Pontic languages
Pontic is a proposed language family or macrofamily, comprising the Indo-European and Northwest Caucasian language families, with Proto-Pontic being its reconstructed proto-language.The internal reconstruction of the Indo-European proto-language done by Émile Benveniste and Winfred P. Lehmann has set Proto-Indo-European typologically quite apart from its daughters. In 1960, Aert Kuipers noticed the parallels between a Northwest Caucasian language, Kabardian, and PIE. It was Paul Friedrich in 1964, however, who first suggested that PIE might be phylogenetically related to Proto-Caucasian.
In 1981, John Colarusso examined typological parallels involving consonantism, focusing on the so-called laryngeals of PIE and in 1989, he published his reconstruction of Proto-Northwest Caucasian. Eight years later, the first results of his comparative work on PNWC and PIE were published in his article Proto-Pontic: Phyletic Links Between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Northwest Caucasian, an event which may be considered the actual beginning of the hypothesis.Evidence
Examples of similarities that have been noted include:
- Nasal negating particles in both families:
- * PIE *n-: Germanic un-, Romance in-, Russian ne-.
- * NWC: Ubykh m-, Abkhaz m-.
- A case variously named "accusative", "oblique" or "objective", marked with nasal suffixes:
- * PIE accusative *-m, reflected e.g. in Latin luna 'moon' vs lunam, or Ancient Greek ἄνθρωπος vs. ἄνθρωπον.
- * NWC: Ubykh kwæy 'well ' vs kwæyn.
