Pontic languages
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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.
History of the proposal
The internal reconstruction of the Indo-European proto-language done by Émile Benveniste and Winfred P. Lehmann has set Proto-Indo-European (PIE) 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 (PNWC). 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:
- A case variously named "accusative", "oblique" or "objective", marked with nasal suffixes:
- PIE accusative {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, reflected e.g. in Latin {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} 'moon' (nom.) vs {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} (acc.), or Ancient Greek {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} (Template:Transliteration, nom.) vs. {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} (Template:Transliteration, acc.).
- NWC: Ubykh {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} 'well (water source)' (abs.) vs {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} (obl.).