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.

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:
  • PIE : Germanic , Romance , Slavic .
  • NWC: Ubykh , Abkhaz .
• A case variously named "accusative", "oblique" or "objective", marked with nasal suffixes:
  • PIE accusative , reflected e.g. in Latin 'moon' (nom.) vs (acc.), or Ancient Greek (, nom.) vs. (, acc.).
  • NWC: Ubykh 'well (water source)' (abs.) vs (obl.).