| Pontic | |
|---|---|
| (controversial) | |
| Geographic distribution | Eurasia |
| Linguistic classification | Proposed language family |
| Subdivisions | |
| Language codes | |
| Glottolog | None |
Pontic is a proposedlanguage family ormacrofamily, comprising theIndo-European andNorthwest Caucasian language families, withProto-Pontic being its reconstructedproto-language.
The internal reconstruction of the Indo-European proto-language done byÉmile Benveniste andWinfred P. Lehmann has setProto-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 wasPaul Friedrich in 1964, however, who first suggested that PIE might bephylogenetically related toProto-Caucasian.
In 1981,John Colarusso examined typological parallels involving consonantism, focusing on the so-calledlaryngeals 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 articleProto-Pontic: Phyletic Links Between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Northwest Caucasian, an event which may be considered the actual beginning of the hypothesis.
Examples of similarities that have been noted include: