10 March 2011

Urheimat

One of my little pet projects is the Wikipedia article entitled Urheimat, for which I am one of the main contributors (particularly for the non-Indo-European languages). The term refers to the homeland in which a language family originated. The article is currently in pretty good shape. The most recent push was to add illustrations and provide more complete references in the footnotes.

It has a capsule summary of the state of what we know about the origins of almost all of the world's main language families. Linguistic isolates whose immediate place of origin is undisputed, but whose deeper origins are the subject of intense dispute, such as Basque, the languages of the Caucusus, and many of the linguistic isolates of the Americas are omitted.

Please take a look.

No comments: