for a while, prevented the emergence of a standardized national language. The formation of the unified and centralized Russian state in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the gradual re-emergence of a common political, economic, and cultural space created the need for a common standard language. The initial impulse for standardization came from
8442-454: The Soviet era can speak Russian, other generations of citizens that do not have any knowledge of Russian. Primary and secondary education by Russian is almost non-existent. In Uzbekistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication. It has some official roles, being permitted in official documentation and is the lingua franca of the country and the language of the elite. Russian
8568-460: The United Nations. Education in Russian is still a popular choice for both Russian as a second language (RSL) and native speakers in Russia, and in many former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics. In Belarus , Russian is a second state language alongside Belarusian per the Constitution of Belarus . 77% of
8694-556: The accuracy of the LWED data on which the paper was based. She notes that LWED lists multiple possible proto-word reconstructions for most words, increasing the possibility of chance matches. Pagel et al. anticipated this criticism and state that since infrequently used words generally have more proposed reconstructions, such errors should "produce a bias in the opposite direction" of what the statistics actually show (i.e. that infrequently used words should have larger cognate groups if chance alone
8820-403: The broader sense of expanding the use of Russian alongside or in favour of other languages. The current standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language ( современный русский литературный язык – "sovremenny russky literaturny yazyk"). It arose at the beginning of the 18th century with the modernization reforms of the Russian state under the rule of Peter
8946-453: The controversial Uralic-Yukaghir classification instead. Other branches sometimes included are the Kartvelian and Dravidian families, as proposed by Pagel et al., in addition to the language isolates Nivkh , Etruscan and Greenberg's "Korean–Japanese–Ainu". Some proposals group Eurasiatic with even larger macrofamilies, such as Nostratic ; again, many other professional linguists regard
9072-562: The country. There is an Israeli TV channel mainly broadcasting in Russian with Israel Plus . See also Russian language in Israel . Russian is also spoken as a second language by a small number of people in Afghanistan . In Vietnam , Russian has been added in the elementary curriculum along with Chinese and Japanese and were named as "first foreign languages" for Vietnamese students to learn, on equal footing with English. The Russian language
9198-724: The course of his work, Greenberg invented the term "Afroasiatic" to replace the earlier term "Hamito-Semitic", after showing that the Hamitic group, accepted widely since the 19th century, is not a valid language family. Another major feature of his work was to establish the classification of the Bantu languages , which occupy much of Central and Southern Africa, as a part of the Niger–Congo family, rather than as an independent family as many Bantuists had maintained. Greenberg's classification rested largely in evaluating competing earlier classifications. For
9324-464: The end of the war. Before leaving for Europe during 1943, Greenberg married Selma Berkowitz, whom he had met during his first year at Columbia University. After the war, Greenberg taught at the University of Minnesota before returning to Columbia University in 1948 as a teacher of anthropology . While in New York, he became acquainted with Roman Jakobson and André Martinet . They introduced him to
9450-606: The existence of statistical estimates of chance collisions, conclusions based on comparison alone are thus viewed as doubtful. Stefan Georg and Alexander Vovin , who, unlike many of their colleagues, do not stipulate a priori that attempts to find ancient relationships are bound to fail, examined Greenberg's claims in detail. They state that Greenberg's morphological arguments are the correct approach to determining families, but doubt his conclusions. They write "[Greenberg's] 72 morphemes look like massive evidence in favour of Eurasiatic at first glance. If valid, few linguists would have
9576-413: The factory and the industrial plant their local peasant dialects with their phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary, and the very process of recruiting workers from peasants and the mobility of the worker population generate another process: the liquidation of peasant inheritance by way of leveling the particulars of local dialects. On the ruins of peasant multilingual, in the context of developing heavy industry,
9702-451: The final reading amendments that state that all schools and kindergartens in the country are to transition to education in Latvian . From 2025, all children will be taught in Latvian only. On 28 September 2023, Latvian deputies approved The National Security Concept, according to which from 1 January 2026, all content created by Latvian public media (including LSM ) should be only in Latvian or
9828-489: The first point, they argue that inaccurate reconstructions should weaken, not enhance, the signals. On the second, they argue that chance resemblances should be equally common across all word usage frequencies, in contrast to what the data shows. The team then created a Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation to estimate and date the phylogenetic trees of the seven language families under examination. Five separate runs produced
9954-672: The generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early 1960s). Only about 25% of them are ethnic Russians, however. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union , the overwhelming majority of Russophones in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in New York City were Russian-speaking Jews. Afterward, the influx from the countries of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat, with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians immigrating along with some more Russian Jews and Central Asians. According to
10080-412: The genetic patterns in populations for which data are available.” Nevertheless, this category of "First American" people also interbred with and contributed a significant amount of genes to the ancestors of both Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dené populations, with 60% and 90% "First American" DNA respectively constituting the genetic makeup of the two groups. Later in his life, Greenberg proposed that nearly all of
10206-581: The geographical distribution of Eurasiatic shows that it and the Dené–Caucasian family are the result of separate migrations. Dené–Caucasian is the older of the two groups, with the emergence of Eurasiatic being more recent. The Eurasiatic expansion overwhelmed Dené–Caucasian, leaving speakers of the latter restricted mainly to isolated pockets (the Basques in the Pyrenees Mountains , Caucasian peoples in
10332-486: The goal of determining broad patterns of relationship, the idea was not to get every word right but to detect patterns. From the beginning with his theory of mass comparison, Greenberg addressed why chance resemblance and borrowing were not obstacles to its being useful. Despite that, critics consider those phenomena caused difficulties for his theory. Greenberg first termed his method "mass comparison" in an article of 1954 (reprinted in Greenberg 1955). As of 1987, he replaced
10458-480: The government bureaucracy for the lack of a reliable tool of communication in administrative, legal, and judicial affairs became an obvious practical problem. The earliest attempts at standardizing Russian were made based on the so-called Moscow official or chancery language, during the 15th to 17th centuries. Since then, the trend of language policy in Russia has been standardization in both the restricted sense of reducing dialectical barriers between ethnic Russians, and
10584-656: The language families of northern Eurasia belong to a single higher-order family, which he termed Eurasiatic . The only exception was Yeniseian , which has been related to a wider Dené–Caucasian grouping, also including Sino-Tibetan . During 2008 Edward Vajda related Yeniseian to the Na-Dené languages of North America as a Dené–Yeniseian family. The Eurasiatic grouping resembles the older Nostratic groupings of Holger Pedersen and Vladislav Illich-Svitych by including Indo-European , Uralic , and Altaic . It differs by including Nivkh , Japonic , Korean , and Ainu (which
10710-621: The language family that Eurasiatic is most closely connected to is Amerind . He states that "the Eurasiatic-Amerind family represents a relatively recent expansion (circa 15,000 years ago) into territory opened up by the melting of the Arctic ice cap". In contrast, "Eurasiatic-Amerind stands apart from the other families of the Old World, among which the differences are much greater and represent deeper chronological groupings". Like Eurasiatic, Amerind
10836-945: The languages spoken in most of Europe , Central and Northern Asia and (in the case of Eskimo-Aleut) on either side of the Bering Strait . The branching of Eurasiatic is roughly (following Greenberg): A computational phylogenetic analysis by Jäger (2015) provided the following phylogeny of language families in Eurasia: Yeniseian Dravidian Nakh-Daghestanian Austroasiatic Japonic Ainu Sino-Tibetan Hmong-Mien Austronesian Tai-Kadai Tungusic Mongolic Turkic Yukaghir Nivkh Uralic Chukotko-Kamchatkan Indo-European Merritt Ruhlen suggests that
10962-451: The list (e.g., bark and ashes ), thus casting doubt on bias being the cause of the apparent cognates. Thomason says she is "unqualified" to comment on the statistics themselves, but says any model that uses bad data as input cannot provide reliable results. Asya Pereltsvaig takes a different approach to her critique of the paper. Outlining the history (in English) of several of the words on
11088-400: The meanings of words used for comparison, and entirely spurious forms. Historical linguists also reject the validity of the method of multilateral (or mass) comparison upon which the classification is based. They argue that he has not provided a convincing case that the similarities presented as evidence are due to inheritance from an earlier common ancestor rather than being explained by
11214-406: The methods used as invalid. The hypothesis has fallen out of favour and has limited degrees of acceptance, predominantly among a minority of Russian linguists. Linguists worldwide reject Eurasiatic and many other macrofamily hypotheses such as Nostratic , with the exception of Dené–Yeniseian languages , which has been met with some degree of acceptance. In 1994 Merritt Ruhlen claimed Eurasiatic
11340-497: The near concomitant spread of the language families that comprise this group to the retreat of glaciers in Eurasia at the end of the last ice age ~15,000 years ago." Many academics specializing in historical linguistics via the comparative method are, however, skeptical of the conclusions of the paper, and critical of its assumptions and methodology. Writing on University of Pennsylvania blog Language Log , Sarah Thomason questions
11466-516: The northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region . Russian was also the main foreign language taught in school in China between 1949 and 1964. In Kazakhstan , Russian is not a state language, but according to article 7 of the Constitution of Kazakhstan its usage enjoys equal status to that of the Kazakh language in state and local administration. The 2009 census reported that 10,309,500 people, or 84.8% of
11592-482: The order of meaningful elements". Greenberg rejected the opinion, prevalent among linguists since the mid-20th century, that comparative reconstruction was the only method to discover relationships between languages. He argued that genetic classification is methodologically prior to comparative reconstruction, or the first stage of it: one cannot engage in the comparative reconstruction of languages until one knows which languages to compare (1957:44). He also criticized
11718-515: The other hand, before the war, almost a quarter of Ukrainians were in favour of granting Russian the status of the state language, while after the beginning of Russia's invasion the support for the idea dropped to just 7%. In peacetime, the idea of raising the status of Russian was traditionally supported by residents of the south and east . But even in these regions, only a third of the respondents were in favour, and after Russia's full-scale invasion , their number dropped by almost half. According to
11844-455: The other three languages in the East Slavic branch. In many places in eastern and southern Ukraine and throughout Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas traditional bilingualism resulted in language mixtures such as Surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect , although it vanished during the 15th or 16th century,
11970-446: The parliament approved a bill to close up all Russian language schools and kindergartens by the school year. The transition to only Estonian language schools and kindergartens will start in the 2024-2025 school year. In Latvia , Russian is officially considered a foreign language. 55% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 26% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 18 February 2012, Latvia held
12096-453: The peasants' speech was never systematically studied, as it was generally regarded by philologists as simply a source of folklore and an object of curiosity. This was acknowledged by the noted Russian dialectologist Nikolai Karinsky , who toward the end of his life wrote: "Scholars of Russian dialects mostly studied phonetics and morphology. Some scholars and collectors compiled local dictionaries. We have almost no studies of lexical material or
12222-455: The population aged 15 and above, could read and write well in Russian, and understand the spoken language. In October 2023, Kazakhstan drafted a media law aimed at increasing the use of the Kazakh language over Russian, the law stipulates that the share of the state language on television and radio should increase from 50% to 70%, at a rate of 5% per year, starting in 2025. In Kyrgyzstan , Russian
12348-418: The population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 67% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2019 Belarusian census , out of 9,413,446 inhabitants of the country, 5,094,928 (54.1% of the total population) named Belarusian as their native language, with 61.2% of ethnic Belarusians and 54.5% of ethnic Poles declaring Belarusian as their native language. In everyday life in
12474-412: The precise inclusion of Dravidian and Kartvelian. Greenberg continued to work on this project after he was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer and until he died during May 2001. His colleague and former student Merritt Ruhlen ensured the publication of the final volume of his Eurasiatic work (2002) after his death. Russian language Russian is an East Slavic language belonging to
12600-636: The prevalent opinion that comprehensive comparisons of two languages at a time (which commonly take years to perform) could establish language families of any size. He argued that, even for 8 languages, there are already 4,140 ways to classify them into distinct families, while for 25 languages there are 4,638,590,332,229,999,353 ways (1957:44). For comparison, the Niger–Congo family is said to have some 1,500 languages. He thought language families of any size needed to be established by some scholastic means other than bilateral comparison. The theory of mass comparison
12726-490: The process would provide a check on accidental resemblances through the sheer number of languages under review. The mathematical probability that resemblances are accidental decreases strongly with the number of languages concerned (1957:39). Greenberg used the premise that mass "borrowing" of basic vocabulary is unknown. He argued that borrowing, when it occurs, is concentrated in cultural vocabulary and clusters "in certain semantic areas", making it easy to detect (1957:39). With
12852-475: The pronunciation of ultra-short or reduced /ŭ/ , /ĭ/ . Because of many technical restrictions in computing and also because of the unavailability of Cyrillic keyboards abroad, Russian is often transliterated using the Latin alphabet. For example, мороз ('frost') is transliterated moroz , and мышь ('mouse'), mysh or myš' . Once commonly used by the majority of those living outside Russia, transliteration
12978-466: The proper pronunciation of uncommon words or names. Russian is an East Slavic language of the wider Indo-European family . It is a descendant of Old East Slavic , a language used in Kievan Rus' , which was a loose conglomerate of East Slavic tribes from the late 9th to the mid-13th centuries. From the point of view of spoken language , its closest relatives are Ukrainian , Belarusian , and Rusyn ,
13104-737: The quest to identify linguistic universals . During the late 1950s, Greenberg began to examine languages covering a wide geographic and genetic distribution. He located a number of interesting potential universals as well as many strong cross-linguistic tendencies. In particular, Greenberg conceptualized the idea of "implicational universal" , which has the form, "if a language has structure X, then it must also have structure Y." For example, X might be "mid front rounded vowels" and Y "high front rounded vowels" (for terminology see phonetics ). Many scholars adopted this kind of research following Greenberg's example and it remains important in synchronic linguistics. Like Noam Chomsky , Greenberg sought to discover
13230-491: The respondents), while according to the 2002 census – 142.6 million people (99.2% of the respondents). In Ukraine , Russian is a significant minority language. According to estimates from Demoskop Weekly, in 2004 there were 14,400,000 native speakers of Russian in the country, and 29 million active speakers. 65% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 38% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 5 September 2017, Ukraine's Parliament passed
13356-571: The results of later migrations into the New World. Early on, Greenberg (1957:41, 1960) became convinced that many of the language groups considered unrelated could be classified into larger groupings. In his 1987 book Language in the Americas , while agreeing that the Eskimo–Aleut and Na-Dené groupings as distinct, he proposed that all the other Native American languages belong to a single language macro-family, which he termed Amerind . Language in
13482-468: The right to doubt that a point has been made [...] However, closer inspection [...] shows too many misinterpretations, errors and wrong analyses [...] these allow no other judgement than that [Greenberg's] attempt to demonstrate the validity of his Eurasiatic has failed." In the 1980s, Russian linguist Nikolai Dmitrievich Andreev [ ru ] 's Boreal languages [ ru ] hypothesis ( Russian : Бореальный язык ) linked
13608-418: The same (unrooted) tree, with three sets of language families: an eastern grouping of Altaic, Inuit–Yupik, and Chukchi–Kamchatkan; a central and southern Asia grouping of Kartvelian and Dravidian; and a northern and western European grouping of Indo-European and Uralic. Two rootings were considered, using established age estimates for Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Chukchi–Kamchatkan as calibration. The first roots
13734-409: The spread of Dené–Caucasian occurred before that of Eurasiatic. The existence of a Dené–Caucasian family is disputed or rejected by most linguists, including Lyle Campbell , Ives Goddard , and Larry Trask . The last common ancestor of the family was estimated by phylogenetic analysis of ultraconserved words at roughly 15,000 years old, suggesting that these languages spread from a "refuge" area at
13860-675: The survey carried out by RATING in August 2023 in the territory controlled by Ukraine and among the refugees, almost 60% of the polled usually speak Ukrainian at home, about 30% – Ukrainian and Russian, only 9% – Russian. Since March 2022, the use of Russian in everyday life has been noticeably decreasing. For 82% of respondents, Ukrainian is their mother tongue, and for 16%, Russian is their mother tongue. IDPs and refugees living abroad are more likely to use both languages for communication or speak Russian. Nevertheless, more than 70% of IDPs and refugees consider Ukrainian to be their native language. In
13986-459: The syntax of Russian dialects." After 1917, Marxist linguists had no interest in the multiplicity of peasant dialects and regarded their language as a relic of the rapidly disappearing past that was not worthy of scholarly attention. Nakhimovsky quotes the Soviet academicians A.M Ivanov and L.P Yakubinsky, writing in 1930: The language of peasants has a motley diversity inherited from feudalism. On its way to becoming proletariat peasantry brings to
14112-546: The term "mass comparison" with "multilateral comparison", to emphasize its contrast with the bilateral comparisons recommended by linguistics textbooks. He believed that multilateral comparison was not in any way opposed to the comparative method, but is, on the contrary, its necessary first step (Greenberg, 1957:44). According to him, comparative reconstruction should have the status of an explanatory theory for facts already established by language classification (Greenberg, 1957:45). Most historical linguists (Campbell 2001:45) reject
14238-469: The tree to the midpoint of the branch leading to proto-Dravidian and yields an estimated origin for Eurasiatic of 14450 ± 1750 years ago. The second roots the tree to the proto-Kartvelian branch and yields 15610 ± 2290 years ago. Internal nodes have less certainty, but exceed chance expectations, and do not affect the top-level age estimate. The authors conclude "All inferred ages must be treated with caution but our estimates are consistent with proposals linking
14364-770: The two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern , Central (or Middle), and Southern , with Moscow lying in the Central region. The Northern Russian dialects and those spoken along the Volga River typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly, a phenomenon called okanye ( оканье ). Besides the absence of vowel reduction, some dialects have high or diphthongal /e⁓i̯ɛ/ in place of Proto-Slavic * ě and /o⁓u̯ɔ/ in stressed closed syllables (as in Ukrainian) instead of Standard Russian /e/ and /o/ , respectively. Another Northern dialectal morphological feature
14490-651: The universal structures on which human language is based. Unlike Chomsky, Greenberg's method was functionalist , rather than formalist . An argument to reconcile the Greenbergian and Chomskyan methods can be found in Linguistic Universals (2006), edited by Ricardo Mairal and Juana Gil. Many who are strongly opposed to Greenberg's methods of language classification (see below) acknowledge the importance of his typological work. In 1963 he published an article : "Some universals of grammar with particular reference to
14616-542: The use of mass comparison as a method for establishing genealogical relationships between languages. Among the most outspoken critics of mass comparison have been Lyle Campbell , Donald Ringe , William Poser , and the late R. Larry Trask . Greenberg is known widely for his development of a classification system for the languages of Africa , which he published as a series of articles in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology from 1949 to 1954 (reprinted together as
14742-506: The use of the language has some presence in certain areas. A large part of the population, especially the older generations, can speak Russian as a foreign language. However, English has replaced Russian as lingua franca in Lithuania and around 80% of young people speak English as their first foreign language. In contrast to the other two Baltic states, Lithuania has a relatively small Russian-speaking minority (5.0% as of 2008). According to
14868-441: The validity of language family. The heart of his argument is 72 morphological features that he judges as common across the various language families he examines. Of the many variant proposals, Greenberg's has attracted the most academic attention. Greenberg's Eurasiatic hypothesis has been dismissed by many linguists, often on the ground that his research on mass comparison is unreliable. The primary criticism of comparative methods
14994-445: The word. Among the 188 words, cognate groups ranged from 1 (no cognates) to 7 (all languages cognate) with a mean of 2.3 ± 1.1. The distribution of cognate class size was positively skewed − many more small groups than large ones − as predicted by their hypothesis of variant decay rates. Words were then grouped by their generalized worldwide frequency of use, part of speech, and previously estimated rate of replacement. Cognate class size
15120-682: The world's ninth-most spoken language by total number of speakers . Russian is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station , one of the six official languages of the United Nations , as well as the fourth most widely used language on the Internet . Russian is written using the Russian alphabet of the Cyrillic script ; it distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without—the so-called "soft" and "hard" sounds. Almost every consonant has
15246-451: Was methodological : if mass comparison is not a valid method, it cannot be expected to have brought order successfully out of the confusion of African languages. By contrast, some linguists have sought to combine Greenberg's four African families into larger units. In particular, Edgar Gregersen (1972) proposed joining Niger–Congo and Nilo-Saharan into a larger family, which he termed Kongo-Saharan . Roger Blench (1995) suggests Niger–Congo
15372-405: Was first introduced in North America when Russian explorers voyaged into Alaska and claimed it for Russia during the 18th century. Although most Russian colonists left after the United States bought the land in 1867, a handful stayed and preserved the Russian language in this region to this day, although only a few elderly speakers of this unique dialect are left. In Nikolaevsk, Alaska , Russian
15498-421: Was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 19% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2014 Moldovan census , Russians accounted for 4.1% of Moldova's population, 9.4% of the population declared Russian as their native language, and 14.5% said they usually spoke Russian. According to the 2010 census in Russia , Russian language skills were indicated by 138 million people (99.4% of
15624-938: Was positively correlated with estimated replacement rate ( r =0.43, p <0.001). Generalized frequency combined with part of speech was also a strong predictor of class size (r=0.48, p<0.001). Pagel et al. conclude "This result suggests that, consistent with their short estimated half-lives, infrequently used words typically do not exist long enough to be deeply ancestral, but that above the threshold frequency words gain greater stability, which then translates into larger cognate class sizes." Twenty-three word meanings had cognate class sizes of four or more. Words used more than once per 1,000 spoken words ( χ =24.29, P<0.001), pronouns (χ=26.1, P<0.0001), and adverbs (χ=14.5, P=0.003) were over-representing among those 23 words. Frequently used words, controlled for part of speech, were 7.5 times more likely (P<0.001) than infrequently used words to be judged as cognate. These findings matched their
15750-402: Was the sixth-most used language on the top 1,000 sites, behind English, Chinese, French, German, and Japanese. Despite leveling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary and phonetics, a number of dialects still exist in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of Russian into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern", with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between
15876-671: Was the source). Thomason also argues that since the LWED is contributed to primarily by believers in Nostratic , a proposed superfamily even broader than Eurasiatic, the data is likely to be biased towards proto-words that can be judged cognate. Pagel et al. admit they "cannot rule out this bias", but say they think it is unlikely that bias has systematically impacted their results. They argue certain word types generally believed to be long lived (e.g., numbers) do not appear on their 23 word list, while other words of relatively low importance in modern society, but important to ancient people, do appear on
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